I. Me, afraid again

If you are fortunate enough to not be an immigrant in the United States, you probably can’t relate to the insanity that it is getting a new visa approved while living here. Applying for it is a costly, anxiety-inducing process, but if you stay here, you’re fine. If you leave, though, you must go to a U.S. consulate and get that visa stamped in your passport—a separate costly, anxiety-inducing process I’ve written about at length. My many cycles in that merry-go-round were traumatic enough that, after my fourth visa (they expire quite frequently), I said “never again—green card or bust.” So, in 2023, I got one (which, granted, is still not as a “safe” as citizenship) and declared the struggle over: I was to never again feel fear living, working, or traveling as a resident of this country.

And yet… this past December, I went to Brazil to spend a month with my family, and as the date of my return approached, I felt myself dreading it. During my vacation, someone shared, in a group chat I am part of, news of the pause on immigrant visa processing for 75 countries:

President Trump has made clear that immigrants must be financially self-sufficient and not be a financial burden to Americans.  The Department of State is undergoing a full review of all screening and vetting policies to ensure that immigrants from high-risk countries do not unlawfully utilize welfare in the United States or become a public charge.

The list of “high-risk countries” included the one I was in. Would that impact my re-entry? My lawyer said no: I already have a green card and I’m not a Brazilian citizen (I was born in Argentina). The internet, on the other hand, said yes: tales of green card holders being detained abound. I am very public about my pro-immigration advocacy, so I felt particularly vulnerable. I put together a safety plan, letting two friends and my lawyer know where I was supposed to be at any given moment, and what to do if they didn’t hear from me. Most people—in both countries—kept telling me “nothing’s gonna happen.” I felt like I was being dramatic. I also felt like other people were not being dramatic enough.

My re-entry into the U.S. ended up being very smooth, though, and it now dawns on me that I had been worrying about the wrong thing: what I should have prepared for instead, perhaps, was how lonely I was going to feel upon my return.

II. Dalida, the unwilling exile

Back in Brazil, when I was freaking out at that group chat text, another country that caught my eye on the list of immigrant visa pauses was Egypt. One of my closest friends, Dalida, is Egyptian (Dalida is not her real name; like that of everyone else in this article, it has been changed for her safety) and has yet to secure her green card. This ordinance, as I understood it, meant she now couldn’t get one. I texted her: “How are you holding up?” Her answer came quickly: “I feel frozen and stuck.” I called her, and we ended up talking for a long time.

Dalida moved to the United States in 2013, fired up by the Egyptian Revolution: “We were seeing change in our country, and censorship was (slightly) not around, so I asked myself, ‘How can art play a role in that [change]?’ I was very adamant that I was gonna go study the craft of theater properly and then come back to contribute to the cultural and artistic revolution that was taking place.” She was accepted into multiple dramaturgy MFA programs in the U.S.; there was, in fact, a bidding war between two schools to see who could secure her. What for an American would be nothing but a source of pride, for her it turned into an anxiety spiral: up to the last minute, she did not know which school to choose, and her passport ended up with the stamp of the one that lost. She was afraid she was not going to be let in due to the mismatch and that she had ruined a very good thing. It ended up working out (the agent at the border was thankfully understanding)... but that was only the beginning of her visa woes.

After school, in 2017, she used her Optional Practical Training (the year of work authorization that international students get as part of their visa to complete their education) to work in one of the biggest theatrical organizations in the U.S., one that provides services to theaters all around the country. Early on, she received assurances from leadership that, once her student visa expired, they would sponsor her; she took them at their word, especially because the company was big on DEI (which at the time put them ahead of the curve) and had a whole department dedicated to international artists. For nine months, it was a great job.

Then, three months before her visa expired, Dalida got pulled into a room to speak with HR:

They’re like, “We’re not gonna be able to sponsor you. We retained a lawyer for two hundred dollars, and he told us this would be a liability—that if we ever need to terminate you within the next three years, we’re gonna have to fly you home.” And I say, “I don’t care, I can pay for [my own] ticket,” but they’re not having it. “No, sorry, this is just a business decision.” It gets heated, so I get pulled into the executive director‘s office—he took it really personally that I was unhappy. He’s said, “I don’t owe you anything,” and I try to explain, “You strung me along for nine months. I didn’t even get a chance to work on a portfolio for dramaturgy to be able to apply for a visa on my own.” And the HR lady pipes in, “I don’t know what the issue is. I thought you could just renew your visa.” I’m like, “Woman, we’ve been talking about this for nine months! What do you mean? Renew WHAT visa?” And they keep going back to how much they paid the lawyer for this opinion.

For what it’s worth: No, Dalida could not “just renew” her visa, as it was attached to her school program, from which she had graduated. The fact that they had felt comfortable operating on an unproven assumption about her status baffled her, considering the company’s stated values. In fact, Dalida’s reliance on said values proved to be the cruelest part of it all: despite her protests to the contrary, she was forced to attend a DEI retreat the week after she was told the news—and was forbidden from discussing her situation with colleagues. Immigration getting lost in DEI conversations is a complaint I’ve heard from multiple members of the community; it does not seem to register as an issue to Americans who would otherwise think of themselves as open-minded and compassionate.

As she left the company, Dalida wrote a letter to the whole staff explaining what had happened; while she can’t remember the exact wording, she does recall including a line that said something to the effect of: “I’ve learned from my colleagues that DEI should be woven into our day-to-day practice, and that there’s no such thing as a pure business decision that is not also a values decision—these things go hand in hand.” This earned her another visit to HR, where the manager, a “middle-aged white lady,” cried: “She said, ‘I feel that this line is an attack on me,’ and I said ‘Yeah, it is.’ She said she was hurt. And I’m like, ‘You fucked up my life, and you’re hurt? From a line in a letter?’”

Upon leaving the company, she met a producer who put her on a J1 visa as a “visiting artist” if she would work for him. The job was not good—“I was working 9am to 12am every day, often weekends, for $700 a month, putting up with tantrums by this old German man”—but it did give her a year to do what she had not been able to do before: putting together a portfolio of work to apply to the O1-B visa, also known as “Alien of Extraordinary Abilities in the Arts.” She got it approved in 2018, and this gave her freedom—not just from angry German men, but from visa sponsors altogether. She could now work for whomever she wanted (as long as it was in the theatrical field), without anyone holding her status over her head.

Her only fear was traveling home. She had not left the U.S. under this new visa yet, and there was always the risk that agents at the consulate would not stamp it on her passport. Lest that seem a far-fetched concern, I witnessed it personally when I worked at an Off-Broadway company: our PR rep, a lovely Irish woman, went to visit her family for the holidays and never came back, as the agents at the consulate deemed that her job was not aligned with what her visa said she did (being a writer) and refused to stamp it. A critic from the New York Times even wrote a letter intervening on her behalf, and it still did not change their mind—she lost her life in New York in the blink of an eye. I remember that scaring the shit out of me: what if someone objected to my day job the next time I went to get my visa stamped? Dalida’s concern was thankfully unwarranted; she took a chance and went to Cairo for a friend’s wedding in 2019, and it all turned out fine: “The lady at the consulate was so confused—she was like ‘you live there, you work there, what do you need from me?’ Even she thought the stamp process was crazy.”

In 2021, she renewed it; her career as a dramaturg continued to take off, as she created a festival for immigrant work, worked at a theater specializing in Middle Eastern theater, and started teaching at a big university. Then, in the summer of 2023, she came across a posting for the job of her dreams: Literary Manager at one of the U.S.’s most prestigious theaters. “I’m usually a person who looks at their cover letter no less than five times before applying,” she told me, “but for this one I didn’t, because I knew I wasn’t gonna get it—everyone told me I wasn’t gonna get it.” Then she got an interview. She was very open with the institution about her visa situation, as she did not want it to become an issue later, but they had no problem with it. During the interview process, however, her brother got married in Egypt. She wanted to attend the wedding, but she did not have her latest visa stamped. She tried to book an appointment at the U.S. consulate in Cairo, but the system kept crashing. She was afraid of going and then not being able to come back, because even if she got an appointment, there was no guarantee the agents would approve her visa—and now the dream job was at stake…

She ended up getting the job, but at the cost of attending the wedding online. This weighed heavily on her. It had by then been five years since she had been back to Egypt, which she still calls “home”—and I can tell she means it, because she uses the word without thinking, whereas I have to do a bunch of math before I pronounce it. Going back, for Dalida, meant endangering her life here; not only because of the visa hassles, but also because she started working on a big project about an Egyptian dissident. What if the Egyptian government decided to punish her? Having a green card felt like the only safe way to visit—a strong tie to America that would allow her to come back safely if things back home proved unfriendly. She found a lawyer, who considered her case to be very strong, and they submitted an application for the EB-1 (an “Alien of Extraordinary Abilities” green card, basically) in July 2024, very confident that her incredible trajectory in the field would earn her an approval.

