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Valerie Curtis-Newton (MFA '96) has defended her unabridged adult life to the theater. She stirs up "skillful trouble" and courageously unmasks uncomfortable truths while sharing stories on the stage as a phone call for us to do the aforementioned.  Curtis-Newton is a nationally recognized Seattle-based theater creative person and activist who serves as a director, professor, and Caput of Directing and Playwriting at the UW Schoolhouse of Drama. She grew upward every bit an Air Force kid in Hartford, Connecticut, enchanted past the power of storytelling and intimacy of the theater, an experience she originally sought out every bit a mode to connect with community, or as she puts it, "to find my people."  She started acting just over xl years agone and turned to directing while an undergraduate.

Valerie Curtis-Newton. Photo by Joshua Huston.

Afterward years of working in theater including as Artistic Director for The Performing Ensemble of Hartford, Curtis-Newton enrolled in the MFA program at UW, expecting to render to the East Coast after graduating. As life would have it, she cruel in love and later married her married woman, Kim Powell, confirming her destiny as a Seattle resident.  In those early years she experienced the discomfort of cultural isolation and deficient opportunities to work in the plays she was interested in. Living in what was at the time the 5th whitest metropolis in the country meant she was different from most professors, students, and theater practitioners. She began teaching at UW in 1998, and apace learned that inserting Blackness playwrights into the curriculum would be a hard-won effort.

The few Blackness customs artists Curtis-Newton knew sympathized with her circumstance. She acted by partnering with the local powerhouse theater artist Vivian Phillips. In 2006 they co-founded The Hansberry Project, named afterward A Raisin in the Sunday playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Their mission was to support artists and phase Black theater productions, beginning with an early on residence at Act Theatre that lasted vi years. Since 2012, The Hansberry Projection has mainly operated as a resource for play development and theater productions within the local Blackness theater community. These resource structures have supported opportunities for unemployed union actors to work with small independent theaters and companies, while securing livable artist wages for non-union actors. This collaborative effort shifted the theater landscape in ways that didn't be for Curtis-Newton when she started out. "[She] has been a forcefulness for many years," said Phillips. "Her sense of history that surrounds Black theater specifically has enhanced our understanding of the necessity to have authority over our ain stories."

Every bit Curtis-Newton'southward work across the country earned her national stage credits, she won more creative freedom in Seattle.  Over the last twoscore years, she has directed and produced just shy of lxxx regional, professional, and educational productions, readings, and workshops at Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Juilliard, Northwest Asian American Theater, the New York Theater Workshop, Capitol Repertory Theater, the Intiman Theater, and endless others.  Her directorial projects past Black playwrights include Christina Ham'south Nina Simone Four Woman at Seattle Repertory Theater (with choreography by CD Forum Program Curator and former UW Department of Trip the light fantastic toe faculty Dani Tirrell), Alice Childress's Trouble in Mind at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and Donnetta Lavinia Grays's Final Night and the Night Earlier at Denver Middle for the Performing Arts, which she will over again straight at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago in spring 2023.

Curtis-Newton's work with local and national communities offers a meaningful presence in the UW community for prospective and current students alike.  She recently directed Suzan-Lori Parks' Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1, 2 & 3 at UW'south Floyd and Delores Jones Playhouse, which brought together a cast of local actors and crew with faculty, alumni, and students comprising the largest Blackness cast in a School production since her arrival at the Academy. Undeniably her leadership in the School has fabricated a significant bear upon, though challenges remain. Inserting Black playwrights into the curricula has been a sustained attempt, recognizing gaps not only in theater instruction but in attaining equitable resource for staging stories borne of Black communities.  "She is kind, outspoken, and cares deeply most the success of the Schoolhouse of Drama," says Functioning Studies Professor Jasmine J. Mahmoud. "I accept watched her mentor students and junior faculty (including myself), always with an middle towards excellence."

Throughout her early career, Curtis-Newton courageously risked being barred from production spaces or resources because she challenged the condition quo.  "I'g so in dear with Blackness people that I want to give other people the chance to fall in dear with united states of america too," she says. The provocative and transformational promise of the theater invites audiences to expand their understanding of the whole human feel, and so her unyielding activity has been to address erasure from the canon. "For a long time, Shakespeare was elevated and everyone else was snuffed out," she explains, "but the problem isn't with Shakespeare or Chekhov, it'south the absence of everything else, which is why a instructor could say to me [when she requested the inclusion of 'other' playwrights in the curriculum] that he didn't know any non-western roots of theater that merited report." She values strong writing past traditionally privileged white playwrights, just intentionally centers stories from Black, Chocolate-brown, queer, and transgender communities in her curriculum and directorial work. She understands the importance of empowering the next generation of theater artists to enact the same agency. Only she also asserts that colorblind casting or diversifying audiences volition never be enough.

