Episode 8: Word for Word

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A transcript, lightly edited for clarity and length, follows.

Show Guests: Susan Harloe, and JoAnne Winter Co-Artistic Directors along with Amy Prosser, Youth Arts Program Coordinator of Word for Word Performing Arts Company

Voices of the Community Introduction: Welcome to voices of the community which explores critical issues facing Northern California communities. We introduce you to the voices of community thought leaders and change makers who are working on solutions that face our fellow individual community members neighborhoods cities and our region. This is George Koster your host. 

Series Introduction: This episode is part of a series of interviews we conducted through our participation in the Bay Area Video Coalition’s TV Show titled San Francisco Nonprofits Spotlight. The interviews were conducted via Zoom from April to June 2020 during the height of the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Shelter in Place requirements. The goal of the series is to shine a spotlight on the nonprofits and their staff who are struggling to deal with the impact of the COVID 19 pandemic on their operations, services and sustainability. The series of interviews we conducted features voices from a cross section of organizations that make up the fabric of our community.  Each of them brings a unique perspective on how they and we are dealing with the issues facing our community during the pandemic.  

Show Guest Susan: There was a woman at Twitter a Latinex woman who wanted to have a Latinex tech night for people who were in the tech world. And so she rallied all her friends and her family and they came and we did a talk back after the show with them. And it was, just amazing. People were speaking from their hearts and talking about their own personal experiences with immigration and talking with the cast. And it was just, it was just really a moment.  One of those moments in theater that you never want to forget 

Episode Intro – Show Host George: In this episode we feature the voices of Susan Harloe and JoAnne Winter Co-Artistic Directors along with Amy Prosser, the Youth Arts Program Coordinator of Word for Word Performing Arts Company. Over the past 25 plus years Word For Word has theatrically transcribed and performed over 70 stories by some of the world’s best writers. Word for Word brings short stories to life with both exciting visuals, and innovative staging, and they do all this without altering the author’s voice including keeping every he said, and she said intact. In addition to Word for Word’s live theater performance program they created an arts education program known as Youth Arts. The Youth Arts program utilizes the Word for Word style of in-depth, literature-from-the-inside-out workshops in San Francisco Bay Area schools. 

Show Host George: I'm joined remotely via zoom by Susan Harlow and JoAnne Winter Co-Artistic Directors along with Amy Prosser, the Youth Arts Program Coordinator for Word, for Word performing arts company. Thanks for being here, Susan Joanne and Amy, given, our remote sequestering.  I wanted to, uh, start with giving the audience a little background on Word for Word and your relationship with Z space. So Joanne, can you share with the audience what that's like?  

Show Guest JoAnne: So, Word for Word, performing arts company is a professional theater company based in San Francisco. And we are unique in that, we take short stories and theatricalize them. We use short stories as a text instead of a play script. And we don't change the text at all. We keep all of the narrative of that and the, he says, and she says, but all of that is fully theatricalize. And for instance, you might have somebody say, she peered tentatively into her computer camera during the zoom call or something like that.

So, the actors speak the narrative as they're doing it. It's like the characters are, talking about it as it's happening to them. And it's the most difficult thing to describe because everybody thinks your script in hand with, music stands, but it's actually quite active.

That's the whole challenge of it is to make the story come alive, theatrically and is quite exciting. It gives a richness to the experience because you have this story interpreted by the writer through the writer's language, and then also interpreted by the director and the actors and the designers. And we are a program of Z Space, which is  a developmental laboratory for New American Theater. And we joined Z Space at its beginning twenty, what is it now? Seven, eight years ago. And, Sue and I were artists in residents. Z space was started by David Dower, as an offshoot of the Z Collective, which was a theater company at the time. 

And his idea was to give theater artists. A place and time and funding to just explore theatrical ideas that they had without the onus of production. So, you didn't have to say, Oh, in five weeks, I have to put this on a stage. You could explore and make mistakes and discover, and then take it to production if you want to do. Or maybe you decide no, this isn't a good idea. And so, there were a group of theater artists that would meet weekly and show each other these explorations. And Sue and I, at this same time had been talking about starting Word for Word in San Francisco. Sue had been part of a company in Seattle called Book It, which did the same thing at the time.

