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[0:00] Tonya Pinkins: Welcome back to part two of my conversation with Kelley Nicole Girod, founder of the Fire This Time Festival, on You Can't SAY THAT on the Broadway Podcast Network.

[0:13] Tonya Pinkins: I'm actually so curious from your point of view, like, you know, for you know, all the amount of time you've been in this industry, like, and I think we talked about this a little bit whenever we were having dinner after the um after the show, but you know, have you have you seen progress? Do you feel like you've seen any real progress? And if so, like where?

[0:37] Kelley Girod: I think there's definitely progress. I mean, we certainly have more of us in artistic director positions. There's more of our work being shown. Um, what I don't see, um, and it's not just in American theater, it's an American thing. There's uh still uh a love of everything British. So the British playwrights, the British actors um are still being uplifted over our American ones. Um, I find that when I go and do master classes at universities, um the black students, their blackness is being uh taught out of them. You know, they're being uh turned into kind of neutered uh black people. You know, there's a a kind of authentic power and fire and energy that I don't see in the actors that are American that come out, whereas a British actor can come over here and they can have all that fire and they can flip all their accents and they'll get celebrated for that.

Our black actors have to be a certain kind of uh vanilla neutral that we're gonna be comfortable with. I think that my career was made on being able to do that. Um, and it just stopped interesting me, particularly after uh, you know, Zimmerman got acquitted. It was like for me, I was like, I'm not gonna spend any more of my time trying to make white people comfortable anymore. Not gonna do it. Um, it's it's it's it's it's killing people. Yeah, it's killing people. So um, yeah, there's progress. There's just lots more to be made, lots, lots more to be made. And as Joaquin Phoenix said at the Boft Awards, the people who have the privilege have to dismantle it. It is their job to give up that which they have and to circulate it.

And that circulation really is predicated on this for me on an understanding that this is really an infinite universe. There is enough, more than enough for every one of us to have everything we want. Everything we want. A hundred. Capitalism can't run on that. But the reality is there's enough for everybody.

[2:44] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah, yeah. Totally. I mean, I got nothing to say to that because it's true if I was to do a mic drop on that. Um yeah. So here's a hard thing I want to talk about. It's it's this very challenging thing that happens between black theaters, black white theaters, black culture, white culture, which is like an experience I've had, and it's always so awkward and it's so sad for me. Like, you know, white theaters have resources and they can do all these things, and black theaters don't, and so there's scraping by and everything's last minute. And so this happens to me a lot. White theaters will offer me a job. Black theaters will ask me to come and audition. And I'm like, huh? What? What what what is that? What is that?

[3:26] Kelley Girod: I could you know, I mean, I I honest to God wish I could speak to that, Tonya. I'm not even because you know, I've never uh be because with the Fire This Time, we just ask. We just ask. Like, I mean, we've I'm so your theater just doesn't do that. It's all asks anyway. Yeah, I mean, because um, you know, we had for the longest time, Kevin R. Free was our artistic director, and he has access to like everybody. So Kevin would just he said, I he would say, I know who's right for this, I'm just gonna ask. Um, but uh, so I g so I I don't even um I can't even wrap my head around that, except that um, you know, I came from Louisiana, knew very little about theater, but knew about Caroline, or Change and knew about Tonya Pinkins, you know, and uh would yeah, I don't know.

I don't know, I mean it happens to me all the time, and I and I just I often wonder, you know, I wonder about it. I go, do we not have the same sort of etiquette? Is it that white people, you know, they create lineages like royalty, and so they have this etiquette of like like you're now in our club, and so now we do this honor to you, and black people are like nope, you need to prove it, cause we don't know, because then white people like they elevate mediocrity, so you need to come into our room and prove that you actually have the chops to do this job. Which you like, I auditioned for um Hurt Village for Katori Hall, because they didn't think I had it in me. They were like, Oh, she's this Broadway Demon.

I was like, I want this job. Uh huh. And I went in there and I auditioned and got that job. So it's not, it actually isn't like I don't mind auditioning, but I have noticed how often, and particularly if it's a theater that's not gonna pay. Now please don't ask me to come audition for you. You're not gonna be paying me.

[5:19] Kelley Girod: Yeah. Yeah. Because I do a lot of things for free. Students ask me to do films. I'm happy to pay it forward. Pay it forward. If having my name or face in your project is gonna elevate it and give you another opportunity or open a door, that's my service to the world because so many people gave me those kinds of opportunities.

[5:37] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah. You're like so genuinely confused. You're like, huh, did we do that? You know, you on the Fire This Time did not do that to me.