Curtis-Newton in rehearsal for Dominique Morisseau'southward "Sunset Baby" with actress Aishe Keite at Arts West Theater in 2019.

"We must create more than opportunities for various [people] to share their vision of family, their vision of love, their vision of compassion, their vision of tragedy, their vision of betrayal," she asserts. Notably, her adjacent Seattle Rep committee is to direct the complex story of an interpreter living on two sides of war in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan in Selling Kabul by Sylvia Khoury, opening on April 22.

Curtis-Newton has also nurtured her writing practise in the women's artist customs at Hedgebrook on Whidbey Island, having done two residencies and formerly serving as Hedgebrook's Board President. I of her plays, The Rent Party, was included in the inaugural 2021 Hue Festival, a four-day digital program in response to Covid restrictions that featured readings of works by local women writers of color. The festival besides included work by Jasmine J. Mahmoud, and Brownish Soul Productions co-founder, producer, and dramaturg Alma Davenport, who Curtis-Newton lauds every bit an important abet in Seattle's theater community.

Given her clear and unrelenting mission to work inside and for her communities, it is no wonder Curtis-Newton has earned multiple awards for her efforts. Among them are the National Endowment for the Arts/Theater Communication Group Career Evolution Grant for Directors, the Gielgud Directing Fellowship from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation, and beingness named a Seattle Times Almost Influential Citizen of the last decade.

Curtis-Newton with the bandage of "Terminal Night and the Nighttime Before" at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts in 2019.

Curtis-Newton is also the honorary 2021 UW Faculty Lecturer – a programme that will be delivered May third on campus and via livestream.  "Valerie Curtis-Newton is an inspired creative person, exemplary instructor, and committed leader who manifests the power of artistic witnessing," said Catherine Cole, Divisional Dean of the Arts. "Her former students say that she not simply teaches the craft of directing and acting, she too cultivates qualities all artists should posses — 'how to build resilience, persist after failure, and how to name the fear in the room.'"

While honored by these recognitions, Curtis-Newton offers in earnest, "I'd rather be an example than an exception; exceptionalism is a trap." Her focus remains in working to accost concerns for young or 'emerging' artists entering the field, citing that contemporary plays are rarely funded beyond one or two productions. Now officially emboldened with increased back up to center Black stories inside theater teaching since the protests following George Floyd's murder, she cautions that "nosotros accept been teaching what they desire, simply not what our field needs." She actively seeks means to create sustainable support for long-term career survival for theater artists.

Her impact continues through The Hansberry Project, teaching, and directing, articulate in her mission to bravely unmask subconscious truths, for the love of her people, storytelling, and the theater. Her work in Seattle and beyond the nation embodies the true aims of disinterestedness — on the page, within community, and on the stage.  This is hard and sometimes uncomfortable work, which she embraces with an unfaltering and eager delivery.

"I look to artists for truth, reconciliation, and repair, and that truth is not necessarily near dazzler," said Ed Taylor, UW Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Academic Affairs. "Every time I go to come across something that Valerie Curtis-Newton puts on I feel troubled, and I say to her 'I hate that you did this to me, and I'm grateful that yous did this to me.'"

The theater is for her a space that invites hazard, integrity, and backbone. "We are not in comfortable times," she concedes. "But stay dauntless. You can't exist safe and go into 'good trouble'. I don't seek to observe safe space. I seek to be brave in all spaces, and to tell the truth is the bravest act."

Berette S Macaulay is an interdisciplinary creative person, contained curator, and writer based in Washington. She currently serves equally Art Liaison Plan Managing director at Henry Art Gallery, the Curatorial Fellow at On the Boards, and founder and lead organizer for Black Movie theatre Collective, a project of i•ma•gine | e•volve. www.berettemacaulay.com

Macaulay spoke with Valerie Curtis-Newton by Zoom and phone interviews for this series. Community quotes were provided upon request by the writer. All images are courtesy of the creative person.

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Source: https://artsci.washington.edu/news/2022-04/unmasking-activism-community-theater

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