so recently I directed a production of a
play called Arden everywhere which is a
reimagining of Shakespeare’s as you like
it a play I have always hated now for
those of you who are not familiar with
as you like it the main character is a
woman who dresses like a man and there’s
love at first sight and a lot of
gallivanting in the woods with only
moderately funny goofy rustic people and
at the end everybody gets married a less
glib version of the plot would include
the fact that there’s been a coup and
the people in the woods are they’re
escaping political violence now most
productions of this play treat the
people in the woods like they’ve just
stepped out of the LL Bean catalog and
are on their way to a picnic and this is
where they lose me because let’s
remember the people in the woods are
living hand-to-mouth in the dead of
winter barely surviving and if they go
home they’re most likely going to be
killed so we have a name for people in
this situation we call them refugees so
a few years ago I was having coffee with
an actor friend of mine who was in a
production of as he liked it and I went
off I hate that play LL Bean catalog why
are those people starving I said I want
those people to be starving well you
know she said you could do the play that
way so we talked about what happens to
the story if you take the stakes of the
circumstances seriously I loved this
idea so much I couldn’t read the play
for months you know how when you want
something to work so badly you can’t
bear to look at it that closely
so Arden everywhere my reimagining of as
you like it as a story about refugees
did not come from my desire to save the
world or even because I had something
important to say about the refugee
crisis it really started because I was
trying to make friends with this play
but it turned out to be so much more it
took me more than three years and it
blew my world open so when I first
started working on the play I didn’t
really know anything about refugees I
probably knew less then than you do
right now because this was before the
summer of 2015 when Syria essentially
emptied out and the refugee crisis made
headline news all over the world so I
went to a lot of websites I did a lot of
reading but my work is telling stories
about people and so pretty quickly it
became clear that I needed to start
meeting people and hearing about their
experiences I started to teach theater
workshops in ESL classes and one of the
first ones that I taught was with a
group that worked mostly with Russian
immigrants and I explained to the group
that I was working on as you like it and
I immediately get interrupted by an
incredibly cranky elderly Russian lady
who says to me there’s no such play I
know all of Shakespeare I’ve never heard
of it
so here I am trying to convince this
woman who could be my grandmother that
yes in fact the play does exist
eventually somebody looked it up on
their phone and in case you’re
interested in Russian they call the play
Orlando she said it’s a comedy she
thought I should be working on Hamlet so
as I talked to the people in the group
about the play I asked them if you had
to leave your home suddenly what would
you take with you and really there was
only one answer I would take my passport
and my children one woman was reminded
of her experience as a young girl during
World War two when the Nazis invaded her
village and she and her cousin ran away
into the woods and they spent the entire
winter surviving only on frozen potatoes
so they kept teaching I thought I was
going to get a lot of stories of
frozen potatoes variety because I was
after all working with people had been
through really hard things but
surprisingly that is not what happened
instead when I asked people to play
silly goofy theater games they were
silly and goofy and when I brought in
parts of the play to work on they were
really focused on understanding what
every word meant just like we all are
when we read Shakespeare one summer I
was the junior high and high school
theater teacher at a program for the
kids of resettled refugees families and
I took the job because I really wanted
to understand what refugee kids were
like and what I found was that the
Junior High students were Shirley and
Brooke healthy friend and didn’t want to
put their phones away and the high
school students were hormones for days
basically they were like teenagers
everywhere after a while it became clear
that in order for me to really learn
what I needed to understand I would have
to go to where the refugees were before
they got resettled so I taught a
two-week theatre workshop at Kakuma
refugee camp in the northwest corner of
Kenya where I was blown away not by the
suffering that I saw but by the sheer
three-dimensional humanity of the people
that I worked with much more about that
in a moment so when I got back from
Kenya not long after I got back I went
to an immersive exhibit that was created
by a really amazing international
organization that provides medical care
all over the world they wanted to give
people a taste of what it feels like to
be a displaced person and there were
lots of video and lots of pictures and I
found the exhibit really moving but they
were something missing for me and I
think if I hadn’t been to Kakuma I
wouldn’t have even noticed it wasn’t
there there was only one in
edge of someone smiling and I get it I
mean this really amazing organization
this whose work I totally support was
trying to raise awareness but they were
also trying to raise money and images of
suffering inspire people to open their
wallets as a photographer friend of mine
who works with refugees a lot says it’s
hard to avoid flies on eyes so what’s
wrong with flies on eyes well let me
frame it for you a little bit
differently when I ask you to take a
moment to think about a time in your
life where you’ve been through something
