By Jamila Reddy

Field Trip Theatre Company is busy at work on Danielle Mohlman’s Stopgap, our first full-fledged production. In the midst of rewrites, production planning, and preparation for our rehearsal process, we’re engaging in conversations about who we are as an emerging company and what we hope to be.  

Here’s what we’re clear on thus far: Field Trip Theatre is committed to developing and producing new plays, supporting emerging artists, and engaging diverse audiences. It is our ultimate goal to use our work to serve the diverse community of Washington, D.C.

Part of what we yearn to do is make our audiences a part of the conversation, not just spectators to it, so we invite you to a behind-the-scenes look at how our company members are putting our heads together to clarify and define what Field Trip’s Mission is.

Here’s what we’re reading:

• How to Write a Mission Statement by Janel M. Radke
• Mission Considered by Gigi Bolt (via TCG)
• Being the Change: An Interview with Woolly Mammoth’s Jeff Hermann (via HowlRound)

We’ll be continuing the conversation to clarify and define our Mission Statement, and we hope you’ll join us. Stay tuned!

By Elena Hight

Deceased Caucasian male. This brief profile graces the death certificates of many of the greatest, or at least most remembered, authors, playwrights, artists, inventors, and thinkers of Western history. These men surround us. They populate our thoughts; they inhabit our dreams; they affect the way we view any sort of progress or attainment. You (as an assumedly Western reader) can’t even think around them. For as soon as you try, you realize that their cold pruny fingers are curled tightly around the edges of your cerebrum, leaving you with what boils down to a pretty nasty sociological hangover.

So at some point, you have to either accept their vice grip or drive yourself crazy trying to think yourself out of your own mind. But just because you accept that those dead white hubbies, sons, and fathers have shaped your past (and left an indelible imprint on your present) does not mean you have to also accept that the reality they helped shape is absolute and immutable. Because each page they filled with scrawl also had its margins—its blank and silent spaces that left out the unsaid and untold stories of their present and our own.

These are precisely the stories that Field Trip Theatre wants to tell. Now, I should probably mention that this post isn’t coming out of nowhere. Last week, the members of Field Trip had a small but pretty wicked duking session about the merits of our logo: “No dead white guys allowed.” We were all about filling in the margins. So we had to ask, wasn’t this motto also marginalizing? Couldn’t it potentially make people (i.e. potential audience members) unnecessarily uncomfortable? Might it push away others (i.e. potential donors) who would normally be drawn to Field Trip’s work?

These were/are big questions, and we still don’t really have any definite answers. But after being so enthralled with the punchiness of the phrase, many of the company members left the discussion, feeling like the punch had gone sour. But I, dramaturgically inclined as I am, said to myself, “Wouldn’t this make an interesting tumblr topic? I’m getting on this shiz.” So this little essay is, for me, a chance to state my opinion to the tumblr world but also to tell you what Field Trip and its logo means for me.

“No dead white guys allowed” is not meant to exclude. In fact, it is meant to scribble notes all along the white spaces of our past by dedicating ourself to the future. Field Trip accepts the foundation and great ideas left behind by forward-thinking men. Playwrights like Brecht, Beckett, Ibsen, and more helped mold the fabric of their society through their progressive works, but unfortunately, they can no longer speak to us, meaning they also can no longer speak about us. And precisely because they were forward-thinking means that we do a disservice their legacy by endlessly reproducing their work at the expense of our own.

We have to move on. We have to break up with these dead white men and realize that there are plenty of other fish in the sea. And as a theatre and a community of artists, Field Trip recognizes that we can only do this by finding the voices, the images, and the productions of the present. The voices that say something about our happiness, our tragedy, our present. Now, we can’t bar these dead men from our doors because they already have front row seats to our minds. But we can keep them from our stage, honoring their past accomplishments by building, progressing from what they gave us, making their theatre better by making it our own.  

Ruth Tam really captured some of Robert and May’s anxiety about “home” in this Thought Catalogue essay. 

In the end, I left to go home. Because that’s what people do during the holidays. We retrace our paths by following the string of yarn we have tethered to our backs. We trail the mess we’ve woven to find the knot that keeps us anchored. When I returned, the house I grew up in no longer felt like my home. I had pulled too hard. I hadn’t noticed, but my cord had broken off and when I finally cared to look, I was left tangled in yarn with places to turn to but no discernable dwelling.

You can read the whole essay here.

Thought Catalogue published a piece by Michelle King today on a recent visit to her high school campus.  May Green must have been thinking some of the same thoughts when she took the job at her alma mater. 

Like nearly every jaded, vaguely spoiled 17-year-old, I left my high school swearing I’d “never go back.” By the time I turned my tassel from right to left, I was very much “over it.” I did not have anything even resembling a bad high school experience. My school had passionate teachers who knew how to make apathetic teens care about conjugating Spanish verb. We had little to no social caste system. We had new computers. I was lucky, but I also suspected bigger things awaited me, which is why I was so “over it.” I also assumed those bigger things were better things. 

You can read the full article here.

Field Trip Theatre is taking STOPGAP to the 2012 Capital Fringe Festival.  We’re so incredibly excited for this opportunity because it will mean so much growth for our play and our artists.  But we can’t get to Fringe without your help.  We’re $1,234 and 42 days away from our goal.  We mean it when we say every dollar counts.  For more information about the project and how to contribute, visit our Kickstarter fund.