Facing Time with Lynne Childress
This position actually cycled through four black women on the DC theatre scene at the time. One playwright who I’d worked with at the Smithsonian and who’s show I would later appear in under the direction of my good friend who would also later work with me at the Folger. Another, who is a local DC actress, and who I’d also become close friends with. As we chat about how we met, Lynne mentions, “It’s such a small world. Especially black women in DC theatre. It is a weird, wonderful web.”
The job of the Mistress was to get the kids roused and excited in between 20 minute performances of Shakespeare scenes and abridged plays from schools across the DMV area. Lynne’s energy was infectious and giving. She was quick on her feet, with a welcoming heart that made all of the kids at our festival feel special. Those kids were from everywhere, including the underfunded DC Public School system. My program, SSO, helped to bridge that gap, at least by exposing the students to other students performing Shakespeare and the opportunity to do so themselves.
Lynne and I chat for a little while about the Children’s Festival and the sense of entitlement that she remembers some of the adults from more affluent schools having. Lynne recalls an incident where one teacher after having been told that she could not use a speaker system to amplify her lead actress (also her daughter), proceeded to smuggle one in to the student road box. Justice was served when the mic kept giving feedback, essentially marring the entire performance. Those little snippets give some interesting insight into the interplay of social justice work and theatre even on the micro-level. The idea of what’s fair and who feels entitled to certain perks simply because of where they are in socio-economic status plays out almost everywhere.
What I didn’t know about Lynne before our chat was her initial goal of becoming a social worker by way of studying psychology at St. Mary’s College. I’m not surprised to find this out though as I’m sensing a theme with my friends. Theatre is social work. Writing and studying about diversity and inclusion IS social work. There are all flames melding the same pot.
I asked Lynne to take a moment from parenting her 6 year old little boy, and running her touring theatre company for youth, Building Better People, to talk to me a little about her background
and her reasons behind founding Building Better People Productions. Having watched her start this endeavor just a few short years ago and watched it grow, I have been intrigued not only by her fortitude in making it happen but her reasons behind it.
Right around the time of the onset of the Black Lives Matter movement, Lynne started seeing and feeling a need for people to just have a better understanding of where each other were coming from in their points of view. When Trayvon Martin was murdered, followed by Michael Brown, followed by Tamir Rice and so on...there were so many of us that were frightened. We were frightened for our young black men, we were frightened very specifically as well for our own children who would grow up to be young black men. I continue to struggle with this, especially as I come to realize that my son is starting to internalize some of the hatred that has traditionally been thrown towards boys who look like him.
Lynne is a kind and important voice on social media. She offers up wisdom, funny interludes about her time with her son, her grief over her father, her uncle and her twin sister’s husband who all passed. She also offers up topics for discourse and is open to hearing all voices. What she found shocking during that time when we should have all be in shock about the killing of unarmed black boys, is that there was a lack of empathy across both sides of the issue. It’s somewhat dismaying to me to even write that there are SIDES to a systemic issue that should be a no-brainer. The fact that there are sides speaks volumes to the need for people to try take a moment to just imagine themselves in someone else’s shoes.
She found the conversations on Facebook getting ugly. People simply weren’t listening to each other. “They were totally missing each other’s humanism.We need to be learning how to be different from one another and be okay.”
As she tried to understand why folks think and act the way that they do towards one another when they don’t have an understanding of what other people’s experiences are, she started formulating a theory about starting with young people. Lynne recognized that building empathy in kids in a myriad of ways has the potential to help them build bridges to understanding people who are not like them. Bless those who know that and don’t give up on addressing the needs of the soul and of humanity in art forms. Building Better People came out of that need. At the moment the production company's show include titles such as We Got It: A Show About Empathy and Zombie Thoughts, a show about tackling anxiety. The shows tour the DC Metropolitan are while after school classes and school residencies serve Anne Arundel County, Maryland.
Our conversation shifts a little to the importance of looking for guidance when starting any new endeavor and gathering wisdom. Lynne found that she had a rich community of people to draw knowledge from in putting her vision to work. She found folks to be giving and forthright with the information that would put her on track.
I loved having this conversation with Lynne and get to know her even better. She is one of those people with a heart so huge that you can’t help but adore her. I can’t wait to see how Building Better People grows.
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