[5:44] Kelley Girod: Well, but you you know what? Like I had uh I I have um I haven't been so I've had the experience at b uh uh of being at um large nonprofits because so when I was pregnant with my first child in 2014, um I was actually I um replaced Marjorie Moon as producing director of the Billie Holiday Theater when it was going through its transition. Um so I was there with um Jackie Alexander as the artistic director. And um, you know, I I think that one thing that I will say is that you're right that I think that, you know, um black theaters, no matter their size, are always struggling more than than the larger uh white theaters, you know, and I like I remember um it was like last year. Oh my god. So, like for the past couple of years, I was at the Sheen Center as a programming associate, and I was like one of two black people in the entire building, but I was the only woman and the only black person on the the team that was making decisions about the programming.

And I said to my husband, I was like, I don't know how I didn't get fired. Because every day I went in there and I was just on, no, I was on 15, not even on 10. I was like on 15 on a scale of one to I'm like, are y'all serious? Why are we doing so much? No, we need to get some diverse all this stuff or whatever. But um, so I was there, we went to some uh panel, the theater sub-district council, and it was all about how um all of these white, large white institutions that are well funded had gotten more funding to create a space for a black person to come in, a paid internship for a black person because they recognize that um we often don't come from uh backgrounds where we can afford to do art, right?

For free. Where we can afford to be interns and stuff. And you know, I'm watching this panel, and everyone's like, you know, it's like, you know, congratulating everyone, and I'm come out of there and I'm scratching my head. Like, so had you not gotten the grant, you wouldn't have recognized that you need to prioritize that in order to get uh people of color and get admins of color in the door. Like, and what's gonna happen when you don't have the grant? Right. Without the grant, why would we do that? You know, and um it so it was just um it was it was mind-boggling to me, you know, that yes, you know, it's like so on one hand, like the the black theater institutions, we we already have the um the the challenge of um uh uh of trying to to get our funding where it's supposed to be and try and trying to to keep up with the larger institutions, right?

Um and don't even talk to me about the New York Times and reviews because I think that the when I was at the Billie Holiday Theater, um, Jackie Alexander's Brothers from the Bottom was I think like the first time we got the Billie Holiday had gotten a major review from the New York Times or something ridiculous like that, right? Which I'm just like that's a big theater too. Why is it but whatever? And you're gonna have to keep me on track, Tonya, because I do this. I just like I'm gonna go on tangents. And now I think I just lost myself where I was. But um, but you know, we so we have the the challenge of trying to, you know, to to maintain our funding and maintain our sustainability, and bring in the next generation of art makers.

Right. At every level. Right. At the admin level. And and many times, like I I end up mentoring a lot of young kids, um, whether they're actors or playwrights or whatever it is, or they're producers or they want to be in it, to the point where like I I'll get a text and someone's like, oh, can you just really talk to this person? And I'm like, I'm I'm tired, but yeah, I've got to do it. That's how we pay it forward. I've got to do it.

[6:42] Kelley Girod: So, you know, um, and and I don't know how to crack that one. If I to be totally honest, that's what we have to do. I think that that is culturally what I'm saying, I think that that's what white culture does. Like you get the internship with your father's friends, this, and they bring everybody in, and like there's this these doors that are opened, and I and and my experience is those doors for me as a black artist in my black culture art were not opened. My first time at the National Black Theater Festival, I'd never ever been invited there, not as a guest ever. A girlfriend of mine was producing a play, and someone fell out. She needed an extra, like someone to be a character off stage, an offstage voice.

And I was a Tony Award winner. And this is my girlfriend. I'm just like, but I get to go to the National Black Theater Festival. Okay, I will be your off-stage character to go to the National Black Theater Festival. For me, because that's what it meant to me. I was so excited. Sure, could I have like paid and gone down and visited? But it was like, you know, I'm a Tony Award winner. There aren't a lot of us. Why don't I get invited? It was kind of a hurt. But when my I had the opportunity to go as an extra in a play, a supernumerary, I was like, I'm in it. And and you know, since then I've gone down. But so it's like it's something I don't understand about us. Because that's not a uh a money thing.

And I think sometimes our our art organizations try to invite the very wealthy, um, you know, famous movie star actors, and yes, they will come, but they're not giving money. You know, we have enough black famous people who could endow the National Black Theater or endow Fire This Time or Harlem, they're not endowing them. They'll come down and get the award and be celebrated and honored. But so, you know, you know, that's my little pet peeve.

[11:04] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah. Yeah. I I mean, yeah. It's uh because I figure if it's happening to me, it's happening to other artists who really do want to be honored by their community. Do you know what I mean? And you feel like, do they think I'm a sellout because I only work in the commercial theater? I really, you know, you want to be celebrated by other people who look like you.

