Theatre for Humans' Blogs

After months of planning, our play had its first professional reading in Los Angeles on Friday night. We flew our playwright, Marsha Norman and director, Lear deBessonet in from New York and they spent a week working on the play with our SAG cast. We are pleased to say that we had a full house and the reading went exceptionally well. The audience also had the chance to ask Marsha and Lear questions about the play in a talkback session that immediately followed the read

The saying goes that “timing is everything” and that was certainly true about the premiere of our film about humanitarians entitled “we need to be many”. As luck would have it, we were just finishing up the film when Peninah Nthenya Musyimi contacted us to say she was coming to Los Angeles for a three-day visit. Peninah lives in Nairobi, Kenya and is the founder of a girl’s empowerment program called Safe Spaces. We had spent a week with her and some of the girls in her p

Lesson to self, when you travel for 4 months with three people all brandishing cameras, it will take you much longer than you thought to look through all the photos. This holiday period is the perfect time to reflect on everything we’ve experienced and start to organize the thousands of photos we now possess. In addition to the photos we captured, some of which we are proud to say are pretty good, there are great shots from Gwendolen Cates, our documentarian and profession

Finally a week without many off-site meetings and lunches! As much as networking is an important element to any successful project, it was great to spend time in our office, actually working on the numerous aspects of our play rather than rushing off to meet with various people/organizations. It was also nice to have a few days that didn’t require us to sit in Southern California traffic. So how did we spend our time? It was filled, and I do mean filled, with conversa

In the course of doing research and development for our play, we’ve had the good fortune to meet incredible people doing great humanitarian work. Through our association with the United Nations, we were introduced to the Creative Visions Foundation (CVF) and Kathy Eldon. Kathy and her daughter Amy founded this organization with the mission of fostering and aiding artists turned activists who use their talents to shine a spotlight on current social issues. CVF supports thes

So when we left you last, I was recovering from a nasty bout of food poisoning and my time in a cholera tent at a Doctors Without Borders (Medicines sans Frontiers) Hospital in Port au Prince, Haiti. I was devastated that we weren’t able to visit with female peacekeepers in Haiti due to my inability to keep anything solid or liquid in my body or stand up on my own. After the non-stop travel by air, rail, boat, UN and CARE security vehicles, tuk tuks, camel (ok that was cool

Haiti, as I've already said on our facebook page, was the most difficult country for me to handle both physically and emotionally. From a physical perspective, I think it was the combination of exhaustion (we'd been traveling for over 11 weeks), the stifling heat and relentless mosquitos that pushed me over the edge. Add to that a night spent in what appeared to be a cholera tent at Medicins Sans Frontieres when Susan came down with severe food poisoning and the complete st

Spent the day with women at the Sarakasi Trust in Nairobi. The Sarakasi Trust is an organization started by a couple from the Netherlands. They work to help people trapped in the slums escape a life of poverty using arts programs such as dance, acrobatics and juggling. The Sarakasi Dancers and Acrobats travel internationally and I was lucky enough to watch them rehearse. The dancers are amazing athletes and it was great to flash back to my musical theatre roots and watch

South Africa at last! I've been looking forward to getting to Johannesburg and was not disappointed. Although India was quite an experience it was great to get to a major urban city that reminds one a little bit of home. Actually reminded me a bit like Toronto in the summer. Our timing couldn't have been better and we were able to attend a rally in Pretoria for National Women's Day. It is a national holiday in South Africa so thousands of women turned out to celebrate an

Well we made it through India! Here we are meeting with members of a grassroots organization located in the Utter Pradesh region. We flew from New Delhi to Lucknow and then endured a 5 hr van ride to reach them. I suppose I went to India with a predisposed idea of what it would look, sound and smell like. I was not prepared. The level of poverty that exists was simply overwhelming and all encompassing. It would be impossible to adequately describe what we saw, but I'll