Shaping the 2019 ATHE Conference

With the exception of Chicago and New York, ATHE rarely meets in one location twice in a decade. So it took many members by surprise when it was announced that we would return to Orlando so soon after our previous visit in 2013. For the 2019 Conference Committee, this presented a challenge: to find an original way to interact with the host city. Fortunately, a conference’s meeting site always provides the inspiration needed. In this case, a theme was prompted by the fact that, in recent years, Orlando’s reputation as “The Most Magical Place on Earth” has been challenged by a number of troubling new associations. The most notorious of these, and the most strongly felt within Orlando itself, was the linkage of the city to homophobic and racist violence following the Pulse nightclub mass shooting of 2016. The wider state of Florida has in recent years suffered from several more high-profile incidents of gun violence, including the high school shooting in Parkland and the killing of Trayvon Martin in Sanford (a mere half-hour’s drive from Orlando). A number of less deadly incidents have also focused negative attention on Florida, including a second controversial presidential election in as many decades. In short, events in the City Beautiful and the Sunshine State that transpired since ATHE’s last visit have proven emblematic of the sweeping changes we have seen nearly everywhere else in the same period. Resonating throughout our culture and its institutions, those changes have reached into our theatres and our colleges. Perhaps the most high-profile example of those shifts has been the recent turnover in artistic directorships across the United States, whether as a result of planned departures or of revelations spurred by the #MeToo movement. Given these developments, the 2019 Conference Committee felt that our return to Orlando might afford an excellent opportunity to take up the very theme of change itself. Fortunately, our field offers the perfect metaphor for encapsulating the idea: the scene change. Thus the Conference Committee presented the membership with our 2019 conference theme, “Scene Changes: Performing, Teaching, and Working through the Transitions.”

The shape and success of any ATHE conference is the result of the membership’s engagement with the theme, the location, and one another’s work. The wealth of panels, roundtables, and workshops that members brought to Orlando made for an invigorating exchange about the shifting scenery of our field and our world. Assuming such an outcome from the start, the Conference Committee sought ways to supplement that energy with all-conference programming that might coalesce discussions around particular aspects of the theme. In recent years, ATHE’s membership has enjoyed keynote addresses from many prominent playwrights, and the committee felt that a different perspective might be appreciated. We were particularly intrigued by the idea of hearing from one of the artistic directors who are shaping the new theatrical landscape in the United States. Several committee members suggested Bill Rauch, the long-time head of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the recently appointed inaugural artistic director of the Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center in New York City. In response to the gentle yet persistent lobbying of Conference Committee members Martine Kei Green-Rogers and Tiffany Ana López, both long-time collaborators with Bill, he finally agreed to our invitation. Thanks perhaps to his own particular moment of transition, his address took on a depth of reflection and emotional tenor that overwhelmed us all.

Bill was kind enough to stay with us for an extra day, allowing us to incorporate the insights of his keynote into the series of all-conference plenaries we had planned. When ATHE gathered in Boston in 2018, Vice President for Conference Ann Shanahan, working closely with Monica White Ndounou and the rest of the 2018 Conference Committee, sparked an organization-wide conversation that aired members’ concerns about equity, diversity, and inclusion within our field. In looking back at those plenaries, the 2019 Conference Committee felt strongly that we should provide a space for those discussions to develop further. Asking some of last year...