It didn’t: the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services agency (USCIS) responded with a Request for Further Evidence, basically questioning Dalida’s professional credits and asking for more “proof” of her Extraordinary Abilities. She was not alone: since the Biden administration, USCIS has been overwhelmed with cases, and I started hearing from lawyers that cases submitted via Premium Processing (like Dalida’s) were getting reflexive RFEs; some suspected it was to buy them time to respond. That in itself would be incredibly unfair, since Premium Processing—which guarantees a response in 15 days (as opposed to the regular decision, which does not have a deadline and can stretch out for months or even years)—costs around $3K. But, to add insult to injury, Dalida’s lawyer noted that the response was nonsensical in multiple points, and he suspected it had been generated by Artificial Intelligence (USCIS does disclose that it uses AI in case reviews, but the extent of that use is unclear). I’ve also heard this complaint from more than one member of our community; the firm Reddy Neumann Brown PC even posted about both phenomena, noting: “It has become increasingly apparent that USCIS is relying more heavily on automated systems and artificial intelligence tools in adjudication… premium processing has increasingly become a fast track not to approval, but to 1) An immediate, poorly reasoned RFE, followed by 2) A swift denial that appears to ignore the RFE response entirely.”

This scenario was exactly what happened to Dalida—despite submitting a detailed response to the RFE, USCIS denied her case on the same grounds it had previously questioned it. Her lawyer did get her a third O-1 visa so she could stay in the country, but she was devastated. And then the immigration visa pause came. She panicked. Her lawyer eventually explained to her that while, yes, Egyptians are barred from seeking green cards for the moment, that would not apply to her, as she is in the U.S. already. But what chances does she have of getting the green card approved if she reapplies under the current administration? And what chances does she have of getting her current O-1 visa stamped at the consulate if she does travel home? Both things are technically possible, but now that Egypt is in the crosshairs of the U.S. government, the chances feel even lower.

She says she does not feel like the ordinance disrupted her life, but rather that her life “has been put on pause, and that pause is not ending.” The only way to end it would be to make a definitive choice between her life here and her life in Egypt—one that, now that she’s been away for almost seven years—may be happening purely due to inertia:

Every time I talk to my friends and family back home, I feel they’re in a world I don’t know, because I’m not in it. I always thought I’d have a wedding in Egypt, if I ever got married—but if I did that now, who would show up? I lost my grandmother while I wasn’t there, I lost my uncle, I don’t know who else I’m gonna lose… people are getting older. I have nephews I’ve never met, and they’re like six years old now. So if I chose home, I’d be choosing a place that’s practically unrecognizable to me now.

She feels like an exile, and not of her own volition. “Being an exile because of my political beliefs back home could have been a choice,” she says—but this is different. This feels like it happened to her. “I didn’t know that the last time I went home was going to be the last time.”

III. Sofía, from bridge to liability

After my talk with Dalida, I wondered if this issue—the impact of the government’s actions on immigrant artists—was getting any attention in the news… which, in retrospect, was not a query I should have pursued if I wanted to keep my spirits up. To my dismay, the national conversation about immigration still found a way to center Americans: anti-ICE protesters, celebrities, and politicians—all born here and holders of a U.S. passport—stood as acceptable proxies for us because of the stances they took about us. When non-Americans were mentioned, it was in the context of how international artists would not be able to perform here—a bad situation that mostly affects… Americans, it seems (the article I linked to literally ends with the quote “Why isolate the American people from this [cultural exchange]?”) I felt low-key crazy. Was I imagining a problem where there was none?

I emailed the members of the initiative I co-founded a couple of years ago, asking if anyone had stories to share, and that’s how I met Sofía. Sofía is a fellow South American, from Chile—though she grew up in the U.S. and was, for a time, a child actor at one of this country’s biggest regional theaters. But when she was twelve, her family returned to Chile, and she eventually lost her green card (which, in general, does not allow holders to spend more than a year outside of the country).

As an adult, she became a visual artist, focusing on recycling; she says her practice allowed her to travel through Latin America, doing exhibitions and building a “giant portfolio.” She eventually applied to an MFA in Set Design at a big school in New York, and got offered a full tuition fellowship, which she attributes to the fact that she “was older and had a big body of work.” So she came, on a student visa, in 2018—and graduated during the pandemic shutdown. She used her OPT time to volunteer, sewing hospital gowns, while investigating the possibility of staying on an O-1 visa. She figured it would be a challenge, since her work is multidisciplinary, and her history does not neatly fit together: she had a background in visual arts, a master’s in set design, and a year of volunteer work for hospital workers. Is there a visa for that?

Sofía found a lawyer who assured her the O-1 was the right fit for her… and then “scammed” her, submitting a case “full of screenshots of things that had nothing to do with me,” which got denied. She found another lawyer, an immigrant, who helped her out of the situation and got her case approved—but by then, she had lost a year. To her dismay, the people who had offered her work were upset at her over what happened:

When we first spoke, it was the middle of the pandemic, so all these Americans were saying, “Of course, it’s so difficult for immigrants right now, we have this project, we’ll include you.” But when I reached out to those same people to let them know my lawyer scammed me, they either didn’t respond or got mad at me, like “You should have this figured out by now.” It made me feel like shit. So when I went out to try and rebuild my network, I started from this inferior place—it was a big psychological toll, it really impacted my self-esteem.

It took two years, but by the end of 2024, she felt like she had finally gotten over that experience: she was working steadily, and one of the plays she worked on, in Philadelphia, was a big hit. She began to consider how, in her own words, she could “act as a bridge” between her two countries; she saw American productions touring Chile but not leaving behind any know-how, and she wanted its theater industry to become more professional (“set design,” she points out, “does not exist as a career in Chile.”) As her O-1 neared expiration, she talked to her lawyer about moving on to a green card—but, due to the result of the latest presidential election, her attorney recommended she choose the safest path and just renew the work visa, so that the riskier green card case would not be the thing that determined whether she could stay in the U.S.

She went to Chile for the holidays in December 2024, then stayed on to work on a project through early 2025. In March, she got news from her lawyer that her O-1 renewal was approved. Sofía, unlike Dalida or me, did not have to appear for an interview at the consulate to get her passport stamped with the new visa: U.S. visa applicants in Chile could often do what was called a “drop box,” mailing in their passports to get them back with the stamp. According to Sofía, the U.S. consulate’s website said she was eligible for it, so she sent everything in April; it arrived at the consulate on a Friday… and a rejection was issued next Monday. The consulate was refusing to stamp her passport because they wanted her to do an in-person interview (a new process that has since then become standard).

It was a very uncertain, confusing time in Chile, Sofía told me: the news was full of Chileans whose visas were revoked just as they were about to board flights to the U.S. She figured something similar was up with her case, so she trained for the interview with her lawyer and took all the documents she was asked to—but it didn’t end up mattering:

I come in, and there’s this bald, big white man, and he’s like, “So who do you think you are? Some kind of important artist?” He’s trying to intimidate me, get me confused. He brought up that I lived in the U.S. as a kid, asking, “Why did you lose your green card?” That had nothing to do with my visa petition! Then he goes, “So, what kind of achievements do you think you have?”, and I start listing them, but he stops me: “I don’t really care.” He asks me who I live with, and I say my boyfriend in New York, so he asks, “Where would you call home?” And I’m trying to explain, “Well, I have an apartment in New York and my family’s in Chile, and I have a property in Chile…” He ends the interview. I ask how long it would take to get an answer, but he just says, “Don’t count on ever coming back to the U.S.”

In spite of that answer, the consulate still retained her passport for 30 days—and then returned it without a stamp. The official response was that her application had been refused because of “immigrant intent,” which the government defines as failure to demonstrate “that you have strong ties to your home country that will compel you to leave the United States at the end of your temporary stay.” O-1 visas, however, are part of what’s known as “dual intent” visas—the duo being whatever the purpose of the visa is (tourism, work, study, etcetera) and to live here. While an applicant for an O-1 does have to show they intend to leave the U.S. at the end of their visa term, they shouldn’t be penalized for changing their minds… key word being “shouldn’t,” because like so many other parts of this system, it’s open to consular discretion.

Sofia and her lawyer immediately set about fighting it. It was a really hard time for her; she tears up talking about it: “I had a nervous breakdown. Between the weight of what happened with the [lawyer who scammed her], then this… I went blank for five months. I was like ‘I’m nothing.’ The whole thing was so violent.” It’s a particular feature of achievement-based visas that they can cut to the core like that; I myself remember, when a lawyer told me I wasn’t ready for the green card, feeling like she was basically saying, “All you’ve done is not enough.” Bureaucracy and legality can turn into personal indictments of one’s career. Sofía moved to her family’s house and focused on her physical and mental health—not just for survival, but because there was nothing else she could do: “By then, I’d lost all the projects I had scheduled in the U.S. for that year.”

