Michole Biancosino
Interview Highlights
The world needs more weird things for our souls and our minds.
Women engage with the world in their writing, which leads to political, relevant, powerful pieces.
The future of the theatre industry depends on hybrid (live and digital) art, new voices, and finding funding streams other than ticket sales.
There is no one way that something must be done. Let the thing tell you how it should be done.
Find Michole Online:
www.witfestival.projectytheatre.org
Michole’s Current Work:
Check out the 7th Annual Women in Theatre Festival, presented by Project Y Theatre, streaming February 4-March 18, 2022!
Bio
MICHOLE BIANCOSINO (she/her) is the Co-Founding Artistic Director of Project Y Theatre Company, where she has developed and directed new work in Washington, D.C., New York City and internationally over the past 22 years. With Project Y, she has led various professional productions, as producer, director, and writer. Credits included the long-running shows Trump Lear (co-created and directed) and the award-winning Gary Busey’s One Man Hamlet as performed by David Carl (co-created and directed), both of which toured regionally and performed at Edinburgh Fringe as co-productions with Richard Jordan Productions (UK), The Pleasance, and Underbelly. She has directed many of solo artist Peter Michael Marino’s long-running solo shows, including Show Up Kids! now running in Spanish- and Japanese-language versions and the Infallible Award-winning show, PLANET OF THE GRAPES LIVE FROM NYC. She is the co-founder of NYC's Women in Theatre Festival, now in its 7th season. Her most recent ventures in digital theatre-making and hybrid theatre can be seen at tinybarntheatre.com. She also co-wrote and directed the cosmic raga opera, WAVES OF GRAVITY (CultureHub). Recipient: SDC Gielgud Fellowship for classical directing. Her work has been supported by grants from The Puffin Foundation, ART/NY, NY Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA), The Dramatists Guild, and New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). She holds an MFA in Directing from Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts. She is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Middlebury College.
“The thing that I try to model in everything I do is putting ego aside and letting the work be the thing that we gather to make together.”
Meet Michole
Hayley: We are here with the wonderful Michole Biancosino! Please share your name and pronouns and tell us a little bit about what you do.
Michole: My name is Michole Biancosino, she/her. I am the co-artistic director of Project Y Theatre Company, which is the producer of the Women In Theatre Festival in New York City. The festival is in its seventh year. I produce, help curate, and bring other people to curate events within the festival. It’s ever-evolving based on the needs of the moment, all with the goal of increasing participation of women in theatre and giving more opportunities for women to showcase their work in New York City in a financially risk-free way.
Hayley: That’s amazing. How did you come to your creative work?
Michole: I have been in the arts since I was a child. I grew up in an artistic, musical family. I was a double English/Theatre major in college and always saw myself pursuing something artistic. I formed Project Y the year I got out of college with Andrew Smith, and we remain the co-artistic directors 20-something years later. At that point, I just knew that I wanted to make the types of theatre that I wanted to see on stages.
As I grew older, it became more tied to wanting to support the work of other artists. Doubling down on doing new plays, and forming relationships with artists and writers creating new work from the ground up. We evolved in our mission as we grew up. We realized what we could do that has value and what we’re creatively excited about. Excited enough to wrangle money and get other people excited about it.
About Project Y and the Women in Theatre Festival
Amy: Tell us more about Project Y Theatre and the Women In Theatre Festival.
Michole: Project Y Theatre Company started in Washington, DC in the late 90s. It existed in DC as a place where we would do full seasons of theatre as young people, because we could actually do that at that time! Then we took a break - I went to graduate school for directing and Andrew went to graduate school for acting, and other company members also went off to various other things in life. So that was its first life. We took a small hiatus, and then Andrew and I both had this producing bug and decided to re-form the company and give it a try in New York.
We’ve done work by playwrights who have huge careers and by people who no one has ever heard of before. The idea of Project Y from the beginning, which has stayed constant, was: How can we get a group of people together to collaborate to put up this one project? It wasn’t about growing the company or trying to create more full-time work for ourselves. It was always: How can we keep the “indie theatre” spirit of gathering people for this one thing? Here we are 23 years later, and we have many, many “one things” that we got people excited about.