hard or something bad happened how would
you feel if the first thing that anybody
knew about you was the hard thing that
you just thought about nobody wants to
be known based on the worst thing that
has ever happened to us and yet that is
exactly what we do with refugees the
problem with flies on eyes is that the
cord that it plucks in us is pity and
pity is distancing it shuts us down
it might make you open your wallet but
for most of us it also inspires this
little voice in our head that says I
couldn’t survive that how can that
person survive that I can’t even stand
it think about it for very long so
what’s the alternative
if penny shuts us down what opens us up
especially when we’re confronted with
someone who’s been through something
very hard I think what we need to do is
tap into our common humanity the cord we
need to pluck is empathy and this is the
lesson that I learned in Kakuma where I
was interacting with people not based on
their suffering but through Kriya
and imagination and play when I first
got there the group the international
organization that I was working with
explained to me that there were four
theater groups in the camp that had
spontaneously emerged and part of what
they wanted me to do was to help these
groups learn to do their work better so
very early on I asked the people in my
workshop what was the hardest thing for
them about making theatre there and I
got the same answer over and over again
it’s really hard for me that nobody in
my community takes me seriously as an
actor now I can pretty much guarantee
you that if I have been in a room with
40 actors in New York City I would have
gotten the exact same answer I learned
that in the content of the theater that
they made was driven primarily by the
agendas of the international
organizations that worked in the camp
and so I asked them to make plays that
were based on stories that were
important to them the most memorable one
was about a cheating husband who gets
his comeuppance when his girlfriend and
his wife conspire it was hilarious and
it had nothing to do with being a
refugee I had thought that I was going
to get to know the stories of the people
in my workshop but it turned out that
most of them didn’t speak enough English
for that to happen and so instead I got
to know them in all kinds of other ways
that really sidestepped a lot of my
assumptions about who they were I
learned that there’s a really compelling
reason why Congolese people are famous
for being fashionable they might be
living in the middle of the desert and
no access to running water or
electricity but that is not an excuse
not to look good
they had hairstyles they had outfits
there were five women in my group that
brought their babies with them to the
workshop and one of them in particular
was really adorable and every day he
would cry
all around on the floor flirting with
everybody really happy until he got to
me I was fine he would burst out crying
I think I was the only white person he
had ever seen and he was terrified
some of the best moments were on days
when I was doing an exercise that
required music and so we would bring a
generator and a speaker with us and then
whenever there was a break somebody
would plug in their phone and they would
dance now I don’t mean to suggest that
the people that I work with it in Kakuma
were happy to be there quite the
opposite they’re essentially living in a
city of 200,000 people with no
infrastructure and no ability to work
all of them desperately want to be able
to go home safely or else get resettled
somewhere where they can build a life
and every one of them either has been
through or is continuing to go through
incredibly difficult things but what I
got from my students in Kakuma was a
crash course in joy
I learned that joy is not the absence of
hardship but the joy and hardship live
together in intimate proximity
cheek-by-jowl and that no one is just
their trauma history and it is this
point that every human experience that
we all a claim to is also happening for
Refugees this idea is so absent from the
conversation that most of us have access
to about the refugee crisis that we
don’t even notice it’s not there so
there’s a talented but kind of obscure
writer performer you might have heard of
a guy named Lin Manuel Miranda she wrote
a show called Hamilton so he calls
theater an empathy machine so it was
this lesson in empathy that
crystallized for me in Kakuma that now
brings me back to as you like it
so remember when I told you the plot I
mentioned there are some only moderately
funny goofy rustic characters when I
first started working on the play I
didn’t know what to do with them I
actually thought about cutting them
because how do I tell a serious story
about refugees with these goofy people
wandering through all the time and then
I went to caca MA and I discovered that
the goofy rustic people are actually at
the heart of what I’m trying to do
because they do take the play out of the
realm of the serious but reductive and
put it exactly where it needs to be in a
world of complexity and contradiction
where suffering and silliness bump up
against each other at every turn so how
did we do this well to begin with we
took the stakes of the situation
seriously remember this version of as
you like it that was supposed to be a
really good production – well this was
Arden everywhere
we had an amazing diverse cast of both
professional actors and non
professionals from the refugee and
immigrant communities and every choice
we made we kept in mind that our
audience might not be fluent English
speakers they might not be in the habit
of going to the theater and they might
not believe that Shakespeare was for
them we played soccer onstage everywhere
I’ve ever been with our refugees there
is soccer it truly is the universal
language and we were lucky to find that
two of our immigrant actors were genius