She monitored the news throughout 2025. By November, it felt like the situation with the denials had calmed down, so—hoping this spelled good news for her own case—she went back to the consulate. Upon reviewing her case, Sofía says the agent who was interviewing her turned off the mic and turned around; she could hear her saying, “Another one of [the previous agent’s name]’s people.” Sofía assumed this meant the man who had interviewed her last time had built a reputation for treating applicants unfairly. The agent basically confirmed as much, telling Sofía that her petition had been denied for an invalid reason, but that the consulate was not able to reverse it at this moment, since the previous agent had also sent a notice to USCIS to say that Sofía was ineligible and that her O-1 approval should be revoked at their level. The consulate needed to deal with that first before they could re-evaluate Sofía’s case.

She’s yet to hear from them.

Sofía’s living out Dalida’s nightmare: an approved case in the U.S., but no visa stamp after visiting home. She’s lost a year already of the three-year visa she spent thousands of dollars and hours getting, and she feels, in her own words, “ripped off,” because she “sacrificed a lot doing things correctly.” She keeps getting job offers for plays she designed that are having new productions, opportunities that could really help her career, and she can’t take them.

Looking back to when she graduated from her MFA program, Sofía is questioning the narratives she was given: “You get told: this is the path—assist so and so, network, create work, and eventually you’ll make it. But I can’t follow that path; every time I’ve tried, it’s gotten stumped on or cut off. And when I talk to Americans about it, they go, ‘I’m sorry that happened, the U.S. sucks!’ But you don’t fit into their path anymore, so you are looked at as a liability.”

IV. Frank, his dream deferred

The story that took this article from something I was interested in writing to something I knew I had to write was Frank’s. In fact, I received news of his situation while I was still in Brazil, only a few days after that group chat incident: he wrote to tell me that he was not going to be able to come to the U.S. after all.

I first met Frank two years ago, when a colleague attended an international playwrights conference in Harare, Zimbabwe, and fell in love with his play. She sent it to me, wondering if I’d be open to spreading the word about Frank’s work in New York; I asked her to introduce us, and we had our first video call, six time zones apart. Frank is somewhat shy, and his answers to my questions were all short and to the point; I left that call unsure of whether this was someone I could work with. But then, in his follow-up email, he displayed a sensitivity that surprised me—and thus started a beautiful 21st-century pen palship, in which we traded plays and feedback with an intimacy almost unwarranted for two strangers separated by an ocean.

At the time of that first call, in 2024, Frank was still juggling his career as a human rights lawyer with a nascent passion for playwriting; it was his sister who pushed him to submit something to the playwrights conference—which, in his case, also meant writing it, because he had never penned a script before. To his surprise, the festival liked the play, so he spent two weeks—as he called it—“being grilled dramaturgically.” The process of writing that script, then hearing it out loud in front of an audience, was “life-changing” for him: from that point on, he knew that’s what he wanted to do, so he quit his job.

But theater is not an established industry in Harare, so there wasn’t a clear path to follow after taking that step; thus, from our earliest conversations, Frank expressed to me a desire to move to the U.S. I saw a lot of myself in him, which is why I pushed back a bit, making sure he (unlike me, when I was in his shoes) knew what he was getting into. But (also like me when I was in his shoes), he remained firm that this was the place for him. With the help of the festival, he applied to several grad school programs, and in early 2025, he was admitted—with a full scholarship—to the one I myself moved to this country for. His story brought me hope: it was my own, with some details changed, but with the same optimism that fueled so much of my journey—an optimism I sometimes miss after ten years of jaded experiences.

But, as it turns out, he would become jaded much earlier on.

After getting admitted to a U.S. school, international students must secure a visa, which often involves proving that they can pay for all expenses throughout the duration of the program without having to work. Frank not only had the full ride, but the playwright’s conference in Harare generously offered to take care of his living expenses, so he had a strong case; those of us rooting for him were confident he’d have no issues. But we did not foresee that a much simpler problem could arise: the U.S. consulate assigned him an interview date that was after the start of his program. Frank tried to negotiate with both entities, but neither would budge: the consulate rejected his application for an expedited appointment, citing “policy,” and the school would not allow him to start later than the rest of his cohort—they advised him to defer his acceptance to the following year. Eventually, he deferred, planning to go through with the original interview and secure his visa for next year with time to spare.

But in August 2025 (when most of his would-be colleagues were settling in New York to start their MFA journey), a second roadblock appeared: the U.S. Embassy in Zimbabwe stopped issuing most visas. The reason is quite vague; according to their website,

The Department of State is committed to ensuring that its visa process upholds the highest standards for U.S. national security and public safety.  We are currently reviewing and evaluating existing screening and vetting procedures worldwide.

Zimbabwean applicants like Frank were directed to a consulate in South Africa—which Frank describes as a “deterrent,” because he had to pay for transport to, and accommodation in, a place where he has no relatives or acquaintances. And most alarming: “You have no idea when they’ll give you your passport back, and you can’t cross back to Zimbabwe without your passport.” Basically: if he went through with it, he would be potentially trapped in South Africa until a decision was reached—and potentially waste the money that went into consulate fees, travel, and lodging should his visa get denied. But again, the playwright conference came to his aid, buying his plane ticket to Johannesburg and booking him a hotel.

Then, in January 2026, a little under two months before Frank’s visa interview, another roadblock came along—one that was seemingly uncrossable: the U.S. partially suspended visas (including student ones) for Zimbabweans as part of a larger “travel ban” for 39 countries that sought to “protect our nation and its citizens by using rigorous, security-focused screening and vetting procedures to ensure that individuals approved for a visa do not endanger national security or public safety.”

That’s when Frank emailed me:

Hi Francisco,

How are you doing? Happy new year!

I just wanted to check in and ask how you’re doing since it’s been a while. How’s work and the writing and everything? Are you working on anything exciting these days?

I’m doing well on this side, considering. I’m sure you’ve heard about the recent Trump decrees partially suspending visas for Zimbabwe and other countries. It looks like my chances of coming there are much slimmer now, but I’m still going to go to the visa interview, just in case there’s a glitch in the system or something.

I hope you’re having a good new year so far,

Frank

The email is classic Frank: If I were him, I’d write something filled with cusswords at this country and all who have anything to do with it—but instead, he asks about my work and roots for glitches in the system. His optimism seemed unshakeable; even when I spoke to him for this article, closer to his interview date, he maintained that he’d go through with it because it was not a guaranteed no (which he was correct about—the government’s language is vague enough to allow for some doubt). He called it “a roll of the dice.”

I pressed him: How did he feel throughout the whole thing? He couldn’t be happy about it! He opened up, the only time I’ve ever heard him express a negative feeling in the whole time I’ve known him:

Yeah… It’s very discouraging. Because the whole thing feels malicious, like there’s a real agenda against Zimbabweans, [or] Africans in general. You can’t help but feel like someone definitely doesn’t want you [in the U.S.], like all the legalese is trying to cover up a policy that says “we don’t really want you here.” I mean, the first time [when the dates did not line up], I got really depressed because I was really looking forward to it. And then [when the travel ban went into effect], I was like, “I should have expected this.” It’s just a steady rate of disappointment.

That feeling, “I should have expected this,” is one I’ve heard from other immigrants and have felt myself. It’s part of the madness of the immigration game: the rules are incredibly confusing and often arbitrary, but it can still feel like it’s my fault when things don’t go my way. “I should have known better,” I catch myself thinking. “Who am I to dream this high? Who am I to say I deserve to go to this school or to work at this institution or to live in this country?” It broke my heart to hear Frank express something like that so early in his journey. But maybe it doesn’t bother him as much as it does me. “I think that’s the first mistake I made the first time around: everything stops, and I’m waiting for this,” he tells me, referring to his first shot at getting the student visa. “But then I realized: time is still moving. I’ll be [in Harare], even if I do end up moving, for half a year at least. I can do things here, and then, if things go well, I may even choose not to go.” And things are going well; he’s developing a new play, and looking forward to a full production of his first script (the one he wrote in a rush to meet the conference deadline) this coming October. “If I don’t go there, I have plenty to look forward to here.”

I envy him for that. I threw my lot in with this place, and while I can and will change course if needed, knowing when to do so is a tricky part. Like Dalida, I’ve put a lot into my life here, and it feels almost impossible to give it up. It’s hard not to look at the state of this country and think: What have I done?

V. Vakil, fighting for exceptions

Being an immigrant in the United States sometimes feels like it should entitle one to an honorary law degree: I know so much about specific visa types, the process of applying for them, and the rights and responsibilities each of them entails, that I constantly have to pause when talking about the subject to repeat “I am not a lawyer,” because I unwittingly sound like one. My friend Vakil, an immigration lawyer—both in the sense that he is an immigrant and learned it all in the flesh, but also in the sense that he went to law school and passed the bar—taught me to sound even more like one: he said I should answer any question with “it depends.”

