Why, how, Oxford now? The academic answer to the question put before me

I share the following, created by request, for those of you who wondered.

Candidate Narrative: I am a 60 year old woman with disabilities
Nyla McCarthy
and like Bertolt Brecht’s most significant collaborator, Margarete Steffin (and unlike the upper middle class Brecht himself), I was born into poverty and the working class.

Margarete Steffin, Brecht’s often overlooked co-creator

I have devoted more than 40 of my years to a radical pedagogy that cultivates political instincts, promoting social activism in my fellow actors, as well as within my students, promoting transgressive cultural shifts within the professional and bureaucratic arenas.

In my early years, I experimented with puppets, movement, multi-media theatre and performance art, incorporating independent auditory semiotics for the purpose of eliciting political awareness within a framework of audience participation.

The Puppet Farms, co-created in the mid 1970’s with my then partner,  Guignol Master Gabriel Ponti, was designed around this dialectic model.
Gabriel Ponti exploring the message

We facilitated audience engagement in locations as diverse as the Oregon Country Fair, the San Francisco wharfs, the nationally acclaimed Woodmen of the World (WOW) hall and the 1975 National Convention of the Vietnam Veterans against the War.

During the 1980’s, coming to understand that an alternative performance dimension need not require text exclusively to be viewed as relevant, I chose to collaborate with a group of professionals curious to explore the possibilities found within integrating practical and theoretical training.

This resulted in the critically lauded Actor’s Production Company (ProdCo) of Portland, Oregon. (Centenary Wilbur Church, home of the the Actor’s Production Company ProdCo), the late, great Peter Fornara, Artistic Director)

ProdCo experimented with fusing classically structured text with elements of Brechtian dialectic, Delsarte’ movement and Meisner technique  to create a fully immersive theatre experience.

The notion of performance for us at that time meant a furtherance of the idea of ensemble, created via the interactions that take place within the theatre itself, from the arrival of the first spectator, through the introduction of each member of the cast,  not concluding until the last person leaves the theater.

The success of this experimentation was most evident through our productions of Friedrich Karl Waechter’s anarchistic portrayal of education in School for Clowns;
from left, Gary Cole, Marla Kauffman, Nyla McCarthy, David Owens (1978)

Steve Gooch’s critical analysis of the male dominant class system and colonization portrayed within his powerful Female Transport was followed by David Rabe’s scathing indictment of the sexualization of innocence In the Boom Boom Room.

Nyla McCarthy, Laurel Nagode
Nyla McCarthy, Chrissy (1978)

from left,
Laurel Nagode, Nyla McCarthy (1978)

and among the cartoonish characterizations of power and politics represented within Elizabeth 1 created by Paul Foster, founder of La Mama Theatre Collective, New York’s early avant garde’ cabaret.

Left, Nyla McCarthy as Lazarus Tucker, the Money Lender. With Laurel Nagode, center, and Jan Carothers, right.
Elizabeth 1, ProdCo (1979)

There were several theatre’s in Portland, Oregon offering a focus on plot and character driven method acting throughout the 80’s, allowing me to continue to hone my more traditional craft and technique. Among the most memorable: Carrie in Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic, directed by Alana Beth Lipp
Vana O’Brien and Nyla McCarthy (1987)

Kathleen Scott in Ted Tally’s Terra Nova, Rebecca Adams, Director (1986) and Patient Griselda in Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (1985)
Nyla McCarthy
at the dinner party, Top Girls, directed by Linda Janke

Susan in David Rabe’s Plenty, Rebecca Adams, Director
Nyla McCarthy, 1985
all at Artist Repertory Theatre (now a LORT theatre);

Maire in the hauntingly beautiful Translations by Brian Friel, John Zagone, Director

Joe Cronin and Nyla McCarthy, Translations, 1985

at Portland Civic Theatre’s Summer Repertory
and the seemingly innocent Felicity Cunningham of Tom Stoppard’s hilarious The Real Inspector Hound, directed by Steve Smith (1983).
* * * * *
I also earned my Actor’s Equity card during this period and brought to life both Lysistrata, James Cox, Director

from left, Ross Huffman-Kerr, Nyla McCarthy

and Iocasta for the Northwest Classic Greek Theatre Company, Keith Scales, Director as well as Catherine in Larry Shue’s The Foreigner for the Willamette Repertory Theatre, now Portland Center Stage, directed by Brenda Nause.

