Hope Chávez Has Become The Man (Part 2)

Welcome back! On the last episode, my friend, producer Hope Chávez, told us about her moving from Texas to New York, becoming “radicalized” by anti-racism work, and participating in a staff revolt that led to the ousting of the (then) executive director of ART/New York. In this second part, she talks about the experiences (and traumas) of working at Long Wharf Theatre and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival—and what learnings she took into her current role as the Executive Director of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven.

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

Francisco Mendoza: At some point, you left ART/New York and went to work at a different theater. Tell us a little bit about getting to Long Wharf.

Hope Chávez: The things happening at ART/New York were frustrating me, and I was ready to do something else—specifically, I was ready to go full-time into producing. I had been doing a lot of freelance producing since graduating college, always on top of my job. I was ready to commit to it full-time, so I was open to leaving New York. I interviewed at a few different places, and Jacob Padrón hired me to produce the shows in [Long Wharf’s] season. I was also his deputy for the artistic department, communicating his vision and goals within and outside the organization. So, I made the move from Washington Heights in New York to New Haven, Connecticut in 2019.

Francisco: It is worth noting that Long Wharf was part of a wave of theaters that embraced [DEI] values, particularly in their leadership. There was a cohort of leaders of color who took over major regional theaters around the 2017-2018 timeframe, and Jacob Padrón was one of those. It seemed like an opportunity to live the change that this anti-oppression work was giving birth to. Was that part of the appeal to you? Did you go there intentionally because of that, or did it just happen to be a producing job that you wanted and they wanted to hire you?

Hope: I didn’t look at Long Wharf and go, “I want to be a part of The Movement.” But I remember when Jacob got the job, I was still at ART/New York and reading about it in American Theatre. Given everything that had happened with the previous artistic director and his ousting, I thought it was a big job to take on, a big choice to make. I wasn’t sure if I would do that. When I was interviewing, something that mattered to me (no matter where I went) was finding a values alignment—feeling like the place wouldn’t be resistant to the way I produce.

Francisco: I’m hearing an extra layer to my question. The previous artistic director, Gordon Edelstein, had been ousted on accusations of sexual assault, or at the very least harassment. Did you see an institutional desire for change in the hiring of Jacob?

Hope: Yes. Even knowing nothing about the board or the community at the time, I assumed it was going to be quite an uphill climb. So during the interview process, it was very reassuring that Jacob, the rest of the staff, and the managing director, Kit Ingui, were all excited about what I offered to bring.

Francisco: I want to hear your thoughts on the pathway that links [these two things.] [Long Wharf] was a theater where sexual assaults could happen unchecked (at least for a while, otherwise Gordon wouldn’t have been ousted). Looking at it from a basic, common-sense perspective, the typical way to engage with that is to create sexual harassment policies; the cosmetic PR fix would be hiring a woman for the position. Race doesn’t necessarily play into it. How does hiring a person of color for that job signal something about the institution’s climate regarding the safety of people’s bodies? Where does the Me Too movement meet the anti-racism movement, as you see it?

Hope: Back then? I didn’t think they met. I didn’t think [the board was] doing something particularly radical by hiring a person of color—although I think Jacob would want to acknowledge that he’s a queer man of color. [But] I didn’t see that as necessarily connecting with safety and bodies, or as a deliberate move away from the culture and policies that allowed a Gordon to exist. I just saw a person choosing to take on a very hard job, even with the support of the board and community. If I were applying today, I would be much more interested in the investment of the board and the entire staff in this kind of cultural work. But back then, my main concern was Jacob, as my direct manager, as well as Kit and the production director, since they were the people I would work with most closely.

Francisco: So far, this is very institutional, dealing with workplace practices—let’s say the institutional mandate was to practice DEI values in all that [the organization] did. But because it is a theater, that institutional mandate should serve a societal one. What was this regional theater delivering to its region? What did you perceive Long Wharf’s mandate to be regarding the New Haven community?

Hope: Jacob would often say that Long Wharf was now going to be a theater of, by, and for its community. It needed to reflect New Haven, which is very demographically diverse—it’s often called a “model city” because its demographics mirror the country’s [Note: it seems the nickname has more to do with its aggressive urban renewal efforts in the 1950-60s]. It’s not predominantly white; it’s about 49% white [Note: considering “white alone,” the number is closer to 27% as of 2020], and he wanted the theater’s work to reflect that. He wanted it to be for the community, which meant partnering less with New York-based organizations than they historically had; Long Wharf had earned much of its credibility through proximity to New York, doing out-of-town tryouts. Instead, he invested in local partnerships, like co-producing with a small company called Collective Consciousness Theater. The mandate was to practice radically inclusive values in every corner of the organization, and to be unafraid of the risks of curating work that was, frankly, less white and less reflective of upper-middle-class America.

Francisco: Why was that a risk?

Hope: It risked losing audiences and losing donors.

Francisco: So New Haven is the model city, but Long Wharf’s audience was not the model audience. What was the alignment between those two things?

Hope: There wasn’t an alignment. Changing the audience through programming was exactly what he was trying to do. I vividly remember listening to a hyper-local radio show hosted by a Black woman, and she noted that Long Wharf was notoriously the “lily-white” theater. It was, and frankly still is, reflective of a very traditional regional theater audience: much older white folks who preferred weekend matinees.

Francisco: So this external mandate, much like the internal one, wasn’t already being fulfilled; it was meant to be executed in contrast to what had existed before.

Hope: Absolutely.

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Francisco: Looking back at that experience, how do you feel that each of these mandates was fulfilled during your time at Long Wharf? One in which the institution practices DEI in all its operations, and one in which the population of New Haven feels they can accurately say that they’re being represented and catered to in the theater’s activities.

Hope: “Practicing DEI in all its operations” mostly occurred, though I would say it’s not as though the organization (while I was there) reached a point where there was some shared analysis and consensus around what that meant. So, did [DEI] come up in nearly every single meeting, no matter what department you were in? Yes. And for a very long period of time, I was part of a sort of DEI internal task force that had representatives from every department on it. There was a corollary board committee as well. So the conversation about race, and then when we did I Am My Own Wife, the conversation around gender identity and transness, and when we were working with Ryan Haddad on workshopping some of his pieces, the conversation on disability—these social justice issues would come up. With the exception of racism—because of who Jacob is and because of his work in the Anti-Racism Coalition and the Sol Project—other issues (from my perspective) were still tackled project-based, which is very common in the theater: you don’t uncover these things until you’re actually working with someone who’s directly affected by it. But the conversation of race certainly came up in every single corner of the organization. But again, I wouldn’t say that there was agreement or alignment on what that meant. Certainly there were times where Development would do something, and Jacob would be upset that it was still too white and that there were not enough wealthy folks of color who were being cultivated for any number of things—but the conversation was happening all the time. The conversation in marketing, same thing: who are we partnering with to get the word out? Is it the same institutions? Who are we working with from a press perspective? And then, of course, everything in the artistic department was constantly vetted through that lens. Every curatorial decision, every casting decision, every decision about the kinds of artists we would work with, who we wanted to commission, what a makeup of a season from playwrights to directors to actors and everything in between would look like, and how that would reflect (or not) the community and our values. Decisions were absolutely vetted through that lens.

Francisco: That being said, it’s one thing to have the discussion, and it’s another one to feel like the work is being done. And I understand you’re saying the work is done through the discussion—but looking back, does it feel like whatever was experimented with had the expected results? Did it create an institution in which the values were lived throughout its activities?