soccer players and they taught us what
we needed to know Jorge and Jorge showed
us the way we had a character who spoke
primarily in Spanish we sang songs in
Sinhalese and Swahili and Russian and we
created text where the non american-born
actors told stories about their own
immigration experiences and then at the
end
we finished with a chorus of people
speaking in Russian and Spanish and
Sinhalese and Uzbek and Arabic and
finally we were lucky to be hosted by
Baruch Performing Arts Center which
connected me with the incredible CUNY
community the most amazingly diverse
group of people I have ever been
privileged to be part of so yeah give
yourself an so so why does all of this
matter it matters because most of us
spend most of our time with people who
are mostly like us but when you and I go
to the theater we are connected by that
experience even if we never talk to each
other we become part of a kind of
temporary community that is forged by a
group of people sitting together in a
dark room listening to someone tell us a
story and because the people who are
telling us the story are in the room
with us they’re part of our community
too and most of us very rarely have an
opportunity to be in community even in
this little way with people who are
different from us and then when we do
the world looks different for a moment
and that is when the empathy sneaks in
there are more than 65 million displaced
people in the world right now it’s the
most at any time since the end of World
War two and yet the conversation that
we’re having in this country about the
refugee crisis is paralyzed on the one
side there are these overwhelming
statistics of misery and on the other
side there’s a kind of nativist
fear-mongering
that wants us to believe that anyone
from somewhere else is a danger so how
do we break that logjam there are no
simple answers if it was easy somebody
would have fixed it by now
but what I have learned is that when we
stop thinking about refugees as
abstractions of suffering or danger and
start to think of them as people like us
we start to think about things
differently possibilities open up so
when I first started working on this
project I talked to the director of
refugee services at a big
community-based organization in Brooklyn
where I live and I was kind of
apologetic about wanting to ask people
who had been through so much to talk to
me about this crazy 400 year old play I
was working on but she set me straight
said no tell them what you’re working on
people like to believe that their
experiences are Shakespearean it’s
flattering so I am using Shakespeare to
try to redeem a seemingly hopelessly
diminished conversation about the
refugee crisis and maybe this crazy 400
year old play is exactly the corrective
we need it will do its work as an
empathy machine so that when we look at
refugees instead of fear or pity we can
connect to the fundamental truth of our common humanity
play called Arden everywhere which is a
reimagining of Shakespeare’s as you like
it a play I have always hated now for
those of you who are not familiar with
as you like it the main character is a
woman who dresses like a man and there’s
love at first sight and a lot of
gallivanting in the woods with only
moderately funny goofy rustic people and
at the end everybody gets married a less
glib version of the plot would include
the fact that there’s been a coup and
the people in the woods are they’re
escaping political violence now most
productions of this play treat the
people in the woods like they’ve just
stepped out of the LL Bean catalog and
are on their way to a picnic and this is
where they lose me because let’s
remember the people in the woods are
living hand-to-mouth in the dead of
winter barely surviving and if they go
home they’re most likely going to be
killed so we have a name for people in
this situation we call them refugees so
a few years ago I was having coffee with
an actor friend of mine who was in a
production of as he liked it and I went
off I hate that play LL Bean catalog why
are those people starving I said I want
those people to be starving well you
know she said you could do the play that
way so we talked about what happens to
the story if you take the stakes of the
circumstances seriously I loved this
idea so much I couldn’t read the play
for months you know how when you want
something to work so badly you can’t
bear to look at it that closely
so Arden everywhere my reimagining of as
you like it as a story about refugees
did not come from my desire to save the
world or even because I had something
important to say about the refugee
crisis it really started because I was
trying to make friends with this play
but it turned out to be so much more it
took me more than three years and it
blew my world open so when I first
started working on the play I didn’t
really know anything about refugees I
probably knew less then than you do
right now because this was before the
summer of 2015 when Syria essentially
emptied out and the refugee crisis made
headline news all over the world so I
went to a lot of websites I did a lot of
reading but my work is telling stories
about people and so pretty quickly it
became clear that I needed to start
meeting people and hearing about their
experiences I started to teach theater
workshops in ESL classes and one of the
first ones that I taught was with a
group that worked mostly with Russian
immigrants and I explained to the group
that I was working on as you like it and
I immediately get interrupted by an
incredibly cranky elderly Russian lady
who says to me there’s no such play I
know all of Shakespeare I’ve never heard
of it
so here I am trying to convince this
woman who could be my grandmother that
yes in fact the play does exist
eventually somebody looked it up on
their phone and in case you’re
interested in Russian they call the play
