At The Playwrights Center Ubu Bake-Off, Paula Vogel and Jeremy B. Cohen (Photo by Whitney Rowland)

Four days ago, the US theatre community fostered the birth of more than 100 new short plays, on our federal holiday of Presidents’ Day. These were not, however, created in a spontaneous outpouring of national pride, but rather a coordinated – if entirely voluntary – effort that specifically sought to conflate the current presidency with Alfred Jarry’s absurdist and profane play Ubu Roi.

Held at nearly two dozen theatres and theatre-related organisations, the Ubu Bake Off was the brainchild of award-winning playwright Paula Vogel, who, please pardon the expression, cooked up the idea while musing on Facebook just five weeks ago. The interest from her Facebook friends and acolytes was immediate.

The Ubu Bake Off followed guidelines Vogel has previously used in her teaching career. It was an exercise designed to prompt people to quick, instinctive creativity, helped along by a 48-hour writing time limit, coupled with a five-page limit. Vogel also provides a set of ingredients, so that the resultant playlets are all variations on a theme.

For Monday, the ingredients included Pa Ubu 45 (supposedly 6ft 3ins, a trim 239 lbs, in “excellent health”, and, yes, the hair is his and real), angry ambassadors from every country that Pa Ubu has insulted, a strange use of the English language that sounds like it is supposed to be English (ie, words for ‘shit’ are prolonged like ‘pshitte’), covfefe, and a double-triple-quadruple-octahedral cheeseburger with special sauce.

Among the companies that participated were the Vineyard Theatre (a creative home for Vogel) and the New Ohio Theatre in New York; the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis (which Vogel attended), Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago and Crowded Fire Theatre Company and Antaeus Theatre in California. I even got into the act, hosting a small group under the auspices of my day job at the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.

This decentralised, far-flung realisation of Vogel’s idea means that no one person saw, or even read, all of the one-act plays that emerged. Almost like carefully organised insurgent cells, each location, each playwright, was part of a larger whole, carrying out their own missions, not knowing what else might be happening for the benefit of the cause elsewhere. Yet, at the same time, we were secure in the knowledge that other partisans were fighting the good fight in the same manner at the same time.

In my little troupe, we read nine plays over two hours, with playwrights and actors joining to give voice to the texts brought into the room, none adjudicated in any way. The Playwrights’ Center deployed eight actors to read all of the plays – in this instance, an astounding 41 plays by 44 playwrights in an event that lasted more than five hours. No doubt the solutions were as varied as the locales.

Based on the circle at my office, and the plays read, the Bake Off inspired instant camaraderie (I had previously met only one of the participants). It was great fun, in the name of expressing frustrations with our present leadership, while concurrently paying homage to a literary classic. The low-pressure, everyone-is-welcome spirit also stripped away any sense of theatrical hierarchy or critical judgement. It even freed me to try my hand at playwriting for the first time in about 40 years.

But perhaps most importantly, Vogel’s inspiration and recipe yielded a great deal of work in a very short time, demonstrating that her educational tool offers a significant opportunity for involving many voices on the same subject.

Without the demands of rehearsal, staging, ticket sales and fundraising, Vogel’s Ubu Bake Off stripped theatre to its most rudimentary essentials, yielding experiences that were, if my own metaphorical kitchen was at all representative, unifying and cathartic. It certainly provides a model for rapid-response theatre applicable to almost any topic. I suspect we have more national Bake Offs in our future.

I am tired.

I am tired of reading posts about “my rights” to a hobby that includes automatic rifles. You like guns, fine. But accept the fact that guns are dangerous and require strict regulations.

I am a teacher. I am tired because my job is hard. Don’t get me wrong, I love this gig, but it is hard work. It is emotionally draining, mentally challenging, and physically demanding. I am talking about a normal day here folks, and this past week was NOT NORMAL.

On top of all I do, I must also include drills where we hide in the theatre from a shooter. I must take time out of our day to discuss my students’ fears and concerns about their safety in our little town. I must plot with them strategies for when a shooter actually gets inside the theatre, what do we throw at them? I must remind them that if the fire alarm goes off to let me get to the door first to make sure there is no shooter out in the hall.

This last bothers me because normally I stay behind to look for stragglers and to shut doors. I must take time from my work to plan safety routes, and to devise strategies for my students for any given circumstance. What if someone is in the bathroom down the hall? What if it is lunchtime, which way should they run? What does gunfire sound like? What should I do first?