This is true of any law, he says, but especially of immigration law: “the hardest kind, even more so than tax law.” I’ve often been frustrated by this very thing when dealing with attorneys—the way they won’t commit to a single answer, but rather keep asking questions and withholding a verdict. And yet, they’re only playing by the rules of an arena where there simply is no objective answer. Vakil knows this intimately. An Iranian emigré, he navigated the visa path all the way to citizenship, and has dedicated himself to helping his family join him—I’ve met some of them, including his mom, sister, and niece (who is a very cute child). His dad, though, is still in Iran. The petition that Vakil submitted on his behalf was approved, but the case moved to processing at the National Visa Center, where it remained for two years in limbo—or, rather, “administrative processing,” which the Department of State defines as situations in which the consular officer determines that “additional information from sources other than the applicant may help establish an applicant’s eligibility for a visa.” As Vakil explained to me, this “can lead to very long delays, sometimes extending for years.”

After Vakil’s niece was born, the family attempted to get her grandpa a tourist visa, “trying our luck to see whether he could come for a short visit and meet her while we were still stuck waiting through the long immigrant-visa process.” It was denied for lack of ties to the home country—“both of his children are in the U.S., and he is retired,” Vakil told me, which marked his father as a high risk for immigration to the U.S. Then, last year, they succeeded in getting an interview scheduled for his green card. The case had a slim chance of success, since the proclamation that affected Frank (the so-called “travel ban”) also applied to Vakil’s father—though Vakil told me there was a possible way through: “[the travel ban] contained an exception for immigrant visas for ethnic and religious minorities facing persecution in Iran.” Because Vakil’s father is Azeri, he could be approved under that exception.

But when I got the news of the immigrant visa pause, which also included Iran, in January, I texted Vakil—and the situation was getting to him: “At this point, it is unclear whether the interview will proceed at all, and if it does, whether a waiver request would be accepted, and even then, whether a visa would actually be issued. Combined with what is unfolding in Iran, this has been psychologically draining. These are hard days.” The interview did proceed, and Vakil attended it with his father (in Turkey, it’s worth noting, as there is no consulate in Iran), but to no avail: while the ethnic minority exception was accepted, “the officer’s position was that no visa could be issued unless both [Vaki’s father’s] administrative processing cleared and the 75-country immigrant-visa pause was lifted.” The case remains in limbo.

I felt bad asking him to help me with this article, considering all he’s going through. But I knew I had to speak to him—not just because my honorary law degree is insufficient to provide the factual outlook this story needs, but because I was also hoping that, if I asked “Should we all just give up and leave?”, he’d answer with an “it depends” that would give me hope. And much like he did with in father’s case, he said we can’t discount exceptions:

In practice, the reason behind a ban or proclamation matters a great deal, because that is what tells you where the pressure points are and whether there is any room to push for an exception. So when the stated rationale is national security, or terrorist affiliation, or some other broad language of suspicion, we have to respond on those terms. We now include entire sections in briefs and RFE responses laying out the person’s background, their history in the United States, the fact that they were already vetted when they first received a visa, the fact that they have maintained status, worked lawfully, paid taxes, built a life, and given the government no reason to doubt who they are. We used to submit only what was necessary to establish the underlying petition. Now we submit much more, because the case is no longer just about eligibility. It has also become about disproving suspicion.

I push him: does this work? All this labor to fight rules that, as Frank says, feel almost like smokescreens for a much simpler “we don’t want you here?” Vakil told me that he has, in fact, secured waivers—but he admits that the number is “so low—maybe a few cases out of a thousand that would have traditionally been processed and approved.” More importantly, he says the ordinances work not just by outright denying or suspending petitions, but by making the process even harder and more expensive: “No lawyer would do the additional work that is to track your whole background and come up with good arguments for free” (he estimates it would inflate legal fees, which usually hover in the $5-15K per case, by an extra $2-3K). “So yeah,” he concludes, “the deterrent part is working well.”

I ask him how his clientele, which is substantially made up of artists, is holding up—and his response makes me think of Dalida, Sofía, Frank, and so many other people I know:

What I see is more frustration, more costs, and more missed opportunities. I have had multiple O-1 cases where the petitioner was very supportive and genuinely wanted to hire the artist, but the process dragged on for over a year, and at some point they had to make a practical decision. So the artist ends up hearing: “we support you, we want this to work, but we need to fill the role, and your opportunity is gone.” I have had clients tell me: “I don’t know what to do anymore. I have no job, no income, and the one opportunity that gave me hope is now gone.” That takes a serious psychological toll; in some cases, I would call it depression. The damage is not only financial. It is also emotional, because after doing everything the right way, they start to feel the system is asking them to disappear quietly. And still, many of them are not leaving. People say, “go back to your country,” but for many that is not a real option—going back would often mean returning to a life far worse than the one they are struggling through here, a life under a regime that brutally suppresses artistic freedom and offers little realistic hope of financial stability. So they are left in this terrible in-between state: they cannot build stability here, but they cannot safely or realistically return either. The system does not just block people. It leaves them stranded.

VI. The final petition

At the end of each conversation, I asked each person what they needed, especially considering that the readership for this article is bound to be majority Americans. A theme emerged in all of their answers—one that makes a lot of sense to me: I’ve noticed after many, many, MANY conversations about this issue that Americans tend to be most comfortable discussing immigration through a political lens (an issue that appeals to, or turns off, voters), an economic one (immigrants as force that bolsters, or depresses, the economy), or (the most common in liberal circles) a cultural one—a matter of language, tradition, or ancestry. What Americans don’t feel comfortable talking about is immigration as a legal reality: that in this country, our ability to live, work, actively participate in society, or be safe from discrimination is conditionally granted to us based on our immigration status—or, as the current administration often puts it, that for us these are “privileges, not rights.”

This also means that whatever innate rights the law does grant us are not always respected; when most Americans see the violence coming through their screens, they see an abusive, xenophobic administration, whereas we see the almost inevitable result of a system that has been oppressing us for decades. The quiet part’s being said out loud. This makes Americans uncomfortable, I think, because it doesn’t change according to their personal beliefs, the city they live in, or the good deeds they might perform personally: it is the law of the land. “This isn’t my country,” I’ve heard several people say when confronted with the horrific news—but it is your country, as Sofía put it:

I had a childhood in the US. You were taught at school that your square foot was your area: “Hey Tommy, this is Sofía’s square foot, don’t make her uncomfortable.” And helping is not just donating. It’s putting yourself in an uncomfortable position, having empathy with the guy next door: “That’s your square foot. I don’t want my square foot to be like that. I’ll send you money from here,” you know? “But to really feel what you’re going through and to comprehend how that will play out for you as a human... no.”

The people who have consistently reached out to help me are all foreigners. My American friends, they don’t know what to say. They don’t have the emotional tools to actually show up. They prefer to detach. And I think Trump is… he’s like a puppet that’s just showing the U.S. what they really are.

It can, in fact, feel like Americans actively resist learning more—because learning more would lead to taking actions that, as Vakil put it, are too much trouble:

Most employers in the U.S. don’t want the headache. They just want to show their support through a post or a statement, but are much less willing to step into the actual difficulty of the situation. I would say the most important thing is for them to connect with these individuals on a human level, and stand behind them in a concrete way. Especially when it comes to waiver cases, it definitely would make an impact to have a letter from a well-known organization attesting in detail on somebody’s character, sort of sponsoring them in a way: “We know this person, we trust this person, and we vouch for them.” That kind of support means far more than abstract expressions of solidarity.

Dalida, who experienced this same unwillingness at a company that supposedly practiced its values in all its operations, reminded me that it feels particularly cruel precisely because we are trying to do things “the right way:”

I definitely want more understanding of what it takes to even go down the legal path of immigration—by those who hire, by those who speak to social justice, by those who tell our stories—and to understand the cost, and the toll it takes on us. The danger is so immediate right now for the ones who are undocumented that, of course, people are focusing their attention on them—but there needs to be an understanding of what leads folks [to become undocumented].

Talking to each of them, I heard them put into words things I myself have felt but never expressed in that particular way. In some ways, by naming the lonelines America has caused me, they were making me feel less alone. But then I checked in with Frank before publishing this article, and he told me he had gone through with the interview, and his visa was denied. No MFA for him, no theater career in the United States. I won’t get to meet him in person any time soon, and that hurts.

Then he told me a story that reminded me of something vital:

Last night, I was invited by a friend to an American embassy event that was about celebrating 250 years of American independence through Zimbabwean art, part of the Freedom 250 events. It was the first time I felt myself actually getting pissed about the whole thing: the hypocrisy, the way Americans are still allowed to come here anytime they want, enjoy our culture and art, use it to celebrate their own history (there were literally a few paintings of the Founding Fathers), and yet they won’t allow any of us to go there. It really felt a lot like imperialism, ironically… I’m getting a clearer picture of what America is and what it’s about, and I’m becoming increasingly sure that that’s not the kind of place I want to be at, at least not right now. So, to me, at this point, that visa denial is not really a bad thing.