Orlando she said it’s a comedy she
thought I should be working on Hamlet so
as I talked to the people in the group
about the play I asked them if you had
to leave your home suddenly what would
you take with you and really there was
only one answer I would take my passport
and my children one woman was reminded
of her experience as a young girl during
World War two when the Nazis invaded her
village and she and her cousin ran away
into the woods and they spent the entire
winter surviving only on frozen potatoes
so they kept teaching I thought I was
going to get a lot of stories of
frozen potatoes variety because I was
after all working with people had been
through really hard things but
surprisingly that is not what happened
instead when I asked people to play
silly goofy theater games they were
silly and goofy and when I brought in
parts of the play to work on they were
really focused on understanding what
every word meant just like we all are
when we read Shakespeare one summer I
was the junior high and high school
theater teacher at a program for the
kids of resettled refugees families and
I took the job because I really wanted
to understand what refugee kids were
like and what I found was that the
Junior High students were Shirley and
Brooke healthy friend and didn’t want to
put their phones away and the high
school students were hormones for days
basically they were like teenagers
everywhere after a while it became clear
that in order for me to really learn
what I needed to understand I would have
to go to where the refugees were before
they got resettled so I taught a
two-week theatre workshop at Kakuma
refugee camp in the northwest corner of
Kenya where I was blown away not by the
suffering that I saw but by the sheer
three-dimensional humanity of the people
that I worked with much more about that
in a moment so when I got back from
Kenya not long after I got back I went
to an immersive exhibit that was created
by a really amazing international
organization that provides medical care
all over the world they wanted to give
people a taste of what it feels like to
be a displaced person and there were
lots of video and lots of pictures and I
found the exhibit really moving but they
were something missing for me and I
think if I hadn’t been to Kakuma I
wouldn’t have even noticed it wasn’t
there there was only one in
edge of someone smiling and I get it I
mean this really amazing organization
this whose work I totally support was
trying to raise awareness but they were
also trying to raise money and images of
suffering inspire people to open their
wallets as a photographer friend of mine
who works with refugees a lot says it’s
hard to avoid flies on eyes so what’s
wrong with flies on eyes well let me
frame it for you a little bit
differently when I ask you to take a
moment to think about a time in your
life where you’ve been through something
hard or something bad happened how would
you feel if the first thing that anybody
knew about you was the hard thing that
you just thought about nobody wants to
be known based on the worst thing that
has ever happened to us and yet that is
exactly what we do with refugees the
problem with flies on eyes is that the
cord that it plucks in us is pity and
pity is distancing it shuts us down
it might make you open your wallet but
for most of us it also inspires this
little voice in our head that says I
couldn’t survive that how can that
person survive that I can’t even stand
it think about it for very long so
what’s the alternative
if penny shuts us down what opens us up
especially when we’re confronted with
someone who’s been through something
very hard I think what we need to do is
tap into our common humanity the cord we
need to pluck is empathy and this is the
lesson that I learned in Kakuma where I
was interacting with people not based on
their suffering but through Kriya
and imagination and play when I first
got there the group the international
organization that I was working with
explained to me that there were four
theater groups in the camp that had
spontaneously emerged and part of what
they wanted me to do was to help these
groups learn to do their work better so
very early on I asked the people in my
workshop what was the hardest thing for
them about making theatre there and I
got the same answer over and over again
it’s really hard for me that nobody in
my community takes me seriously as an
actor now I can pretty much guarantee
you that if I have been in a room with
40 actors in New York City I would have
gotten the exact same answer I learned
that in the content of the theater that
they made was driven primarily by the
agendas of the international
organizations that worked in the camp
and so I asked them to make plays that
were based on stories that were
important to them the most memorable one
was about a cheating husband who gets
his comeuppance when his girlfriend and
his wife conspire it was hilarious and
it had nothing to do with being a
refugee I had thought that I was going
to get to know the stories of the people
in my workshop but it turned out that
most of them didn’t speak enough English
for that to happen and so instead I got
to know them in all kinds of other ways
that really sidestepped a lot of my
assumptions about who they were I
learned that there’s a really compelling
reason why Congolese people are famous
for being fashionable they might be
living in the middle of the desert and
no access to running water or
electricity but that is not an excuse
not to look good
they had hairstyles they had outfits
there were five women in my group that
brought their babies with them to the
workshop and one of them in particular
was really adorable and every day he
would cry
all around on the floor flirting with
everybody really happy until he got to
me I was fine he would burst out crying
I think I was the only white person he