[11:22] Kelley Girod: Yeah. I mean, I I wonder if it's just a question of them thinking I'd say no. Yeah, maybe. Or like a question of access, like, you know, it's like, oh, because I also feel like there's, you know, um, because there have been so many artists who have come through the Fire This Time. Like, I mean, and I I love Dominique Morisseau. Oh my God, she is such an angel. Like, she is anything you ask Dominique to do, if she she will try her best. Camilla Forbes is the same way. Like, she will try her best, but if she can't do it, she'll like she'll say, like, I really, you know, I tried, I'm not gonna be able to, but she'll always get back to you. And I feel like it's that thing that like once um an artist of color hits, they work all the time.

They're working all the time. Which is good. So you just like we could not get a director for the Fire This Time this year. I got everyone was working. Ebony, we Ebony Noel Golden, who ended up um directing, she said, she's like, if you guys had asked me two days later, I would have already said yes to something else. And I was like, So it's awesome. Everybody's working. Um, so but I think that that's what it is. Because like, you know, that like because when we work, because there's such a I'm and I'm doing air quotes after saying do it. There's such a scarcity of us that like whenever when we do get on, like we're just on, you know.

[12:38] Kelley Girod: Well, one person says the theory is that all the actors who were on in New York off Broadway for one season, like when the next season of television comes, that's the list that they call. As if those are the only black actors that you you had to have been on on or off Broadway in the last season, and then you're gonna get all the TV and film auditions. And yes, those people do work all the time, but that is such a small pool of the the number of people who are available to do the work.

[13:01] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah, yeah. So I don't know, but you know, I'm never gonna ask you to audition for me. I'm like nope. I just do regularly send me emails asking you to audition for them. They didn't call me. I'm like, you know me. Why are you sending me an email asking me to audition? What I one of those mysteries to me, but I I just sometimes feel like, do I need to go give an etiquette class to my black theater people so that they understand that there's certainly you don't ask to audition.

[13:36] Kelley Girod: You ask them to do the job, and then they're gonna do it because they want to give of themselves to your work and support it. And that I always, you know, I wonder about it. I wonder about it, and is it a lesson? Like, you know, people give me the privilege of doing things, and then I'm just in gratitude about it. You know, and I wondered, are people not getting that lesson? I see it with young people coming up. I wanted to give a young student an opportunity. Um, I wanted to just give her an opportunity because I just I got enthusiastic about her. And she's, you know, a Gen Z. And she started treating it like it was a job rather than an opportunity and asking for this and that and that. And I'm like, you don't have a, you don't have a track record.

You have, I was like, I'm telling, and I was just like, I can't, I can't want something for you more than you want it for yourself that you're missing the we and the they of this business, which is their jobs that we do for them that they pay us a lot of money because they have a lot of money, so they got to give it to us. And then there's the things we do for us because we want to keep doing the things we love and we want to do it with the people we love and we want to get that in the world, and that is a real thing that artists have to understand, the we and the they of this business.

[14:48] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah, yeah. I mean, and in fact, I think over the years, anyone who has emailed me and said, "Oh, Kelley, somebody said that I should meet you. Can we get coffee? I'd love to pick your brain." And I say, you can come down to the festival. I was like, come down to the festival, you know, because there you have got to be, you need to, there needs to be a commitment to the community aspect. Now, and I don't care, whatever your community is, black, white, whatever, you know, um, because so much of that is about our community. And I think that, you know, um you can easily forget that in a, in a, in a, I mean now, I mean it's like I, I don't really do social media that much. I mean, it's not big, I'm not because I didn't grow up with it.

I just like find it incredibly, uh, one of the things I gotta do, right? Um, but you know, it's like, uh, it can feel even more now that the things that we do are individual endeavors, and um, and you really cannot, uh, uh succeed without your relationships in your community, particularly in this, in this business.

[15:58] Kelley Girod: Yeah, this is a collaborative business. And that, and that also it's like, you know, like sincerity cannot be faked. Like, you know, if you're like, I'm just like, if you're if you're coming and your main thing is to get something and to get out, I can see that from 100%. I'm not, I can't do that for you. I'm not the one, you know. So I think like, you know, to your point that the recognition that there's something bigger, you need to be able to see the bigger picture of this, you know. And that's really anybody, like any of the kids who come to me for, I say like mentor as if like I've been doing this shit for so long, you know, but I mean I've been in it for like 11 years, so I can't say the things that I have found, uh, important to me.