I can’t describe to you the silence that followed some comments about what to do if I, the teacher, do not return to the safe zone: “You shut the locked door and you stay quiet.” Yes, you forget about me and take care of each other, would you promise me that please?

The kids are terrified. Yesterday was even worse than Thursday, because of a threatening Snapchat, we were on alert. The phone lines were flooded with concerned parents, the halls had security and police patrolling. But you know what broke my heart? Sitting in my office working on my computer while I listened to our music teacher, a truly lovely man, kindly talking to his beginning level choir class, showing these young and frightened children how to cross the music hall to the band room as it is safer than the choir room.

As a teacher, I am privy to the emotional and mental health assessment of every student in my classroom. I am seeing more and more students suffering from debilitating anxiety and the label PTSD appears more and more often. THIS IS NOT OKAY.  It angers me that the rest of our country is so quick to judge kids without really understanding their motivations. Theatre teaches us to develop empathy, if only to understand our character and put on a better performance. I wish everyone was required to study theatre in school, if only to help them gain compassion – not just for others, but for themselves as well. Our country would be so much healthier for it.

Thank you so much, adults. On top of your own issues that plague my students thus making learning a difficult task already, you now have introduced terror into their daily classroom routine. Because of your inability to grow up and be responsible, unselfish and willing to sacrifice for others we are now living in this messed up, full of rage and extremely polarized country where children died because they attended school.

Rachel Harry received the 2017 Tony Award for Excellence in Theatre Education. She has taught theatre for 30 years at Hood River Valley High School in Oregon, and she also teaches at Columbia Gorge Community College. Much of this essay began as a Facebook post on February 17, 2018, following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. It is reposted here by permission.

Donald Trump (Photo by Gage Skidmore/Creative Commons)

If I were given to cynicism, and if I thought I could get away with it, this week I would have submitted the same column as the one published on March 24 of last year. Why? Because we return to the same topic: President Trump and his antagonism of the arts.

The president has, for the second time in his presidency, submitted a budget to the US Congress eliminating funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Never mind that the new budget will balloon the national debt above and beyond the long-term damage done to the US by the tax cut passed in December – a plan that rewards the ultra-rich while penalising the rest of the country.

No, the president and his henchmen still want to make a statement against creativity, arts and scholarship. It would be a meaningless save in the context of the budget itself. But it’s catnip to those perceived as his core supporters.

Underlying Trump’s effort to wipe out the NEA, NEH and CPB is the fact he failed to do so last year. He’s hardly the first politician to use these entities as a political punching bag; they have long been convenient targets for the right who see them as pursuits limited to those who are politically on the left.

Certainly if the right, which always proclaims the value of free markets and self-sufficiency, wanted to prove that the arts don’t need federal support, they might have produced a conservative version of Sesame Street for commercial TV. Or perhaps we would have a wildly successful theatre company dedicated to works based on the writings of Ayn Rand and her acolytes. But as we know, that’s not the case.

Oh, sorry, but maybe I am getting cynical. It’s hard to stay fully positive when, in the 35th year of my career in the arts, I realise the NEA has been under some form of attack almost annually since at least 1990 – fully three-quarters of my professional life. Trumpism may have us on ever more heightened alert, but there’s never really been a moment when we could truly relax regarding this issue. If our community did, we were losing ground.

Nowadays, I get calls to action to defend funding for these tiny slices of the federal budget via e-mail, Twitter, Facebook and occasionally still from the post office. But I can recall the era when mail, phone calls and faxes – remember those? – were the organising tools of choice to face down these perennial assaults, whether they came from within the Oval Office or under the Capitol dome.

There’s no question that the efforts to minimise or eliminate these agencies have had an effect, since funding today is less than it was 25 years ago. Even with relatively steady funding of late, the net effect is to reduce the federal impact, since costs rise while the available monies remain the same. Should we hit a period of inflation, the impact would prove even greater, even if the numbers on the ledger remain the same.

All these efforts to wear down the agencies’ advocates must take its toll on the detractors too, right? But instead, each side plays its designated role, battling to, more or less, a draw.