Now they have gone on to adapt full length novels. But she decided to move back from Seattle San Francisco. And I said, hey, could we try something like that here? So, we approached David, we said, we have this idea to create this literature-based theater company. And we did, and we put a story up, Dorothy, Parker's the standard of living and, showed it to our compatriots at Z Space and said, hey, anybody interested in being a part of this? 

And that's where our core company, the charter group came from primarily. A few people joined a few years later, but that core company has been meeting every month for, or practically every month for the last 27 years. And deciding what direction the company will go in. And we've done oh gosh, what do you Sue, over 150 productions?  Main stage and smaller ones. And we toured all over California and the Western United States. And we've been very fortunate to be able to tour to France for the last over 20 years. And, we’ve worked with many authors. We have had many authors come and see our productions of their work. That's been one of the most thrilling parts of what we do. 

And we also have an arts education program. Uh, where we take students through this process of taking a short story or a poem and theatricalizing it. And it's turned out to be a wonderful amalgam of literature, arts and theater, arts. And kids really get viscerally what it is to read, what are the skills that good readers need to visualize and to really break that text down. So, we've got a lot of richness within what we do. And Z Space at the same time is developing all kinds of new works all the time. And Z Space is also a place, it's a theater in Project, Artaud in the Mission in San Francisco. And in addition to our productions and other productions that Z Space develops and produces, we rent the space out and bring all kinds of diverse theatrical companies from all over the world and all over the country. And dance, troupes, musical groups, so we have a very rich life amongst Z Space.   

George: Thank you.  So, Susan, can you talk about how COVID-19 is impacted, the production of Word for Word?  

Susan: Well, the first thing that happened was we had this fantastic tour of France planned. As JoAnne mentioned we go every year, we have special funding that we received whose purpose is French American Amity through cultural events. So, we were going to bring "Retablos", the short chapters from Octavio Solis's memoir "Life Lived Along the Border". This had been in production at Z space. And we had to A close the show just four performances before it was due to be over. So, we were fortunate that we got to have most of the run. But B, we were supposed to bring this show to France. And we were so excited about this. And some of the casts had never been to Europe, some had been, but everybody everywhere was pretty thrilled about this. And that was one of the hardest, I think probably the hardest thing in my career was when I had to go to the cast and that was on March 8th, actually. Because it wasn't looking good. Italy had just been quarantined the Northern part of Italy. And I had spoken to friends in France and they said, you can come, but I don't know if you can get out.  

And so, I had to go and talk to the cast about this and you know, I wept. It was really, really difficult, but I said, we are not canceling this we're postponing this. Because the show is built to tour and it's all there packed in bags, costumes, cleaned everything. They're ready to go when we are able to go again. So that was one thing. The second was that we had a show planned and a bunch of us off the page stage readings also planned for this summer. And the show this fall was Jeffrey Eugenides's "The Complainers", which is ah incredible story of the power of older womanhood, I'd say, and that was supposed to be performed in September, October. And we're postponing that. And of course, the question is, yeah, that's next step for us. And we were talking about it and talking to designers about it and to our director about it. And to the potential actors about it, but we just don't know exactly when.  

So, for us it's those specific projects. And then of course the whole entire future and how we're going to perform. And we have two spaces at Z Space. We have our black box that we call Z below and then the space above, which is much larger and airier. And you could do some social distancing there. So, the Z team has been talking a lot are technical guys, and staff are talking a lot about how we can make that work for us when we can make that work for us.  

George: So, Susan and JoAnne, over the 20 plus years, what do you feel like has been the largest impact of Word for Word on our community?  

