Diane Paulus explained how the arts can create empathy after tragedies like Orlando
The Artistic Director at the American Repertory Theater spoke at an arts conference on Friday.
Diane Paulus stopped counting how many productions from the American Repertory Theater have gone on to Broadway (answer: eight—the most recent being Waitress, which was nominated for four Tonys). While she says it’s great when her shows get an extended life through the famed New York theater epicenter, that’s not her goal.
“While we may be known for taking many shows to Broadway, that’s not our mission,” Paulus, artistic director at the A.R.T., said. “Our mission is to expand the boundaries of theater, and we do that by incubating, growing and creating work here … Our focus is on making the work for—and with—the community here.”
And the community here, in the Greater Boston area, is special, Paulus said. So special that artists who come to work for the A.R.T. from all over the world constantly remark to Paulus about how engaged the audiences here are.
“What has kept me so excited about leading the A.R.T. is this community, and by that I mean the audiences I have found to be so adventuresome, so willing to take a risk and go on a ride,” she said. “Audiences that I feel have an identity of wanting to be stimulated, pushed, engaged.”
Paulus has pushed those audience members with a program she enacted at A.R.T. called “Act II.” As an extension of the production, Act II turns the stage into a public forum, connecting the themes of the show to current conversations in politics, science, and beyond; issues concerning the environment to instances of violence against women around the world have been covered.
To Paulus, there is no diverging art from current events. Even when, and almost especially when, an event is as catastrophic as the massacre in Orlando last Sunday.
“I think artists are on the planet to react and reverberate and reflect what goes on in our lives,” she said. “And when something like this happens, it just puts into extreme relief what it is that we maybe should be talking about and what we need to be talking about.”
Paulus has already seen the arts community come together in the wake of this tragedy. Sara Bareilles, who wrote the music and lyrics for Waitress, along with other cast members from the production, participated in recording the song “What the World Needs Now is Love.” The song honors the victims and families connected to the Orlando shooting and is available on iTunes, where 100 percent of the proceeds will benefit the LGBT Center of Central Florida.
“We can be a haven and more than ever we have to be a leader in communicating the necessity to live inside these values,” Paulus said. “We have the unique opportunity through art to create empathy.”
Paulus elaborated on the connection between art and empathy on Friday at the Americans for the Arts convention in Boston. She gave a speech on arts and civic engagement, first touching upon Orlando.
“For several weeks now I’ve been planning this speech in my head but all of that changed last Sunday,” she said.
Paulus chose to reflect on Orlando by repeating questions that her colleague, Timothy McCarthy, director of the Sexuality, Gender, and Human Rights Program at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, had previously articulated:
“Why does it feel like we’ve been here before and why does it feel like it’s getting worse?”
“Will people even care if so many queer people were murdered?”
“Did the shooter know that it’s Pride Month?”
“Does anyone care that President Obama has to deliver yet another speech, the eighteenth of his presidency I believe, about mass shootings?”
Paulus didn’t answer these questions. She let them hang in the air. The point of being a director, she said, is not to have the answers but to ask the right questions. Asking the right questions leads to compelling theater.
“I make theater because it’s a forum to ask questions,” Paulus said. “It can take us to places we’ve never been before, perspectives and stories that are not our own. We can achieve empathy… I cannot imagine an action more vital to our survival—other than love—than empathy.”
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