It was worth almost getting shot by the Portland Police, who had received a call regarding an “armed body of transients marching across the Burnside Bridge toward downtown” to get this still photo during the poster shoot of God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman, an original Portland Labor Players script about the Wobblies, written and directed by Melinda Pittman

Nyla McCarthy hiding out, third from the right, back row, (1978)

I enjoyed portraying the female lead, Betty, in director Gus Van Sant’s award winning debut film about poet Walt Curtis, unrequited gay love and poverty, Mala Noche.

(1985)

Then it’s the 90’s and I am co-creating Cygnet Productions with Louanne Moldovan. We design a small collaborative theatre committed to literary pursuits and social justice, where our lean and solid production of the Bertolt Brecht cabaret, In Dark Times, plays to sold out audiences. Then, Susan Sontag’s The Way We Live Now, directed by Louanne  brings audiences nightly to tears.
Ted Roisum, Nyla McCarthy, Keith Scales (1991)

However, during this same time I began to switch my energies from performance and direction into an infiltration of the social service system, committed to manifesting progressive social change while emancipating the most oppressed of the oppressed: the disabled, particularly individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Through donning my daily character “The Bureaucrat”,
I become successful at convincing leaders within the government of the State of Oregon to put me in charge of the statewide training and abuse prevention program serving the elderly and individuals with disabilities receiving state funded services.
Nyla McCarthy, the Bureaucrat as Emcee of the Connecting Communities Conference, Portland, Oregon (2012)

Influenced heavily by Brecht’s Lehrstuck “learning plays” model, I create a comprehensive abuse education and prevention training program, travelling across the state of Oregon, engaging and empowering citizens via open forums, to envision more direct and creative ways of designing curriculum and social marketing campaigns aimed at reporting and eliminating abuse.

My forums, like the Lehrstuck themselves, were pedagogically designed to provoke emancipatory political discussion and analysis. My goal was for these events to culminate in spectator/participants offering up solutions to the cultural and systemic problems of abuse experienced by those perceived as not having, and indeed, NOT having, power.

I further employed the learning plays model while working directly with my peer group, individuals with disabilities, and with members of their support networks, to distinguish social from asocial behaviors while identifying acts of abuse, whether psychological, economic or physical.

I was mostly happy and quite successful in this arena for nearly 15 years, supported quietly by leaders as committed to social empowerment as I was. The program I created was received enthusiastically by the people, heralded as “a model program, innovative and impactful” on the national level and resulted in videos, multi-media educational campaigns and model books including scripts.

I also authored a variety of trainings during these years, including the facilitative curriculum, Reaching Within, an analysis of ethics and inter-cultural equity for professionals; the video training series, The Choices We Make, focused on power, choice and covert oppression within the social service system by those in control and a national model Abuse Investigators Core Competencies Training Institute.

They were exciting, creative years in which I successfully married my art, my values, and the needs identified by the citizens of Oregon, all while working somewhat rogue within the bureaucratic State system. Throughout that decade and a half, I succeeded in being a meaningful resource to hundreds of marginalized individuals by facilitating the acquisition of ideologies and skillsets designed to demand and support Self Determination, resulting in a strengthening of their collective voice.

This expanded into national level activism until, without warning, a negative, economically driven shift occurred within the State of Oregon’s governing hierarchy. Good people doing good work fled or were driven from their positions. I was deemed too revolutionary for this new order. My popular and successful program was abruptly terminated and the citizen empowerment materials were literally destroyed.

The creative home turned institution. The dream is gone

People across the state protested in outrage. I soon resigned in disgust and protest.

Which brings me to today.

I am returning to the performing and literary arts as a much richer, more astute, determined advocate.
Nyla McCarthy, 2016

I am convinced (having experienced it) that the power to question and destabilize the spectator’s construction of identity, as well as of the social structure itself, lies within the power of performance.

My lifelong experiences, combined with an increasing awareness that feminist theory, queer theory, and postcolonial theatre scholarship (which is a relatively emergent field) are evolving lead me to believe we MUST demand the inclusion of a greater analysis of the social and economic impact of disability into our intersectional analysis, while indeed, we must also work for a greater inclusion of artists with disabilities themselves into our work.
Dark Horse Theatre, Snakebite, modeling how to do it

In conclusion, it is apparent that theatre, film and performance, including that which has heretofore been defined as Brechtian or dialectic in nature, has colluded, however unconsciously, in the ongoing marginalization of the very populations I have worked to empower: people with disabilities, the elderly and those living in poverty. One need only conduct a sober international field study of theatres, scripts, those movies generating big box office and the electronic media to see the truth of this.

I welcome the opportunity to join with colleagues at St. Hugh’s College in Oxford this summer to explore and generate collaboration toward a further, more meaningful, inclusion. The performance aesthetic demands it. Thank you for the invitation.

In solidarity I remain.