And I say to, you know, the young kids just come out of school and they're like, oh, but I'm not getting this yet, and I'm not getting that yet. And I'm like, you know what? Success is you having peace with yourself no matter where you are. I'm like, you need to work on that. I'm like, those other things are gonna come at some point, maybe today, maybe five years from now, and then you might be on for five years and not on for five years, that says, but if like if you don't have that comfort and that community and that peace you build around yourself, it's like you're never gonna, it's you're never gonna have success. Because it's always gonna be about what is the next thing that's coming, you know.

[17:15] Kelley Girod: I mean, it's like I, you know, it's like the Fire This Time for me. I mean, that is like more exciting than Christmas morning. I'm like, oh shit. If I'm time's coming on, I was like, I'm ready to get, I'm like, y'all crank up the music. Just like it makes me so happy that like that I have that and that we have that, you know. And it won an Obie Award in twenty fifteen, like three months after my daughter was born.

[17:37] Tonya Pinkins: 2015.

[17:38] Kelley Girod: Yeah.

[17:39] Tonya Pinkins: Yes.

[17:40] Kelley Girod: Yeah. Which was so exciting.

[17:42] Tonya Pinkins: Yes, you know. But yeah. So what is next for Kelley Girod?

[17:48] Kelley Girod: So what is next? So I am finally getting back into my own writing and uh having to advocate for myself is very weird because I will literally be in meetings with people and being like, oh, you know who you need to talk to. You need to talk to this writer. And they're like, aren't we talking about your work? So, um, so last...

[18:12] Tonya Pinkins: You're a connector.

[18:14] Kelley Girod: Yeah, and you know I can't help it. I'm a connector too. It's funny because I was about to say, Oh my god, Tonya, you need to talk to Jackie. Because Jackie's at uh North Carolina Black Rep now, artistic director. I just saw Jackie the other night at the TCG gala.

[18:24] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah, yeah.

[18:24] Kelley Girod: And I'm just like, oh my god, y'all need to um, but whatever. Um so yeah, so I um the I left the Sheen Center last June to focus more on my writing. Um I had gotten a commission from the Atlantic Theater, the launch new play commission, and um I was working on a trilogy about my family in Louisiana, so um I had I had the year the summer prior, I'd put up a play um The Stretch of Montpelier, which was a, you know, kind of an ode to my um my grandmother, uh Johnny Kendrick, uh who lived in Montpelier, Louisiana, and I did that play, and then um Atlantic uh I got the launch play commission, and then I decided to write the second piece in that trilogy, The Faith Healer, about my grandfather who was a traiteer or uh Creole Cajun faith healer, and my father, who is a prominent black doctor in Louisiana, and um so did that, and then um Sheen Center also.

[19:22] Kelley Girod: Now, here's the wonderful thing about this full circle. While I was at Sheen Center, I created, I created an um, a fellowship for new playwrights to for us to work with new playwrights and um where you get um compensation and space for like six months to be able to work on whatever you want to work on. So when I left the Sheen Center, programming associate Julia Brian was like, Hey Kelley, you want to apply for this? And I was like, sure, I'm sure enough, I got it. So I'm working on the last play in my trilogy about um my uh the great flood of uh Baton Rouge in 2016, where my um parents were literally homeless, and my mother having come from extreme poverty, the trauma of your worst fear of like losing being homeless again, have like having to go through that again. Um so you know, all happy stuff, Tonya, you know, like all the happy stuff.

[20:14] Tonya Pinkins: Drama, drama, but this faith healing. Tell me about that.

[20:17] Kelley Girod: Faith healing. What is faith healing? So faith healing um in the Creole community, uh, so you know, Creoles and Cajuns for the most part are Catholic. If you're um so uh so faith healing combines um uh the Catholic faith with um, you know, uh healing practice like ancient healing practices. So you know, give me some examples.

[20:43] Kelley Girod: So um, well, so here's the here's the wonderful thing about it is that for a lot of faith healers, uh first of all, because their traditions, everyone's traditions are different. So, okay, let me back up for a second. In the faith healing tradition, the power to heal has to be passed down from one generation to the next. And the person who is the healer will just instinctively know who which child is the person. The child may not feel like the healer, and at some point they will have to accept. So when I was doing research for this, and I was, and I mostly had to talk, you know, ask my father, like, okay, so like what did you, you know, witness when you were a kid when you saw your father heal?

