Membership Spotlight – February 2024

I guess the quick answer is that I am working on my new job with The Coterie as their new Producing Artistic Director, getting to know the people and community that makes the Kansas City arts scene so vibrant and energized! But I am also looking forward to playing with my friends at The Rose as the director/choreographer of their summer production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory!

All the Black women artists making waves in our industry right now, anything by Manual Cinema, Reservation Dogs, and The Bear on FX.

I would love to create a project for young audiences that could tour to refugee camps around the world.

Theater invites us to think beyond our current circumstances, dream and imagine unlimited possibilities, and foster empathy and universal understanding and acceptance. If we can reach young people as they are growing and developing with art that moves them to unlock all their creative potential and find connection when it reflects their lived experiences, we are building up future generations of good humans who will do good for others in our world.

Oh I have so many amazing friends and colleagues who have gifted our world with such great art! But I just recently worked with Kamilah Forbes, the Executive Producer of The Apollo Theater and the director of the world-premiere show The Hippest Trip: The Soul Train Musical. She masterfully held space for all the artists each time we gathered together, making each one feel seen and heard and valued, while also navigating the challenges that come with launching a Broadway-bound musical with a huge legacy attached to it. She demonstrated great wisdom, leadership and grace. It was an honor to watch her work and I aspire to be half the amazing woman and leader she is in my own artistic journey.

Dr. Anita Dashiell Sparks, my acting professor and mentor at USC! She was the first teacher who was a direct reflection of myself and who I wanted to be when I grew up. A queen!

IG: Khaliashd or Website: khaliadavis.com.

We’re currently in rehearsals for the remount of Commanding Space by Stephanie Leary. It was originally commissioned in 2018 and has toured locally and nationally – both digitally and in-person – several times since then. We’re excited to be able to bring this show to a new group of students in our local community. Annie Easley, the computer scientist whose real-life story the play is based on, was an incredible woman who everyone needs to learn about.

I am currently really into making and exploring wheel thrown ceramics. There is something so intriguing and fueling about art that is often fickle to make and has so many failure points. But then, if it survives, all of that can exist for such a long time. The variety of forms, shapes, colors and materials is endless. It’s a great tool to reinforce the ideas of creating things, letting them fall apart, and trying again.

I’m thrilled to soon be starting work again on a Theatre for the Very Young show we did last year called Push, Pull, Together, Apart. The show is non-verbal and non-narrative based and leans towards performance art for and with toddlers by incorporating interactive sound sculptures and giant magnetic blocks. Getting to come back to a show after learning so much and trying again with fresh ideas is a luxury. I’m looking forward to having another round of tiny humans to play and build with us.

I truly believe that all theatre can help people see others’ perspectives and therefore change people’s minds — and in turn change the world — but those tasks are so much easier and immediate with young audiences. Kids are just more honest and quicker to respond than adult audiences. They are constantly taking in so much information, and I find that astounding. Their brains—particularly toddlers’ brains – are more plastic and open to ideas and learning. (Plus, the giggles are better.)

It takes a team! The collaboration between Matthew Warne, Carmen Martinez, and Mara Rich over the past two years in making Push, Pull, Together, Apart has been so fulfilling and enriching. There’s a lot of problem solving that has gone into making interactive sound sculptures that are meant to be touched; toddler-resistant if not toddler-proof. And the exploration of sound, color, design, and practical application between collaborators has been astounding.

Sarah Hankins. We met in Orlando, and she shaped me into the artist and educator I am today. I’ve approached so many programs, particularly with high school students, thinking: “Now how would Sarah do this?” She’s had a long-term impact on so many people, and I hope, one day, to be able to achieve a small portion of her influence myself.

Email me at kmlaissl@syr.edu!

So far, this year is shaping up to be all about exploring environmental justice and/or nature. Literally every project I’m working on right now has to do with one or the other, or both! I am honored to be a part of the TYA BIPOC Superhero Project, working with Northwest Children’s Theatre. We’re doing a teen superhero story about grief, water pollution, and flores de cempasúchil (AKA marigolds). But first up is a play I’m super excited about called Somos Aire. It’s a bordertown fairytale set in San Ysidro, CA (which is the busiest land border crossing in the Western hemisphere). The community of San Ysidro experiences many challenges, including incredibly poor air quality due to border traffic, but there is a strong sense of resiliency. This play is part of the Far South/Border North program which is an initiative to create arts-based campaigns that raise awareness of crucial issues affecting our local communities. I cannot think of a greater purpose for my work than bringing visibility to the invisible (like air quality).

The songs of Ben Gundersheimer (AKA Mister G) for reasons that will hopefully reveal themselves very soon!

My dream project is a play called Remember That Time. It’s about an eleven-year-old girl named Carol who wonders if she can have a meaningful relationship with her father who is serving a life sentence in prison. Through the power of letters, art, and imagination the audience follows Carol and her dad as they figure out how to be a family in spite of their circumstances. A little backstory on this project: I teach playwriting in a men’s prison. On Friday, March 13, 2020, my co-teaching artist and I walked out of that prison not knowing when we would see our creative community again. The world, and the rules, were changing hourly but things had already started to shut down. By Monday, all state prison programming was canceled. The uncertainty was terrifying but if it was hard for us, I could not begin to imagine how difficult it was for those experiencing incarceration or their loved ones on the outside. This play was my way of trying to find a light in the dark. I wrote it during the lockdown with the intention of one day bringing it into prison as a full production. I knew it was a pipe dream. This play was so over the top that even doing it as a regular public performance seemed impossible. But that’s the thing about dreams. Every now and then, they actually come true. In December, we brought the full production of Remember That Time to a men’s prison in the middle of the Southern California desert. I’ll just say this. If I never created another piece of art ever again, it would be fine because I had that day. I will probably spend the rest of my life reflecting on the things the men said about the play and their connection to it in the talkback. Also, I want to point out that Remember That Time is definitely TYA. I’d like to think we made some kind of history bringing a TYA play to a maximum security men’s prison.

I write mostly for and about young people because I have never forgotten how hard it was to be a kid, but in spite of all the challenges, kids make room for laughter and joy and silliness. I hope my work is a tribute to the resiliency of youth.

Tori Rice is my creative ride or die. We began working together as teaching artists, often in tricky environments, so we learned how to communicate well with each other (and have fun). We’re co-hosts of the podcast Hey Playwright, we dramaturg each other’s work, and most recently, Tori took on the Herculean feat of directing Remember That Time. Tori also teaches in prison so she knew what it meant to bring a production into that space, and also understood the myriad challenges, logistical and otherwise. Tori will be directing the upcoming production of Somos Aire because she clearly has a knack for making sense of my impossible plays.

The Godfather of Plays for the Rest of Us Kids: Idris Goodwin. I used to think TYA plays were a certain something and it wasn’t until I stumbled upon the Idris Goodwin canon that I realized they could be something else. Idris left me a voicemail to tell me I’d gotten the ReImagine grant back in 2021. I still have it saved. Idris has been a mentor, door opener, and homie—and he introduced me to my other mentor/collaborator/TYA Superfriend Alvaro Saar Rios. Fun Fact: I wrote Remember That Time in Idris’s Writing Theatre for Young Audiences class (shout out to Playwrights Center’s virtual offerings). The power of a good teacher, am I right?

Find me at mabellereynoso.com and listen to Hey Playwright on your preferred podcast platform.