Not to diminish the importance of the funding situation, but this exercise in political gamesmanship is almost like some vintage cartoon series, with antagonists fighting in endless variations on the same theme, only to take up their enmity again in the next instalment.

But fight we must. The identity of the wolf at the door may vary, but the goal is the same. The arts, the humanities and the public broadcasting outlets and their supporters cannot let the government wipe an entire professional discipline from its attention and funding programme.

This year, the battle even faces a new twist, since the changes in the tax code have reduced the tax benefits of charitable deductions for many citizens and the impact of that policy won’t be fully known until donations are tallied at the end of 2018.

And so we organise to hold back those who would overrun us. We make the case for our value spiritually, creatively and economically, as inventively, persuasively and as loudly as possible.

While some political pundits have already suggested the president’s budget is dead on arrival and Congress will assemble something at least marginally more saleable – to each other and to the public – we can’t take the risk that this is the year when our interests might get bargained away.

Yet again, to the barricades (to be very clear, not a wall). And to the phones, the computers and maybe even the fax machines.

If you’re under 50, you likely aren’t familiar with the work of comedian Bill Dana. His most famous creation, a character seen on an array of television shows in the 1960s – Jose Jimenez – has been largely forgotten, especially since Dana stopped playing the character (save for one exception) in 1970. But the Jimenez character was a comedy phenomenon, appearing on Dana’s comedy albums in addition to his many sitcom and variety show appearances. Fans of the movie The Right Stuff may remember one of the Mercury astronauts repeating his catchphrase – “My name Jose Jimenez” – while in the flight capsule, a detail straight out of Tom Wolfe’s non-fiction book, prompted by sketches in which Jimenez was a reluctant astronaut.

Dana stopped performing the character 47 years before he passed away in 2017, because of lobbying from Hispanic groups who found the slow-talking, slow-witted Jimenez to be a deeply offensive stereotype. Jose Jimenez would be joined in oblivion a year later by the commercial pitchman Frito Bandito, consigned to the same fate as Jimenez for the same reason: being a negative stereotype, in this case a rootin’-tootin’ shoot ‘em up villain with a taste for Frito-Lays’ corn chip snack and a theme song that included the refrain, “I love Frito Corn Chips, I love them I do/I love Frito Corn Chips I’ll get them from you”. The Frito Bandito was as genuinely threatening as the Hamburglar and as authentic as Eli Wallach’s character in The Magnificent Seven, which is to say not at all.

The now rarely seen or heard Speedy Gonzalez

It would take much longer, until 2002, but when the Cartoon Network acquired the rights to the Warner Brothers cartoon family, they withdrew the Speedy Gonzalez cartoons from TV for yet again the same reason, stereotyping. For trivia fans it’s worth noting that both Speedy and the Frito Bandito were voiced by the famed Mel Blanc. Speedy, for those unfamiliar with him, was regularly portrayed as an anomaly in his Latinx community, with the rest of the rodent characters portrayed as slow talking and slow moving.

So with the mass media relegating the afore-mentioned Latinx stereotypes to archives years ago, it’s disconcerting to learn that a small, family-operated theatre north of Salt Lake City, the Pickleville Playhouse, has been producing a series of original shows over the past decade featuring the leading character of “Juanito Bandito”, written and portrayed by the Caucasian actor TJ Davis, sporting a black wig, sketchy accent and absurd handlebar mustache. Among the shows featuring this character have been, in chronological order, The Hanging of El Bandito, Bandito Rides Again, Who Shot Juanito Bandito?, The Hanging of El Bandito Reimagined, Bandito Rides Again Reimagined, Who Shot Juanito Bandito Reimagined, Juanito Bandito in the One with the Monkey, Ready, Fire, Aim starring Juanito Bandito and Love & Death vs El Bandito. Oh, there’s also the seasonal favorite, Juanito Bandito’s Christmas Carol.

In the peculiar ways of the internet, word of Davis’s character has recently begun popping up in theatrical feeds, inevitably in conjunction with charges of stereotyping. The tweets were most likely prompted by a joint letter, originated by Diana Burbano, dated February 9, from some 40 theatre artists to The Grand Theatre in Salt Lake City, a large venue in Utah’s capital where one of the Bandito shows recently played. Davis initially responded in a sustained blog post, since withdrawn, in which he defended the character, saying it wasn’t a stereotype because the character’s accent is so poor. His shorter, revised post reads, in part:

Two days ago I wrote a post trying to explain some of my points of view regarding the Bandito character.  I’ve chosen to take it down because even though I thought it might help those who had expressed concern (people who have never actually seen what we do), it seems now that a blog post is not the appropriate avenue.