Susan: Well, I think it's,  the stories that we pick, you know, because we're performing short stories, it's a little bit different than a play. And so it's a, it's an unusual form and people become captivated by it, you know, and they get excited about it. So, it also leads people to read. The books themselves, or to look for other work by that writer. And there's a whole literacy component to it just by the very nature of it being short stories that we perform. We select our stories carefully and there's lots of criteria for that, but one of them is the impact it will have on the community and whose story is being told. So, I would speak first to what we just closed. The story that I mentioned, "Retablos, Stories From A Life Lived Along The Border". Octavio Solis, who's ah renowned playwright, and who also coincidentally directed some of our very early stories, grew up in El Paso. And so, this is his memoir and we took 14 of the chapters in his memoir and put them on the stage with a wonderful cast. And we were really lucky.  

There was a woman at Twitter a Latinex woman who wanted to have a Latinex tech night for people who were in the tech world. And so she rallied all her friends and her family and they came and we did a talk back after the show with them. And it was, just amazing. people were speaking from their hearts and talking about their own personal experiences with immigration and talking with the cast. And it was just, it was just really a moment. One of those moments in theater that you never want to forget, because it was so heartfelt and people were speaking so openly and showed you the power of theater to be able to tell stories on stage that other people can relate to and talk about. So that's the first that I would mention. And then Joanne. 

JoAnne: Well, last year we did a production of, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner", which is not a short story, but an epic poem as everybody probably knows. But, one of our core members, Delia McDougal had for many, many years wanted to bring this to the stage and we always conceived of it as an epic production to match the epic nature of the poetry. Because it is about a sea voyage and it took us many, many years to, be able to put the money together to do that and the right set of artists. And last year, we were able to make that happen, thanks to help from a lot of people.  Delia, McDougall directed the production and she saw the poem through the lens of the climate crisis. There's a lot of connection there. If you look at it, it's about, you know, man trying to have control over nature and failing dismally.  

So, we were able to not only have this amazingly beautiful production with an incredible cast, and, just beautifully designed, but we also took our lobby at Z Space, which is quite large. And we did a lot of, informational displays about the climate crisis and what people could do to help with that. And it was beautifully designed by one of our volunteers, Amy Hosa. She put in her heart and soul to that. So that was a really exciting thing. That again, our goal to have an impact on the community. And so not only move them with a theatrical production but to have them go away with some, things to think about and to possibly do. 

Susan: And the other director of that was Jim Cave, Delia and Jim Cave directed it together. So, he was able to bring a lot of technical aspects to it too. I would mention two stories really quick. One is Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin that we performed in collaboration with the Lorraine Hansberry theater. And that was directed by Margo Hall with a great cast, incredible story by James Baldwin. Then we also were able to do my local favorite Amy Tan, we were able to have a production of Immortal Heart. And that too was reaching a community. I remember at one point we had a blessing by ah master calligrapher artists. And we were really able to bring people together for those two stories as well. And I just want to give one shout out to Y cause of all the writers we've done more of his stories than anybody's. And I think it was in our early, early years when we realized the power of the short story and how exciting it can be for people through his work. So, we could go on and on, but. I think those, Joanne, you have  

JoAnne: Well, I mean, you know, every writer that we've chosen, there's some sort of story about the connection that we've made there. You know, one of the early stories that Octavio Solis directed was a story by Greg Sarris called "Slaughter House" from his book "Grand Avenue, which is about marginalized people, present day in Sonoma County and Santa Rosa. And, when we, did that production, we invited Greg to come. And he came to see the show and, and we sort of, fell in love with each other and we've had this relationship pretty much throughout the entire existence of Word for Word. And Greg, in addition to being ah wonderful author is the tribal Chairman of the Federated Indians of Granton Rancheria, which are the Coast, Miwok and Southern Pomo People of Sonoma County. 