He’s absolutely right: It’s the United States that entered our own square feet first. In Argentina, checking the peso-dollar exchange rate every day is more important than checking the weather. I grew up surrounded by American culture, imposed on me to the detriment of my own; it is undoubtedly the reason I am here. This country entered my square foot from the moment I was born, without permission or even a warning—it is why I was so hurt at the rude awakening of the past ten years, which has done so much to erode those dreams sold to me by Hollywood and Broadway. There was, and never has been, any reciprocity. It’s been “America First” all the way.

So I’ll end on a warning I’ve made before to my readers, describing the “American nightmare:”

America’s biggest threat may not be outsiders coming in and taking up space, but outsiders not caring about it, not even trying to come in because they don’t dream about this country anymore. In the nightmare, Americans will have no one to watch their movies and TV shows because their own companies will have decided it’s more lucrative to produce content in, and for, other markets; no one will buy their products because tariffs will have made them too expensive; no one will develop their technology because the brains that would do so will stay in their own countries, afraid to come here and be mistreated. If that day comes when America is no longer number one in our minds, a rude awakening awaits its citizens, now sufferers of the nightmares that we’ll be finally rid of.

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The following transcript has been slightly abridged and edited for clarity; Substack auto-generates its own, which you can turn while listening, but I can’t guarantee its accuracy.

Francisco Mendoza: Hello, and welcome to Downtown Chats, the companion podcast to The Downtown Beat, where I interview fellow artists on the business and craft of making art downtown. I am your host, Francisco Mendoza, and with me today is a great friend of mine, Hope Chávez. Hope, I don’t believe in reading bios while people sit by awkwardly, so do you want to introduce yourself?

Hope Chávez: I hate it too, so my pleasure. The highlights are: born and raised in Texas, went to New York at 18, worked primarily in theater and a little bit of arts admin as well, at ART/New York. I did a lot of independent producing, working with Off-Broadway theaters, things like that. The producing side and the admin management side were always my calling. I went to Connecticut (the first time) to work at Long Wharf, then went to Oregon Shakespeare Festival after that to be an associate producer, and now I am the executive director at the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, which is a service organization for all forms of art, not just theater. And I have two cat children… and that’s where I’ll end the bio.

Francisco: So, the question I ask all the guests—and by “all the guests,” I mean the one I’ve interviewed before and you; when I was a kid, my sister and I had a rule that “two is all,” so if something has happened twice, it’s happened every time. So, the question I ask all the guests is: what makes you a downtown artist?

Hope: I have all of the wiring to do things the hard way; the cheap, hustly, call-in-a-million-favors, pull-it-all-together-in-a-hurry-if-you-have-to, and work-against-much-larger-systems-of-resources way. That is my default modality; in fact, it’s very strange for me to be in well-resourced environments. I think that’s what makes me downtown.

Francisco: In other words, the scarcity. The scarcity makes you downtown.

Hope: Oh yeah, trauma!

Francisco: I want to start with approaching the craft as a producer: When you got involved with theater, was that your approach from the beginning? You wanted to be a producer?

Hope: I was a kid when I got introduced to theater, and it was through community theater productions… I’ll just put a little asterisk here: I was raised in a cult, which is to say that theater was a really important space of community for me. But all I knew was acting. I conceptually understood there were directors and stage managers and designers, but I had no idea what that meant at the professional level. Then, when I came to New York, I had a really incredible professor who saw me very clearly; first semester, she took me to Starbucks and said, “Hey, is acting really what you want to do?”—which was her very loving way of saying, “You’re not particularly good at it.” And I also didn’t want to do it, so when she said, “I wonder if you know what producing is,” and then told me about it, introduced me to people, and used her small nonprofit theater company as a vehicle for mentoring me and giving me my first producing jobs... I was pretty hooked. What I did know at that age was that I enjoyed helping people make theater more than I enjoyed being the theater. And I definitely didn’t want to have the life of an actor.

Francisco: Do you feel that realization has carried through for the rest of your bio?

Hope: Yes. Supporting the artists and the art-making and the process of art has become my love.

Francisco: However, the reason I wanted to have you on the podcast is that, as long as I have known you, that priority has lived side-by-side with a larger one, which is project-agnostic, having to do with—and I’m going to use a gigantic term here—the betterment of society, or the correction of historical wrongs. Would you say that has always been true? And if not, when did that social bent become part of your practice?

Hope: It was not something I always thought about explicitly. When I was growing up, I did struggle against different kinds of power, but I did not understand that there was analysis, language, strategy, or such a thing as fighting against it... I didn’t understand any of that because I was raised in a pretty tight bubble. But moving to New York at the ripe age of 18 and staying there for almost a decade, I had a very accelerated development into the person I am today. I can remember, during my second year of college at the very conservative college that I went to, hearing the definition of feminism for the first time. And I’m not kidding: I had never heard an actual definition for it. I had pictures in my head of what feminists were, but I didn’t know what it meant. [The professor] was describing it to break it down and critique it and, obviously, train us against it—in a different idea of femininity and masculinity and family values and things like that—but, to their credit, they gave a pretty robust presentation of how a more progressive person would define feminism. And when I heard “the equality of the sexes,” I felt bamboozled my whole life. I was like, “Oh, that seems like a very reasonable thing to want. I, too, would like equality for the sexes.”

Francisco: The fact, though, that the movement is not called “gender equality” but “feminism” points to an existing imbalance. That, I think, is a concept that really tilted societally to some degree around 2016/2017, with the rise of the MeToo movement, because it made explicit through, let’s call it “empirical evidence,” that there is an imbalance: “Look, here is how you quantify it.” Obviously, that’s far from the first moment feminism was discussed publicly, but it was a moment in which it seemed harder to push back and say things [were balanced before]. So, why don’t you tell me a little bit about your history with that movement? How did that hit you? How did that become a part of your practice?

Hope: So, at the time MeToo launched—the presidential campaign and the tapes and everything that was coming out... I can’t remember, was Harvey [Weinstein] at the same time or after?

Francisco: Harvey was actually a little bit before, if I’m not mistaken. [NOTE: I was mistaken, it was after.]

Hope: Yeah. So, all of that is happening when I’m very much an independent theater producer, not working inside of a theater institution or an art institution on a full-time basis. But then, in 2017, I move to work at ART/New York, which is a service organization doing advocacy and grant-making and professional development. And when I started there, the leadership at the time—the deputy director, the director of programs—were really well relationally connected and very at the forefront of some of this work. And around this time is when you get the Long Wharf story; the artistic director, Gordon Edelstein, was accused of some pretty terrible… not just sexual harassment, but I would categorize some of that as sexual assault. He was subsequently fired, and there was a big New York Times article. And then, I think at The Public, there was a story about transness, and I think—I’m probably going to get this imprecise—but I think they didn’t use trans actors for some of it, and there were allegations of there being a form of sexual harassment in the terminology being used internally at the organization and its understanding of gender and gender equity. So there started to be more theater stories.

So ART/New York says, “We’re gonna go get a bunch of money and do something about this.” We created the first sexual harassment prevention training program specific to theater in the country that I am aware of, and we hosted those trainings for all sorts of folks in New York theater. We created an ombudsman program, which took individuals who were trained to work in tandem with intimacy directors and the creative teams for shows; they were employed by ART/New York to help disrupt power dynamics, and they were literally there to receive people’s concerns anonymously and do whatever the person in that situation wanted to do—hold on to that information, help advocate with them within the institutional power, etcetera. And the final piece was some micro-grants for intimacy directors on shows.

Francisco: So, you mentioned that you entered into a team that was sort of well-versed [on these issues]. Were they the source of your knowledge as you started to work on and implement these initiatives?

Hope: That was not the only source at all. In fact, I commend them—probably because they had done work in organizing and justice spaces, they knew better than that. So, they immediately made it accessible for me; this is an incredible gift, I talk about it all the time because I want people to know that they also can ask for this. They gave me a ton of professional development: I did the New York Peace Institute’s mediation training, a restorative justice intensive with Columbia’s School of Social Work, artEquity facilitator training… I was sent to convenings and trainings all designed around how to facilitate and hold space—where my role was to basically just help everyone else get their good ideas out and work together—and also aimed at harm reduction and repair from different angles.

Francisco: How aware are you, in this sort of 2016 climate, of a systemic issue that is leading to these situations versus “there are bad apples that need to be weeded out”?

Hope: I think at this point, I was operating mainly from places of my lived experience and that of people close to me; I didn’t have a ton of language around systemic stuff. Meaning: I am a survivor, and I had only recently kind of come to terms with that sort of language; I had a lot of anger with specific men in my life, and was beginning to understand all of that better. The election of 2016 was incredibly emotional for me; I was—right before I went to ART/New York—working in a fintech firm as my day job, and it was a pretty toxic male work environment. But I think I was becoming radicalized around that time, in a sense, because I had a lot of strong instincts even from childhood about (and this language I would use now) butting up against systems of power and institutions that sought to silence those who were less powerful. I had a lot of empathy in general, my whole life, for people who were vulnerable in that way. But coming to ART/New York and working on these programs was when I think I got much more immersed in… let’s call it the slightly more academic, or pedagogical, side of understanding the systemic parts of racism, sexism, classism—all of the isms.