And he said, Well, I only ever saw him do a couple of things because healers, it was very secretive. My grandfather had a um a shack in the back of his house where he would see his um see his patients. Um so they didn't really witness a lot of it. And the prayers, because they are spontaneous, you will hardly ever find find them written down. So um I had to piece together a lot of information to find, but you know, like for example, my father did say that like my grandfather used to make um teething necklaces for babies who were teething. He used to, you know, he would say prayers and lay hands. Uh he would use different types of herbs, things like that. But um sometimes he wouldn't even know what the prayer was until the person came to him and it was just spontaneous, and it was just about what came.

Um, and I find the interesting thing that my grandfather's generation, uh, so the way my parents met was because my uh my mother came over with her father. She went over to my grandfather's house with her father because my grandfather, my mother's father had a cough and he needed to be healed by my father's father. And that's how my mom and dad met.

[22:42] Tonya Pinkins: Wow.

[22:42] Kelley Girod: And um, so that so that my grandfather's generation, they relied heavily on healers. They were very, very paranoid about doctors, very paranoid about white doctors.

[22:53] Tonya Pinkins: Oh yes, because they were experimenting on us.

[22:56] Kelley Girod: Yes, you know. So, so yeah, and then you and then you learn the history, and you're like, well, no shit, of course. Like, I mean, I wouldn't be going to that either. Um, you know, in fact, you know, my my father tells me that when he was born, my um my grandfather was only able to go to the hospital to see him because they thought he was a white man. They thought he was white, otherwise he would have never saw his child right after he was born. But um, so that's the culture that they lived in, and so it was surprising to me that my father did not choose to go to medical school. He didn't want to be a doctor, he wanted to be a chemist. But there was a research program that he didn't like that he applied to that he didn't get into, and he did get into medical school, so he was like, What the hell? And did his father pass the healing on to him?

[23:39] Kelley Girod: I see, I think he had to have to. Even if my dad doesn't a hundred percent like know that, but um but but so anyway, so that so then there's so then there's the medical side, and now I feel like I because I have a sister I have two sisters who were doctors.

[23:58] Kelley Girod: Oh, so dad passed down.

[24:00] Kelley Girod: It's passing two generations. Um I have two sisters who are doctors, and one of my sister um sisters recently just left her position in HOMA as a critical care pulmonologist to return to um to other for alternative types of healing. Uh I think you're starting to see that come back a lot because I it's I think it's a function of just like uh healthcare being just fucking crazy in this country, and you know, people just being like, I can't afford to pay these bills. They're finding alternate ways of, you know.

[24:30] Kelley Girod: And there's this resurgence of use of entheogens like mushrooms and ayahuasca. I just was in Peru on an ayahuasca retreat myself, and there were a number of psychotherapists there who were talking about how their own journeys with ayahuasca had they'd seen incredible improvements in their patients, and so they were all signing up to do this maths training with Aya. And and very much when you're when you're in the midst of an Aya journey, the the maestra is in the Shupibo tradition is looking at you and he can see your lines and he can see when your lines are um you know out of place and they sing the songs to to straighten your lines. And there was a point for me at which I what my experience of it is I can only describe as that there was a demon on my line, in my line in my ancestral line, who had showed himself in the like the second uh ceremony that we had, and then by the fourth ceremony, I was casting that demon out, and I could feel other people in the room.

There's no words being said, I could feel them doing battle with me, and the only words I had was you know, I cast you out in the name of Jesus, because that I was raised Catholic too, but I could feel other people were working with me and the sounds coming out of me and the bile coming out of me as I cast this demon out of my line.

[25:50] Tonya Pinkins: So I will be at Kelley reading for Faith Healer on Monday. And it was just been so great having you here, Kelley Girod. I'm so glad we met, and I hope we can be friends and and collaborate and create together in the future.

[26:01] Kelley Girod: Likewise, it was an honor.

[26:02] Tonya Pinkins: It was an honor.

[26:03] Kelley Girod: Yeah.

[26:03] Tonya Pinkins: And you've got roots in Louisiana too, right, Tonya?

[26:05] Tonya Pinkins: I do. My family, my grandmother was from Monroe.

[26:08] Kelley Girod: Yeah.

[26:10] Tonya Pinkins: Monroe, Louisiana.

[26:10] Kelley Girod: Yeah.

[26:12] Tonya Pinkins: So uh thank you.

[26:13] Kelley Girod: Thank you.

[26:16] Tonya Pinkins: Thanks for listening to You Can't SAY THAT, The Show Where You Can. I'm Tonya Pinkins. This is part of the Broadway Podcast Network, produced by Dori Berinstein and Alan Seales. Edited by Derek Gunther, music by Anthony Norman, available wherever you get your podcast. And visit me on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, and let me know what you'd like to hear me talk about. For more information, visit dpn.fm forward slash YCST.