Greg a few years ago took some Miwok and Pomo legends and kind of rewrote them and made a collection called "How A Mountain Was Made". And we've taken a couple of stories from that and staged them for family performance for children and their families. We've toured it a little bit. That inspired Greg to invite us to come up and be part of their summer camp for native youth, because they didn't have a lot of arts programming. So, for the last three years, this will be our third summer. We have been participating and bringing theater and arts programming to the summer camps for the native youth up in Sonoma County. Now, of course, this summer, we're having to go virtual with it. And Amy Prosser, who is our Youth Arts coordinator, Youth Arts being our arts education program, has been just on the massive learning curve of, how to bring this on to zoom. And Amy, why don't you tell us about that? 

Show Guest Amy: So, I just want to just start by saying that when the shelter in place came down, we were between residencies, between school residencies. So, we had this really nice lull time where we could really check in with our teaching artists, all of whom are gig workers who go from teaching jobs, to acting job. And, were deeply, deeply affected by COVID.  

Amy: So we were able to spend about a month checking in with them, checking in with our grant organizations to make sure that we could continue paying our teaching artists, even if they weren't able to teach in the schools, we had to cancel one of our school residency. So, that was really lovely to have that time to focus on that. But as JoAnne said, we're now moving, six weeks of summer camp online for the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. It's going very well. We have nine incredible teaching artists who are going to teach a fourth through eighth grade program and then nine other teaching artists are going to teach a teen program. 

So yeah, we're learning everything we can about Zoom. We've shortened our day to three hours instead of six hours. And, we've had to really alter our curriculum from, putting on, one of Greg stories to, teaching a variety of, theater skills. And the last thing I'll say is that, I just heard from Chairman Sarris that he's working with the Smithsonian and, they are documenting how native people are, transitioning during this period from live education to virtual education. And, Chairman Sarris is very excited to use our camp as an example of that transition. So, we're really honored to be part of that study and conversation. 

George: I think finally, just to wrap up, how can people, get engaged with, Word for Word and support your efforts, to keep, live theater going in the Bay area?  

JoAnne: Well, you can go to our website, which is zspace.org. And there is a donate button and all of that money will go to support the various artists, actors, directors, designers, teaching artists, dancers, and our, hourly staff that is not able to work right now because we don't have any shows on. All of those people need support. And we would really appreciate it anything anybody can help with right now, zspace.org.  

George: And I want to thank, all three of you for being a part of our show today. And, we'll get the word out, in the show on, all the social media and how people can follow Word for Word and the youth program. Please stay safe and healthy, out there as we go through this, new and strange time.  

JoAnne: Thank you, George.  

Susan: You too. Thank you so much.  

Amy: Thanks. 

Episode Outro – Show Host George: That’s it for this episode of voices of the community. You have been listening to the voices of Susan Harloe and JoAnne Winter Co-Artistic Directors along with Amy Prosser, the Youth Arts Program Coordinator of Word for Word Performing Arts Company.  Susan mentioned working with author Tobias Wolff to bring his stories to life on stage. When asked Why does Word for Word’s method work? Tobias responded “What they’re really trying to do is approximate the imaginative experience of someone reading a story and create those visual equivalents that the language produces in their imaginations as they read the story. ... Those little things that I worried about — the little ‘he said,’ ‘she said,’ all that kind of little business that goes on in dialogue — they make that disappear.”

 Series Outro: We hope that you enjoyed the insights, points of view and personal stories from the voices of change makers and their nonprofits featured in the series. To find out more and get engaged with the nonprofit and staff members, featured in this episode please go to my web site georgekoster.com and click on Voices of the Community to find links to this episode. Please consider a donation and volunteering to provide a hand up to your fellow community members.

 Series Credits: I want to thank my associate producer Eric Estrada as well as the wonderful team at Bay Area Video Coalition. Go to www.bavc.org to find out more about Bay Area Video Coalition’s services. To listen to our next episode in this series and to our archived past shows which feature community voices working on solutions to critical issues facing Northern California communities, please go to georgekoster.com. While you are on our website please consider making a donation to help us provide future shows like this. Please rate us on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts and share this story with your friends. Follow us on twitter @georgekoster and please email us at george@georgekoster.com. I'm George Koster in San Francisco and thank you for listening.

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