Francisco: As we move forward in time, 2018, 2019, the conversation of race starts entering the picture. Not that it wasn’t there before, but... it is the first time I heard the term “anti-racism,” let alone what it meant to apply it. Was that a similar journey for you as well?

Hope: Yes, I don’t think I heard the term anti-racism as such prior to its zeitgeist in the American theater. We had a DEI cohort program-

Francisco: Define [that term], just for the readers who have been living under rocks for such a long time.

Hope: If anyone at this point doesn’t know that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion stands for... wait, did I just do that backwards? DEI stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. [laughs] Although we added a “J” to it at ART/New York: We were going, “Is it EDI or DEI?” and then it was, “Is it DEIA or EDIA?” because “A” for “Accessibility…” And then we heard one of our facilitators say she liked to do “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice,” and we went, “That’s the one. We’re about Justice around here.” So, we start doing that work, and now I’m immersed in it. I’m also self-educating at this point; Emergent Strategy and White Fragility came across my desk around 2017.

Francisco: Emergent Strategy is a book...

Hope: By adrienne maree brown about how we build more sustainable strategies for anything, really: organizing, leading nonprofits, community work…

Francisco: Is race a significant part of it?

Hope: Absolutely. She’s a mixed-race Black woman; she talks about class, race, gender—but she doesn’t talk about it on its nose. It’s not a book about race, it’s just a book where an analysis of how someone’s identity and lived experience and geography and all these things play into how we build sustainable movements and make change.

And White Fragility is a book by Robin DiAngelo that’s explicitly about race and the fragility of white folks in that work. It’s very much written for white people to do kind of a 101 on racism in America and the ways in which they enable it and how to take accountability for it.

Francisco: If before, you couldn’t necessarily apply a system-level analysis, the literature that you’ve mentioned does lean more towards the perspective that the system is inherently racist and will perpetuate racism if allowed to continue. It becomes less (in my vision and the way that I understood it at the time) about prevention, and becomes instead about transformation, because it’s useless to just wait for the next bad apple: we are in a rotten apple bushel, and we need to change the container—not just the people inside of it. Did that evolution take place in your own thinking as well, and your own practice?

Hope: Not consciously. But it was the water I was swimming in for... I mean, I guess I’m still swimming in it, but it felt like I jumped into that stream around 2015/2016, and the currents just got stronger. And so I may not have had that kind of logical “from here to a systems analysis,” “from prevention towards transformation”... in fact, if anything, I think transformation felt clear to me very early. I just didn’t always know my place in it, I didn’t always have my own analysis around it: What can I do? What should we do? What’s better, what’s worse?

Read more

As you might have noticed from the gap in articles, I was away recently—not just from my desk, but also from the city. In October, I went upstate on an artistic retreat with some friends to write, hike, and gossip engage in discussions about art over home-cooked dinners for a week (and, also at one point, get lost in the forest in what threatened to become a Blair Witch situation except with working phones). Then, in early November, I went to Connecticut for yet another retreat—this time with my church, for five days, during which I was completely silent and sans devices, focused on praying, meditating, reading, and receiving the sacraments. Lots of time to think.

One of the things I thought about was this publication, which I’m still discovering. “Discovering” may make it sound like I’m not in charge of it—what I mean is that I am listening, both to people giving feedback about the content I’ve posted so far and to myself, as I figure out what I see as its role and what I enjoy doing for it. For example, the monthly listing: I was somewhat disappointed to see almost every single play I featured on my Fall preview show up in Nothing For The Group. Not because of any competitive spirit (who am I to compete with Lauren’s years of experience and—more important— street cred?), but because the point was to highlight things people might miss; if someone else is doing a good job at it, why repeat it? The way I see it, in a healthy media ecosystem, there is no competition (or at least not primarily), but rather complementarity. So what am I adding to the cultural coverage ecosystem with The Downtown Beat? What is its unique role?

I am not the only one asking these questions; the field at large was rocked this summer by a wave of firings and reassignments that did away with, or substantially changed, the cultural criticism desks at several legacy media organizations—and, in the spirit of not repeating, I will offload the responsibility of telling you all the facts to Charlotte Klein, who wrote a comprehensive and well-sourced article for New York Magazine on this topic, “Do Media Organizations Even Want Cultural Criticism?” (In fact, my Fall Preview was supposed to have two Uptown Gossip items, and one of them had to do with the changes at the New York Times and how it’s been impacting the review-hungry marketing departments of Off-Broadway theaters, but my two sources backed out—which compels me to repeat: you CAN gossip around me, I will not publish anything that you don’t explicitly consent to).

There was an uproar from… mostly other critics, who were very upset at seeing their jobs being treated with such carelessness. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody wrote a whole defense of the review as format and, by extension, of the reviewer as profession. He made some excellent points, such as that when it comes to arts journalism, most coverage (interviews, profiles) “should be rightly understood as part of a marketing plan,” being as it is prompted by the project’s or artists’ publicists; the only person who’s not invested in the commercial success of the work is the reviewer, something that allows their work to act as “a consumer guide, an intrinsic variety of service journalism.” Over at The Atlantic, Spencer Kornhaber expressed a similar understanding of the profession and diagnosed the problem in economic terms (quotation abridged):

Demand for cultural commentary seems as high as it’s ever been. TikTok, Instagram, Substack, Letterboxd, and podcast apps teem with analyses of movies, books, Labubus—any cultural artifact you can think of. The very platforms that are stealing eyes away from newspapers and magazines have created a new class of self-styled critics. With this transition, the definition of the profession is in flux. The credibility of traditional reviewers came from expertise, experience, and the imprimatur of trusted publications. Today, more and more critics pay their own bills, build their own followings, and invent their own rules. For better and for worse, the adage “Everyone’s a critic” no longer seems like an exaggeration.

So: you have the facts from New York Magazine (legacy media institutions are shedding cultural critics), the analysis from The New Yorker (the review plays a crucial role in the art form, and we will miss it), and the diagnosis from The Atlantic (this role is being taken on by freelancers/influencers). I will therefore not belabor any of these points, but offer instead a completely different take on the situation: In the mid-2020s arts ecosystem, we have no use for critics—because there is nothing (or barely anything) for them to do.

That’s a big statement, of course, so let me break it down a bit. First: on the necessity of critics. There are many lenses through which one can frame the job of a critic and the role of a review. In my own circle of friends, I’ve heard folks say it’s an active way to engage with a piece and the art form in general (think of a positive review that bolsters an early-career artist’s stature, helping them gain a foothold, or of a pan that closes down a show). Others have said it’s a way for the piece to go on the record, to freeze for posterity the impact that a specific work had on its contemporaneous audience (as represented by the critic), preserving it from a potential future reappraisal becoming the only point of view—or, more likely, from being forgotten forever.

For the purposes of this essay, however, I will adopt Brody’s framing of “service journalism” and posit that the role of a critic is mainly to let the audience know if they should spend their time and money experiencing a particular work of art. As such, I will then posit that, for this to be a job that is needed in society, a few conditions must be met:

1. The critic must live in a time and (a little less important in the digital age) space where art is a valued commodity, which allows them to build an audience;

2. The critic’s audience must have time and money to spend on art;

3. The number of artistic options on which the audience could spend their time and money must exceed their resources, forcing them to choose;

4. The choice(s) must not be one(s) that the audience can reasonably be expected to make for themselves without outside help.

Whether any/all of these conditions are currently met is debatable, but I’d like to focus specifically on the fourth one: what does it take for the choice of what art to experience to become one that requires outside help? As previously established, most work that goes into the marketplace is backed by marketing professionals who make sure that audiences not only hear about it, but also have enough reason to see it. That has been true for a long time, though, and it did not impede the rise of criticism as a profession. The understanding, as I see it, was always that marketing would tell its biased story, and the critic would come in unbiased to either confirm or deny. Has that changed?

I think it has, because the more I consume the art that is being offered to me, the more I feel the work has lost something crucial: mystery. Just what do I mean by that? I will now take you on a bit of a trippy ride, so make sure you’re comfortable and have your thinking cap on!

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The following is an edited version of the transcript. Substack auto-generates its own, which you can turn on while listening—but I can’t guarantee its accuracy.

Francisco Mendoza: Hello, and welcome to Downtown Chats—the companion podcast to The Downtown Beat—where I talk with fellow artists about the craft and business of making art downtown. I am your host, Francisco Mendoza, and I am joined today by one of my bestest friends, Lilly Camp. Lilly, do you want to introduce yourself?