had ever seen and he was terrified
some of the best moments were on days
when I was doing an exercise that
required music and so we would bring a
generator and a speaker with us and then
whenever there was a break somebody
would plug in their phone and they would
dance now I don’t mean to suggest that
the people that I work with it in Kakuma
were happy to be there quite the
opposite they’re essentially living in a
city of 200,000 people with no
infrastructure and no ability to work
all of them desperately want to be able
to go home safely or else get resettled
somewhere where they can build a life
and every one of them either has been
through or is continuing to go through
incredibly difficult things but what I
got from my students in Kakuma was a
crash course in joy
I learned that joy is not the absence of
hardship but the joy and hardship live
together in intimate proximity
cheek-by-jowl and that no one is just
their trauma history and it is this
point that every human experience that
we all a claim to is also happening for
Refugees this idea is so absent from the
conversation that most of us have access
to about the refugee crisis that we
don’t even notice it’s not there so
there’s a talented but kind of obscure
writer performer you might have heard of
a guy named Lin Manuel Miranda she wrote
a show called Hamilton so he calls
theater an empathy machine so it was
this lesson in empathy that
crystallized for me in Kakuma that now
brings me back to as you like it
so remember when I told you the plot I
mentioned there are some only moderately
funny goofy rustic characters when I
first started working on the play I
didn’t know what to do with them I
actually thought about cutting them
because how do I tell a serious story
about refugees with these goofy people
wandering through all the time and then
I went to caca MA and I discovered that
the goofy rustic people are actually at
the heart of what I’m trying to do
because they do take the play out of the
realm of the serious but reductive and
put it exactly where it needs to be in a
world of complexity and contradiction
where suffering and silliness bump up
against each other at every turn so how
did we do this well to begin with we
took the stakes of the situation
seriously remember this version of as
you like it that was supposed to be a
really good production – well this was
Arden everywhere
we had an amazing diverse cast of both
professional actors and non
professionals from the refugee and
immigrant communities and every choice
we made we kept in mind that our
audience might not be fluent English
speakers they might not be in the habit
of going to the theater and they might
not believe that Shakespeare was for
them we played soccer onstage everywhere
I’ve ever been with our refugees there
is soccer it truly is the universal
language and we were lucky to find that
two of our immigrant actors were genius
soccer players and they taught us what
we needed to know Jorge and Jorge showed
us the way we had a character who spoke
primarily in Spanish we sang songs in
Sinhalese and Swahili and Russian and we
created text where the non american-born
actors told stories about their own
immigration experiences and then at the
end
we finished with a chorus of people
speaking in Russian and Spanish and
Sinhalese and Uzbek and Arabic and
finally we were lucky to be hosted by
Baruch Performing Arts Center which
connected me with the incredible CUNY
community the most amazingly diverse
group of people I have ever been
privileged to be part of so yeah give
yourself an so so why does all of this
matter it matters because most of us
spend most of our time with people who
are mostly like us but when you and I go
to the theater we are connected by that
experience even if we never talk to each
other we become part of a kind of
temporary community that is forged by a
group of people sitting together in a
dark room listening to someone tell us a
story and because the people who are
telling us the story are in the room
with us they’re part of our community
too and most of us very rarely have an
opportunity to be in community even in
this little way with people who are
different from us and then when we do
the world looks different for a moment
and that is when the empathy sneaks in
there are more than 65 million displaced
people in the world right now it’s the
most at any time since the end of World
War two and yet the conversation that
we’re having in this country about the
refugee crisis is paralyzed on the one
side there are these overwhelming
statistics of misery and on the other
side there’s a kind of nativist
fear-mongering
that wants us to believe that anyone
from somewhere else is a danger so how
do we break that logjam there are no
simple answers if it was easy somebody
would have fixed it by now
but what I have learned is that when we
stop thinking about refugees as
abstractions of suffering or danger and
start to think of them as people like us
we start to think about things
differently possibilities open up so
when I first started working on this
project I talked to the director of
refugee services at a big
community-based organization in Brooklyn
where I live and I was kind of
apologetic about wanting to ask people
who had been through so much to talk to
me about this crazy 400 year old play I
was working on but she set me straight
said no tell them what you’re working on
people like to believe that their
experiences are Shakespearean it’s
flattering so I am using Shakespeare to
try to redeem a seemingly hopelessly
diminished conversation about the
refugee crisis and maybe this crazy 400
year old play is exactly the corrective
we need it will do its work as an
empathy machine so that when we look at
refugees instead of fear or pity we can
connect to the fundamental truth of our common humanity
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