Women In Theatre Festival started seven years ago. We’d been doing a reading series in New York City. Lia Romeo, an amazingly talented playwright who was our literary manager and is now our associate artistic director, formed a playwrights group, and then she started curating the reading series for us. We did it with a yearly theme: “The Anniversary of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique” - what’s a new kind of feminism? That was something we explored over the course of a year with readings. We did “Race-y Plays” - plays about race, we did “Border Plays” - what does it mean to have a border as a part of your identity? Our first theme was “Kickass Plays by Badass Playwrights.” It was all women.
Hayley & Amy: Love that!
Michole: This report came out after 2010 about the abysmal numbers of women in leadership positions in theatre. It was so depressing to me as someone who had thought there was room for me to direct and be an artistic leader somewhere. Artistic directors of major theatres were saying, “There just aren’t good plays by women playwrights,” “I don’t know any women playwrights” – and at Project Y, we had been doing 15 years of amazing plays mostly by women playwrights just because they were amazing, without it being inherently part of our mission.
So I thought, I want to do a festival where 50% or more of everyone involved are going to be women. We are going to only do works by women. That can be anything, because women don’t just write one type of play or one form, it doesn’t have to be a play. That year we had a stand-up comedy night, we had video projects, we had devised work, we had all sorts of things that didn’t fit into anything. What became clear when you do a Women In Theatre Festival is your festival is really political.
Hayley: Oh yeah, it’s gonna get radical real quick!
Michole: Yeah! Women are invested in whatever’s happening. They are like, “The world is fucked up and I want to engage with that in my writing.” The plays we were getting were amazing and so powerful and relevant - they felt like right now, these need to be done. So the first year of the festival was awesome and showed us the possibilities. That’s how it got started.
We’ve had more successful years – we don’t measure success by whether we get in the New York Times. We’ve had plenty of productions that have. But our major marker of success is: Did we serve the play and the playwright? Did the play or the playwright have a life after us? We’re an off-off-Broadway theatre company. We do amazing work that looks like a lot more than that. But we want these plays to go out there so more people can see them.
Hayley: I love that at Project Y, you are putting your values and the idea of consistency and sustainability over other factors like attention or box office success. We need to see more theatre grown that way, in my opinion.
Amy: Artistic integrity over the numerical success that’s really pushed in our capitalist society.
Michole: What’s so funny is COVID really helped us to double down on that. In the past two years, you just weren’t going to make your money in ticket sales. As a nonprofit, we are always raising at least half of the money anyway. Whatever the budget is, it’s made up of donations that are under $100 each. For more than 20 years, we’ve cultivated people who give $25, but they give it every year. That’s the hard way to do it, but it also allows you to take risks because you don’t have somebody who is giving you one check to do one thing.
With the audience numbers during COVID, we weren’t going to make any money back. So that makes you reevaluate things. We always had ticket sales factored into the budget, and if we didn’t do well, it could kill a little theatre company like ours. So now we are asking ourselves how to take the ticket sales out of the equation. How do you reframe the way you do theatre to have a different model?
The other thing we did during this time was to reframe paying artists better, which we haven't always done. Even with ourselves, we were operating on a model for most of our company’s existence where neither Andrew nor I received income. We still don’t really pay ourselves for what we do as producers. But we realized…maybe that’s not a good model. It’s just being open to reframing values and deciding what you’re going to prioritize.
Amy: I love the idea of taking ticket sales out of the equation. I’m interested in the financial logistics of making theatre, which was a mess before COVID and has become more of a mess during COVID. Having a society that supports the arts is just a better way to go about doing that, and it’s really heartening to hear you’ve had success with that approach.
Michole’s Creative Work and Creative Mission
Hayley: Michole, can you tell us what you’re working on creatively right now?
Michole: During the pandemic, I directed several shows from different cities where my collaborators are. One with Project Y is Close But Not Too Close, which is a digital musical by Julia Sonya Koyfman, Dusty Sanders, and Paloma Sierra. We are so thrilled to present it at the New York City Indie Theatre Film Festival at the New Ohio in February!