I am absolutely interested in doing the right thing in every aspect of my life.  I believe that racial stereotyping is a big problem in the entertainment industry today.  I don’t want to be a part of that problem, and I do not believe that the Bandito productions are a part of that problem.

JB is not a stereotype of any race or culture.  I do not darken my face with makeup nor have I ever done so in order to make him appear to be Latino.  Bandito has been Spanish (from Spain) from the beginning.

In the post that remains, Davis seems to suggest that his character, who he claims is from Spain, isn’t making fun of Latinos. While the character’s iconography seems drawn from The Magnificent Seven and its ilk, he’s really splitting hairs. He may believe that he’s not making fun of Latinos, but even if we were to grant him that, he does appear to be making fun of Hispanics. Yes, there’s a distinction, but for the purpose of addressing stereotyping, it’s a fairly academic one. A feature story in the Herald Journal of Logan, Utah notes that the character had its origin when, “Davis, who had seen first-hand in Guatemala how non-native speakers ‘butcher’ Spanish decided to try something different. ‘I came in one day and said, ‘What if I do this with a Spanish accent?’”

TJ Davis as Juanito Bandito (screenshot via YouTube)

Davis notes that he doesn’t darken his skin, but seems unaware that one need not employ makeup to deploy brownface, blackface, yellowface and their ilk. His self-admittedly poor accent is more than enough of a tipoff as to which ethnic group he’s referencing; one of his Instagram posts includes the ad line, “We’re adding a chow. Jou’re welcome.” The open captioning on a video from one of the productions features the dialogue, “You chooted at him because he lunched at you?” Pure Jose Jimenez material.

He further protests that he is being criticized by people who have not seen what he does. While it’s probable that the rumble of unhappiness is coming predominantly from people who haven’t made it Utah to see the character in action, there’s plenty of video currently online to get a sense of what the portrayal is like. Though Davis’s earlier post indicated that he had Latino friends who told him the character was fine, that’s unlikely to be the prevailing opinion among those he doesn’t already know, as confirmation bias in his existing circle won’t be a factor.

Davis says he wants to do the right thing in every aspect of his life, writing, “Our mission in everything we do is to create fun, clean family entertainment to help our communities create lasting memories with those they love.” Let’s take him at his word, with the assumption that his communities include Latinx and Hispanic patrons, or potential patrons. Perhaps he’s unfamiliar with Gonzalez, Jimenez and the Frito spokes-cartoon, since they’ve been out of circulation for almost a half century.

Mr. Davis, the right thing is to not make a career of a character that is instantly recognizable as a stereotype, even if he is intentionally a badly drawn version of one. Utah may be a state that is largely Caucasian – as of 2016, per the US Census Bureau, the category of “White alone, not Hispanic or Latino” represented 79% of the Utah population, the next largest category is “Hispanic or Latino” at 14%. But that’s not an excuse for ignoring the minority for the amusement of the majority. In fact, it might argue for even greater sensitivity, since the families that attend the Pickleville shows surely don’t want to be teaching the lesson that it’s fine to laugh at people who are different than you, especially when they are in the minority and overmatched by the dominant ethnicity. Even when intended benignly, brownface is an offense. Your saying the character is not a stereotype doesn’t make it true.

Some might see it as unfair to impose this sensibility on a small family playhouse, but it seems that Juanito Bandito has been expanding his territory. Davis’s Instagram account promotes recent holiday shows featuring the character playing beyond his home of Garden City, with gigs at the Eccles Theatre in Logan and the Grand Theatre in Salt Lake City. There have also been student performances for elementary schools, indoctrinating children into the harmless good fun of ethnic ridicule at the earliest opportunity.

Sure, some Utahns may mourn the mothballing of an apparently beloved character, but there are those who miss Speedy and Jose as well. Letting go of the past is part of growth and progress, and it seems high time for the Pickleville Playhouse to advance past humor out of the 1960s, especially since such contemporary musical styles as rapping are already part of their performances. After all, if Davis is committed to not offending the Latinx community, in Utah and beyond, he probably doesn’t wan’t to upset the Hispanic community either.