Lilly Camp: Hello, I’m Lilly Camp. I am one of Francisco’s bestest friends, and that’s probably my most important identifier. But beyond that, I am a playwright and a writer and a bunch of other stuff—because you can’t really just be that.

Francisco: What makes you a “downtown” artist?

Lilly: My most recent piece that went up publicly was called Why Taylor Swift Is Gay: A Presentation, which screams downtown to me because anything that can get you sued feels like a little bit more downtown than not.

Francisco: You and I both met in an MFA program. It feels like the natural progression would be: you start very downtown, very experimental, and then you finally get it right and you’re on Broadway. But for me, it’s actually been the opposite: I feel like the most mainstream work that I’ve produced was during or right after school, and the more I walk away from that experience, the weirder my art becomes. Would you say that’s the same for you?

Lilly: Yeah. I’ve actually been wondering how much of that is an internal thing and how much of that is a response to the world; the weirder the stuff, oddly, the easier it is to kind of make—a lot of the weird stuff feels also somewhat scrappy and cheap and accessible. I wouldn’t say that I’m after making anything weirder, but I do think that in part because they only let you into the club so much, and also because I like writing and I want to keep writing, I feel like I’ve shifted towards ideas that are a little more odd.

Francisco: Talking about things that are crazy to write: I wanted to focus our discussion today on a specific form of craziness, which is the craziness of writing about things that have happened, and about people who are still alive to find out that they’ve been written about. There’s a short story called Cat Person, by Kristen Roupenian, that was published in The New Yorker, and there was a huge social media cycle about it, because people did not love the protagonist. And then it all quieted down— about this particular subject, of course; there was a lot of anger and outrage about other things—but much, much later, a couple of years ago, there was a second cycle when a young woman claimed that her life had been appropriated for the story. And I remember a tweet that came out of that—I wish I remember who wrote it; if you’re the person who wrote it, please write to me and I’ll put it in the show notes—that said something like: “this new Cat Person cycle shows that it’s not just about not dating writers or being related to or friends with them, but that no one is ever safe as long as writers are alive.” So would you say people are safe as long as you’re alive, Lilly Camp?

Lilly: No, they’re not. But they really never have been, from any writer. So, no worse than anyone else.

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An unspecified amount of time ago, an unspecified Off-Broadway company reached out to me via e-mail, based on the recommendation of a dear colleague, to see if I’d be interested in serving as an audience consultant for its upcoming production of a “Latine play” (and I feel compelled to clarify the quotations don’t refer to this specific play’s ability to fit that bill, but to the bill itself, as I will explore later). On its face, the email made sense: I am someone who was born and raised in Latin America, have a good amount of marketing experience, have fostered a community of people I am in active relation with (you all)—and, perhaps most crucially, I’m also a newly non-full-time-job-haver who needs this kind of gig!

What is the gig? For those not in the know (which hopefully you are), “audience consultants” are professionals in the theater industry who can help a company’s marketing department reach a group of people that is not already (nor can be expected to organically become) part of their existing audience base. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that, in a field where the average house is packed with an assorted collection of white-haired (or hairless) heads, audience consultants tend to focus on reaching people of color, young/disabled/queer people, immigrants, etcetera. But if you’re wondering why a theater would want to reach out to them through a consultant, instead of consistently programming shows for them and building them into the audience base organically, I’ll quote the artistic director of a theater who once considered programming my work: “We always like to do one play in the season for the community.” I did not know who “the community” was, and I was afraid to ask, but I got the overall message: “This play would be a break from our usual stuff so that we can say we did our charity for the year.” Kinda like when companies take their staff to do some volunteer work around Christmas!

What follows is, of course, that the one “play for the community” will not actually be for the community; it is illogical to think that an organization that spends the majority of its efforts catering to one kind of audience would suddenly know how to cater to another—and, most importantly, to do it without alienating its regulars, who have gotten used to being catered to and would in no way appreciate being told to sit this one out. The “play for the community” is one that is thought of, fostered, found, and/or presented not for “the community,” but for the regulars. The “community members” that an audience consultant brings in are not meant to stick around: they will complement the regular patrons’ experience of the play, taking away the discomfort of talking about “the community” without them being present (because social media says that’s bad) and giving a bit of local flavor to the proceedings—especially to any reviewers who might report the experience on their write-ups. Once the whole thing is over, the theater will go back to its usual fare, and the consultant will go on to sell their audience to other companies that request it.

This all might’ve been floating around my subconscious when, in response to the email, I asked: “Could I read the script first?”

And boy, am I glad I did.

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Dear readers,

Welcome to the first-ever edition of The Downtown Beat! Are you excited? I know I am (and I’m using the term liberally, more to mean “exhausted and somewhat regretful of embarking on this, but really hoping I can do my part in building a new way of talking about art that can help turn this dying industry around.”) For this post, I relied mostly on reader submissions, and you sent me some very intriguing shows! Plus, you get some juicy uptown gossip, our first-ever reader-exclusive deal, and a preview of the paid content coming later this month.

Happy fall—and if you happen to try Dunkin’s pumpkin spice version of the iced lemon loaf, tell me if it’s worth it—as true ones know, I am a DD superfan (and that includes the loaf), but I’m ALSO a pumpkin spice non-superfan, so I’m torn… oh and apparently there’s a Dunkin plane??? Please reach out immediately with any info on how to fly in it (or at least to report sightings of it, as some of you have already done),

Francisco

Productions

📍Austin, Texas

Frutos de la Muerte, or the breakdown play

👥 By Delena Bradley, Khristián Méndez Aguirre, Bárbara Mojica, Caroline Reck, Gricelda Silva, and Minerva Villa

🏠 Glass Half Full Theatre

📅 October–November

Last season, I had the pleasure of being in The Civilian’s R&D cohort with Khristián Méndez Aguirre (as two white immigrant Latinos, we were more than once called by each other’s name, in a very own Natalie/Keira dynamic). During the residency, he worked on a “certified Latin American magical realism” (as the pre-show announcement proclaimed) piece about fires in Guatemala; he spoke many times about his frustrations with eco-theater (mainly, that it’s usually boring) and his desire to shake things up. Now, he’s joined forces with Delena Bradley, Bárbara Mojica, Caroline Reck, Gricelda Silva, and Minerva Villa to devise Los Frutos de la Muerte, a piece about funghi for Austin’s Glass Half Full Theatre that blends “movement, puppetry, wit, and bilingualism.” I simply must point out that the play that has a “Fungal Dramaturgy by” credit in its program; if this is not downtown, I don’t know what is.

📍Indianapolis, Indiana

Wad

👥 By Keiko Green, Directed by Emily Moler

🏠 Produced by American Lives Theatre and The New Harmony Project at Phoenix Theatre Cultural Center

📅 Through September 28

Keiko was a developed playwright at the theater I used to work for, so I’m sure we’ve emailed before (meaning, I probably asked her for a headshot/bio to put on our website, and she hopefully was one of the ones that sent it right away without any weird capitalizations on play titles), but I’ve never seen her work. However, the blurb for Wad (which already had a Zoom premiere in 2021, but it is now being incarnated in flesh and blood for American Lives Theater in co-pro with New Harmony Project) sounds intriguing—though not as intriguing as her own words when she described the show to me: “It’s a tiny production with giant, potentially triggering themes and ideas: the systems of capital punishment and the sexualization of violence.”

📍New York, New York

Blood Orange

👥 By Abigail Duclos, Directed by Vernice Miller

🏠 Produced by Et Alia Theater at The A.R.T./New York Theatres

📅 Through September 27

I’ve been a fan of the Et Alia folks for quite a while; as it is wont to happen in the tiny world of theater—and the tinier one of immigrant theater—we’ve crossed paths multiple times, and it’s always been a delight. One of them, Giorgia Valenti, even played a “very scary”—according to audience feedback—visa agent for my Civilians final presentation (second Civilians mention in this edition! Do I hear a branded post?) Giorgia also produced one of the three pieces that inspired me to launch this newsletter in the first place: Riven, a site-specific play about trash collectors beautifully staged at a recycling center in Brooklyn, which went tragically uncovered by theater outlets. So I was happy when she reached out about Et Alia’s latest piece, Blood Orange, a “horror comedy” that sounds very [bleep]ed up!

The Matriarchs

👥 By Liba Vaynberg, Directed by Dina Vovsi

🏠 Produced by Anna & Kitty, Inc. at TheaterLab

📅 Through September 28

Ah, TheaterLab—where every step you take is a stab to the ears of your fellow patrons, and the elevator takes you to the outer rims of the known galaxy before finally arriving on the 3rd floor. But brave it all you shall, because this play is being self-produced by the playwright despite fancy organizations like The Civilians (seriously, send me a check) and The O’Neill having put their grubby hands on it at different points. A more desperate playwright would’ve waited to get an uptown offer, but Liba said, “[bleep] it, we’ll do it live,” and what could be more downtown than that? I read the script when I was on the panel of [Big Award name redacted*], and I said in my report: “This one reminded me a bit of Wish You Were Here, both because of the time jumps and the examination of female friendships. There was something endearing about it, particularly in the mom character, which alternated between being a sort of god and a mom who resented being put in a god-like role.”