In October, I developed a beautiful workshop with Neel Murgai, a composer and a sitarist, and Seema Lisa Pandya, a visual artist who did the animations, at CultureHub, the technology wing of La Mama. We’re now trying to find a way to work on it further. That’s a really “out there” project that was made during COVID and made to be hybrid. I’m doing lots of hybrid work right now – it’s really cool to be able to do something with bodies in the room, but at the same time be able to stream it elsewhere to people who can’t be in that room. The biggest hurdle right now is unions not being able to handle that or make it doable.
Hayley: Hybrid theatre adds accessibility for so many people and adds so many possibilities.
Michole: Right, and once you build it in, then you can actually do something with it rather than just setting up a camera. I’m interested in making that intentionally artistic.
Amy: Michole, can you tell us about your personal creative mission?
Michole: That’s interesting. I’m an educator, I teach college students, I run a theatre company and I also started another hybrid theatre company in Vermont called Tiny Barn…I think the thing that I try to teach or model in everything I do is putting ego aside and letting the work be the thing that we gather to make together. How do you be together with a group of people and let the best ideas go to the top without anyone feeling like they need ownership over it?
Hayley: Best idea wins.
Michole: Yeah, and the best idea is the best idea! It is hard, but when you’re with people who all think like that, you make such good work together. Also, not being afraid to say “I don’t know” and letting other people be the expert in things they are experts on. I also think, the more weird the better - for our souls and our brains. How can we allow ourselves to be really weird and put things out that are not tied up neatly at the end? Making space for the audience to have a thought.
Amy: What are some of your favorite weird pieces?
Michole: I work with Lia Romeo a lot. I love all of her work. It’s very dark, very funny. I like her work because you laugh and then you wonder if you are a horrible person for laughing. She’s a master in deception. By the end, you feel like, “Oh that was really deep, but it was really fun the whole time. How is that really fun and also so moving?”
I’m working on a piece with Lia right now called “Yoga with Jillian.” It’s a solo show but with an audience who are the yoga participants. It’s scary because it’s very real. I’m playing someone my age, doing the thing that she loves but the whole world has gone crazy. That’s what a lot of us in the arts have been going through since our industry shut down during the pandemic. It’s like - where have all my life choices led me? Who am I if I’m not doing this thing?
Hayley: In the theatre industry, for many people, our identities become so much about what we do.
Amy: Yeah, so what happens when that goes away? Who are we?
Hayley: On the positive side, many people I know have had these awakenings about what else they bring to the table and what their other interests are. There is this capitalistic side of theatre that says we have to be so devoted to it that there is nothing else, and so I think there is something beautiful about the discoveries people have had.
Michole: I love hearing that. If you can open up to ask, “What else?”, categorizing yourself can crack open a little bit and you can find something really cool on the other side.
Amy: And it works the other way too. You bring the things you do in the world into your work in theatre. The art becomes more well-rounded and we become more well-rounded people.
Thoughts on Womanhood
Hayley: Michole, how does womanhood fit into your identity?
Michole: I’ve always identified as a woman artist, a woman director. I wouldn’t necessarily say that was chosen, but it was always something I was very aware of. For people younger than me, it’s not so strange to see a woman directing, but it was not usual when I was younger. The numbers are still not there, but they were really abysmal then.
I’ve always had a very strong sense of myself. I’m the oldest of six kids, my mom’s one of 15. I always felt that I had the ability to do the things I wanted to do…but if I walked in a room to direct a play, I was very aware that I was a 21-year-old woman who’s coming in to direct this play.
Hayley: I still feel that way as a woman in my mid-20s. When I walk into a space, people look at me like, “Where’s the director?”
Michole: Oh, absolutely. The other thing is I’m a unicorn; I’m a theatre director and I have three children. My husband was a school teacher when we were having children, so it’s not like I married a hedge fund executive. I didn’t want to let theatre be the reason I didn’t do what I wanted to do. Having a family life was always really important to me. I never had a mindset that I couldn’t have a family in order to do theatre.