The 30th anniversary of The Phantom of the Opera on Broadway (Photo by Jeremy Daniel)

By celebrating its 30th anniversary on Broadway last week, The Phantom of the Opera marked what now seems a never-ending series of milestones, having run longer than any show in Broadway history.

The seeming permanence of Phantom may mask its achievement, though it has an eight-year lead on the revival of Chicago and nine years on The Lion King. Even if it were to close tomorrow – and that’s not about to happen – it would take the better part of a decade before either of those surpassed it, if they could.

Congratulations are due, of course, to Andrew Lloyd Webber, but also to Richard Stilgoe, Charles Hart, Harold Prince, Gillian Lynne, Cameron Mackintosh and so many others.

There is a certain irony to Phantom’s stupendous run on Broadway, in the West End and around the world – as pointed out in Harold Prince’s autobiography Contradictions, recently revised and expanded as Sense of Occasion.

In the original 1974 book, Prince predicted that no show would ever run as long as Fiddler on the Roof, which he produced. In Sense of Occasion, he allows that he was wrong, with many shows having surpassed Fiddler – A Chorus Line, Rent, Les Misérables, Wicked and the aforementioned productions to name a few.

Last summer, Prince was quick to contradict a question I asked him about whether shows were being engineered for longer runs. He cited the international market for musicals, and for tourism, as the engine behind the longest-running shows.

What was happening wasn’t a creative decision, but rather a product of changing and expanding opportunities. Shows were running longer because ever more people wanted to see them, the new modes of marketing and because there were successive generations of new audiences.

Certainly long-running shows existed before Phantom and its brethren, but they weren’t in theatres as large, they didn’t play in as many cities, and they didn’t necessarily tour as extensively.

In the West End, The Mousetrap has run for longer, but it is a play, not a musical. In Paris, a revival of Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano has been running at the tiny Theatre de la Huchette for some 60 years. In the late 1980s, I saw a production of The Three Sisters at Moscow Art Theatre that had been in the repertory since the 1940s. It may yet still be there for all I know. The Fantasticks ran for 42 years Off-Broadway at the Sullivan Street Playhouse.

Coming back to Broadway, the expanding list of long runs is something to marvel at, especially if you are among the fortunate who invested in the shows.

But just as the growing markets, according to Prince, expanded the sense of what a Broadway show could achieve, they have also fundamentally changed Broadway itself. I have heard more than a few people remark that they have been in the Majestic Theatre, home to Phantom, only once – or not at all – in their lifetimes.

That is obviously due to the Majestic having had only one show playing for 30 years; the previous tenant, 42nd Street, ran for six years before that.

I should note that Phantom has been around long enough that I saw it on a discounted student ticket. (Though it opened a while after I graduated from university, the friend who bought the seats was only six months past graduation.)

It is possible to applaud Phantom, Chicago and The Lion King and all of those who have made them possible and bask in their success, but also temper that appreciation with caution.

While only a handful of shows each decade will even approach Phantom’s phenomenal run – Hamilton seems poised to be the latest to join that esteemed pantheon – and maybe some will run for only a decade, the impact has already fundamentally changed Broadway.

With a finite number of theatres, hovering at about 40 despite the openings and closings, these hits end up restricting the opportunities for new Broadway work. It’s great news for theatre owners, but limiting for works that might truly benefit from the awareness and opportunity that Broadway affords as a result of its legacy.

Unlike some countries, where we read about purpose-built theatres for each new extravaganza, Manhattan affords little space for new venues, especially in the theatre district.

The Shubert Organization announced, not so long ago, that it would not pursue a new theatre in the area because the costs were prohibitive. Meanwhile, the new venues coming to Manhattan are performing arts centres, designed to house a variety of work.

Only if works can set up in other cities with populations and tourism that approach those of New York, and only if the media affords comparable attention to that devoted to Broadway, might we see an expansion of large-scale work.

Perhaps Chicago, Boston, Washington DC and Philadelphia, to name but four, could become home to long-term work that doesn’t need to play Broadway to ultimately reach vast audiences.

We must accept that the model has changed, as Prince noted, and so change the opportunities for production accordingly. Even leaving aside significant concerns about pricing and accessibility, Broadway’s own success may be limiting new Broadway-scale work.