*So that I won’t be disinvited from judging again for violating their (non-existent but still enforced) NDA.

The Maenads

👥 By Stephen Foglia, Directed by Phillip Christian Smith

🏠 A Tank Core Production with Harborcoat Productions at The Tank

📅 Through October 12

Ok so I stupidly thought the name was some sort of pun, like The Janeiad or Amm(i)gone, but turns out maenads (“mee-nads”) are a thing? According to Wikipedia, “inspired by Dionysus into a state of ecstatic frenzy through a combination of dancing and intoxication, the maenads would dress in fawn skins and ivy-wreaths around their heads or wear a bull helmet in honor of their god, and often handle or wear snakes.” It’s giving Midsommar, and it matches the description of the play that I got from the team: “A wild, boundary-pushing experience that combines tripped-out music and movement sequences with a timely and caustic exploration of male flailing and the fears and misperceptions men have about women.” And all of this at an itty bitty space The Tank!

Festivals

📍New York, New York

For the Streets! A Festival of Political Performance

🏠 Produced by Radical Evolution at La Plaza Cultural

📅 October 4

I still remember an event Radical Evolution threw for the launch of a fiction podcast—about the time some Irish soldiers defected from the U.S. Army to fight for Mexico during the Mexican-American War (yeah, that actually happened)—during which I got into a very intense conversation with another playwright about the dangers of commercializing our oppressed identities... these folks know how to bring the right people together! That sounds especially true of their upcoming festival, which, according to producer Meropi Peponides, “harnesses the vibes of the Mamdani campaign and brings them to a performance festival” for people “who may not ever walk through the doors of [Broadway theater name redacted*] or even [Off-Broadway theater name redacted†], but who deserve great art that speaks to our lives, concerns and politics.”

*So as not to make new enemies this early on in the run.

†So that my old enemies can’t find me.

Fucked-Up Play Fest!

🏠 At Caveat

📅 October 4

No, I didn’t copy-paste and forget to update the date—this ALSO happens to be on October 4, but I challenge TDB readers to try to make it to both, since FUPF starts at 9:30pm! In their own words: “We’re an indie show with no budget, happening every couple of months, featuring brand new work by playwrights who frequent the Off-Off-Broadway/indie scene. It’s our mission to make outside-the-box theater that brings in audiences who don't necessarily frequent more traditional/established theaters by being CHEAP and FUN [capitalization theirs].” What else do you need to know?? Oh, maybe that for the October showing, they are featuring playwrights who are published with indie publisher 1319 Press, “so both organizations can lift each other up!” It’s downtown on top of downtown—downtown squared!

Beyond The Realm

🏠 Produced by The Playwrights Realm at venues across the city

📅 September–November

I am biased about this one—but not because it’s produced by my former employer (I was never shy about expressing contrary opinions when I was on staff, as any of my former colleagues can attest). Rather, it’s because the first edition of this festival featured one of my all-time favorite pieces of theater, Ugandan playwright Asiimwe Deborah Kawe’s Appointment With gOD (directed by a baby Saheem Ali). A mixture of play and religious ritual set at a U.S. Consulate, where visa applicants pray to be stamped with the right color, AWg was also a perfect showcase of what this festival is supposed to provide: “a radical space of experimentation to serve the needs of playwrights whose bold new works don’t fit in the traditional play development model.” This year’s lineup has pieces focusing on translation, dance, and even a “crash course in activism” that takes patrons through the streets of New York.

Readings

📍Frenchtown, New Jersey

Empire Liquor

👥 By Peter Kim George, Directed by Nana Dakin
🏠 At ArtYard, in collaboration with Brave New Works
📅 September 20

The culmination of Peter Kim George’s residency at ArtYard, “an arts organization that is focused on supporting artists in developing new work,” in collaboration with Brave New Works, “a new play development initiative that nurtures the early life of plays and the artists who create them,” this reading promises some metatheatrics: a group of friends in 2021 quarantine in a Scottish manor to workshop a play about the killing of Latasha Harlins by Empire Liquors owner Soon Ja Du twenty years earlier. ArtYard’s team tells me that “[Frenchtown] is a lovely river town of 1,400 people along the Delaware River, quite an unexpected place for arresting art like Empire Liquor,” which just goes to show downtown is not a place, but a state of mind.

Concerts

📍New York, New York

Abdullah Ibrahim: Life of a Legend

🏠 Jazz at Lincoln Center
📅 October 3-4

How “downtown” can an event at Lincoln Center be? Fair question—but the marketing staff made an impassionate case for it: “Abdullah Ibrahim is one of South Africa’s most influential pianists, one of the few legends of his era still playing, and most people don’t know his sound. He survived and flourished in some incredibly difficult political times for South Africa, and wrote amazing tunes along with his group Ekaya, who will also be playing on this show!” Sounds downtown to me.

Uptown gossip

Here at The Downtown Beat, we* believe in punching up when it comes to spreading gossip, so let us feast over a juicy morsel of the lives of our rich and powerful† uptown brethren:

Another day, another executive leadership mess

In yet another plot twist in what sister publication‡ Nothing For The Group calls “The Regional Theater Game of Thrones,” I’m told we should expect the Artistic Director of a major East Coast theater (that’s as specific as I can get without landing myself or others in trouble) to get fired by the board very soon, amidst an investigation brough on by a former staff member’s complaints—just as I am also hearing this person is a finalist for a different big arts job. If I know this industry, there’ll be a muted, cordial public parting of ways with some words about how, despite a tenure on the short side, the legacy this person leaves behind is truly transformative yada yada yada and then the cycle starts over again. Still, the damage is done—I’ve written about this kind of thing before, but it’s worth repeating: no one wins in these situations, folks. Staff are left adrift, doing jobs they are not paid for, before a new leader comes in and potentially cleans house. Boards end up having to get more involved than they ever expected to (especially for a volunteer position) in matters that are often wildly outside their area of expertise. And the leaders themselves have to restart their lives yet again (taking these jobs is never a chill endeavor), but now having burned a bridge with a significant part of the community. It’s the sort of thing that can kill a company—and has, many times. Here’s hoping the “how will the press release land” phase of hiring leaders (which itself succeeded the “this person’s qualifications are: being the best friend of the board chair” phase) is coming to an end. Sustainable governance needs to become priority number one!

*Who’s “we?” I’m literally the only writer on staff!

†Arguably, no one is truly rich and powerful in this field; I once famously described our gatekeepers as “guarding a chest that contains a used Metrocard.”

‡I did not check with Lauren Halvorsen before calling NTFG a “sister publication,” and there’s a strong chance she’d be upset and ofended by the association.

An exclusive deal

My friend (and photographer to the stars) Daniel J. Vasquez once took this headshot of me:

If you know me in real life, you know I’m not that hot! He could do the same for you! He could make you look hotter than you are in real life! And because he’s a downtowner at heart, he’s offering my readers a ~secret~ deal, The Quick Take: 2 headshots for a cool $100—perfect for those of us whose profile pics are getting long in the tooth while our wallets refuse to fatten up. The deal is available only on the first Monday of every month (the man is busy, people), so book NOW:

Book The Quick Take

Terms and conditions: You are not allowed to share that link (what happens downtown, stays downtown), and please don’t forget to put “The Downtown Beat” down as your referrer!

A free preview of paid content

The Listing is free for all, but everything else is for our frequent flyers Platinum cardholders season pass memebers paid subscribers! If you are not one of those, here’s what you WON’T be getting in the coming weeks:

• An essay by yours truly, “Is American Latinidad Just a Performance? Thoughts on an Invented Third Culture.” Spawned by the experience of being asked to be a Latine audience consultant for a play at [Off-Broadway theater name redacted], I reflect on the dissonance that I, someone born and raised in Latin America, feel when I’m in affinity spaces with American-born Latinos—just in time for Hispanic Heritage Month! (Speaking of which: consider this my official offer to be the Latine audience consultant for the Evita team soon crossing the pond—after all, both it and my own play are listed under Concord Theatrical’s “Latine Experience” tag. I got the cred!)

• The first episode of the Downtown Chats podcast, “No One Is Safe Around Lilly Camp,” in which I sit down with my friend and longtime esteemed colleague Jacqueline Follet Lilly Camp to discuss the fact that they have written not one, not two, not three, but FOUR plays based on stuff that happened to them or people they know. How do they sleep at night? Here’s a preview:

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This is the literal first edition of this newsletter, so I am really looking forward to hearing how you liked it and any suggestions or questions you might have—email them all to me (or just respond this message if you’re reading this on your inbox)! EXCEPT if you mean ~business~, in which case please go to the Contact page for further instructions.