Miranda Haymon
In January of this year, The Public Theater held their longstanding Under the Radar Festival online. As one may expect from a digital theatre festival, some pieces were more successful than others. One deliciously strange performance shouldered past the crowd and embodied the isolation, alienation and desperation of the past year in technicolor.
This was bb brecht, a creation of director and theatre artist Miranda Haymon. The piece, ich liebe zu lange, was part of the Devised Theater Working Group’s standout entry called Incoming! In three short, frenetic minutes, Haymon’s creation leads us through a hip-hop video immediately accessible to anyone who has come close to Instagram or Tik Tok since their inception, but will cut even deeper for fans of German playwright Bertolt Brecht. bb brecht is, after all, a reincarnation of old Bertolt embodied in a 21st century Black woman (Haymon that is, for bb is a “he”) who vapes, shotguns beers and writes Notes app missives on his very own Instagram account.
“bb brecht has arrived to rediscover suffering, exhaustion and desperation,” Haymon says. “Where do I go to discover suffering and desperation? You go on fucking social media. You go on the internet. You take a selfie and post it on Instagram. That is the ultimate combination of suffering and desperation. That feels fun for me to be able to create this person who is actively trying to rediscover the very thing that inspires him … I'm just trying to explore suffering and desperation in the 21st century.”
The heart of Haymon’s work is to separate whiteness from our concept of the “universal” — not only whiteness, but middle class, cis, able-bodied male whiteness. One of the effective ways Haymon accomplishes this is by exploring and reconstructing the work of white artists, including Brecht and Kafka, laying bare a deeper universality while also shining a light on false archetypes.
With a resume that includes the likes of Roundabout Theatre Company, Arena Stage, the New York Theatre Workshop, the Lincoln Center and the Manhattan Theatre Club (among many others), Haymon has built a career that incorporates the creation of deeply experimental work while working within the structures of traditional American professional theatre. No small feat.
“I always gravitate towards the place that is at the precipice of legacy and opportunity to break that legacy,” she explains. “I've had a unique opportunity to be able to see how the places that have this legacy are moving forward with that legacy and trying to incorporate the legacy of their ways of making and of their ways of being into a new future of making, which at this moment has become critical.”
“How do we keep moving forward? How do we something that Jill Raffson of Roundabout says all the time, which I love, ‘How can our new play development sector become the canon in 80 years?’ How can we be making the new canon now, whatever that wants to mean?”
Haymon double-majored at Wesleyan in theatre and German studies, and studied in Berlin, observing Brecht’s legacy Berliner Ensemble up close. Her deep understanding of German literature and theatre stands out not only as an American artist interpreting them, but also in the sharp edge she uses to excise white identity from the universal — an edge she turns to all her work.
Her adaptation of Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, examines incarceration and the scouring eye of the media through the experience of three Black men. bb brecht reincarnates Brecht as a contemporary influencer. She directed Eric Micha Holmes’ Mondo Tragic, which explores biracial identity and ’60s mondo shockumentaries as a live radio drama.
The theatre world — the arts world in general — too-often works from a scarcity model that leaves artists themselves in the cold. As Black theatre practitioners know, and as the We See You, White American Theatre movement has laid bare, this is visited a hundredfold on BIPOC artists.
“It's not that there's a scarcity of opportunity, there's a scarcity of opportunity that actually is sustainable,” Haymon says. “But then I think that the psychological and the emotional impact of that scarcity mentality has deeply affected the way we work, the way we collaborate, the way we pitch projects, the way we think about next steps, the way we think about programming, and, of course, I think that scarcity is also coming from a lot of white supremacy culture.”:
When Haymon and I spoke, she’d recently taken part in a working group organized by Bryan Joseph Lee of the Public Theater. “He posted on Facebook saying (and he's black), ‘Are any BIPOC who work in institutions, hearing a lot of this allyship, anti-racist work, and not really knowing what to do about it as a BIPOC?’ And I was like, Yes.”
“He ended up creating this working group that was all about how to kill the white supremacist inside of you as a BIPOC … I think that was the beginning of my unpacking my own relationship to the white supremacist inside of me that has been wrought by a politics and just general culturalization and socialization. But then there's also a lot of relationship to working culture that is so rooted in white supremacist culture that theater has also inherited and embodied. It has become structurally part of how we make theater. No one should be working six days a week for $500 a week. And that’s a good gig.”
She adds, “So the first step for me started with being able to create some boundaries around work and play and everything in between.”
As with any performing arts conversation in the past year, we find ourselves looking at the post-COVID future. What have we learned? What will we bring with us, and what will fall away? And, perhaps most importantly, how can we avoid falling into old destructive habits?
“I really hope that we are putting artists more in an opportunity to be able to have a space or a place that creates an ongoing dialogue with themselves and with their practice simultaneously,” she says. “I think that as we become more programming-driven … like, ‘okay, we have to have this kind of show slated and this kind of show slated,’ I think as we become more and more like that, and as the scarcity that we have becomes greater, not only because of the lack of government support that we have …[but the] scarcity that we're going to have coming out of a pandemic, I'm really concerned that the opportunity to play and experiment will be at an all-time low.”
Haymon also points out that there will be an achievement gap. “If I'm directing a show on Broadway in say, like five years, my assistant will probably be someone who just graduated from college, because there's going to be a gap between the next generation.”
She finds hope in the relative positives that have come from artists digitally adapting to the lack of live opportunity. “What feels so exciting to me about what's going on in terms of what artists are making on TikTok and Instagram and just in general with like iPhones. I shot the entire bb brecht music video on my iPhone … and it cost me $300 because it was a green screen and two flood lamps. So I hope that as we're facing this achievement gap and this scarcity gap, more folks are starting to create in ways that exist outside of the need for a show and the need for a space.”
“All theater artists are scrappy and innovative,” she adds. “So I hope that we can start to appreciate the opportunity that we have as an industry to supplement our individual artists as makers in their own right through TikTok and Instagram and online because that costs under $300, and to make a play still costs 10 times as much. We're going to lose theater if we're so afraid of venturing out to other places and spaces that can be olive branches to the tree that is theatre.”
“I truly believe that theatre is the gesamtkunstwerk — the total work of art … Every single artistic medium can walk through the door and be welcomed by theatre. So I'm so glad that that is my house and my tree trunk. But we need to stop being afraid of the olive branches, the out-shoots of people's tree trunk of theater … bb brecht is simultaneously so theatrical but also just content. That’s awesome. And I hope that we can inspire artists and ourselves really to go and take those leaps and not be so afraid of the olive branches, because all of it is.”