There are always others’ expectations of you in certain roles and your own expectations. You can’t fight all of these things. You have to negotiate and ask yourself what you really want in terms of navigating career and family. When I was younger, I thought I would get hired to do all of these jobs. The industry isn’t set up like that at all. I had a really hard time finding an entry point to having the kind of career I wanted to have. I was waiting for all of the things I set up to pan out, and they didn’t pan out until much later in my career.
A lot of it felt tied to questions about gender, like raising kids. Regardless of how evolved I’d like to be, the things that you’re fighting in your own head are a product of how you were raised. For example, do I want to be there when my kids are younger? For everybody, that wouldn’t be tied to being a woman, but for me it was.
Amy: I think for a lot of people it is. I have a three-year-old right now and I’m in the trenches with those questions. It’s really hard to build a career in anything when you have a small child, much less a career in theatre when you have three small children, so good on you.
Michole: With Project Y, I remember when I was having my first child, Andrew said to me, “You’re not going to be able to do all of the work that we have to do. I’m gonna cover for you. You don’t have to think about it. We don’t have to give up a company because of this moment.” And then when he started his family, I did the same for him. I took over all of the maintenance for the company. We really rely on each other.
Hayley: I’ve always been adamant that I don’t want kids, but recently I’ve started asking myself if I don’t want them because I don’t want them or because I’ve been told that in order to have a successful career in theatre, I can’t?
Amy: We make our decisions based on the world we live in. That’s the reality, a lot of things are harder if we choose to have kids.
Michole: I will say, now that my kids are older, they come hang out in tech and it’s fun! We have to make space for kids in our spaces. If you want to have people in your process who have had a life, that’s not going to be a neutral person who doesn’t engage with the world. It doesn’t mean they have to have children. But it does mean they have talked to other people who don’t do theatre, have other interests, have other things going on. It’s someone who doesn’t just live in the rehearsal room.
Hayley: I love what you said about needing to make space for people’s needs. It’s such an important conversation for parents and also people who are caring for elderly parents or have other important responsibilities. How do we meet people where they are at and allow them to be people? It’s a conversation I want to keep opening up through this platform and elsewhere.
Amy: I see those conversations happening more and more in theatre, which is so exciting. I hope that a fringe benefit of the pandemic is that it has made people more aware of caregiving responsibilities. Most people have them at some point in their lives, so it’s really important.
Michole: This year as part of the Women In Theatre Festival, we’re supporting a group of parent/caregiver playwrights. Liz Apple and Lia Romeo put out a call and curated a group of caregiver playwrights, and they are paying for childcare during writing sessions. The response was overwhelming. It’s not just the hours, it’s the money. How do you afford to get out of the house to work on your craft?
Thoughts on Mentorship
Hayley: Tell us about your influential mentors.
Michole: I had a really influential college professor, Cheryl Faraone, who runs Potomac Theatre Project. She taught my first Contemporary Women Playwrights class and feminist theory as it relates to theatre. She opened my eyes to the ways in which theatre can be political, especially for women. I’m very grateful to her and we’re now colleagues and friends.
When I was at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts, I learned from Amy Saltz and Pam Berlin, who were both directors. They taught me a lot of skills. I left there feeling like I had skills I could take into any room.
The Benefits and Limitations of Gender
Hayley: How do you feel your gender benefits you as an artist, and how can it be an obstacle?
Michole: It’s really hard because I have a hangover from thinking of it as an obstacle for so much of my life. Thinking if I was a guy, I could have gotten so much further. That’s old bitterness that I don’t think is useful at all. I used to spend a lot of time thinking that way when I was younger. The opportunities for women, for BIPOC artists, didn’t exist.
I think a way it has benefited me is…I’m an outside-the-box theatre director. There is no one way that something should be or must be done. Let the thing tell you how it should be done.
Hayley: Content dictates form, hey!
Michole: Yes…and I think it’s a relationship.
Hayley: And form dictates content which dictates form -
Michole: Yeah! Almost any barrier to something I could find a way through, past, over or under. That’s the main thing. The other thing is…I had spent so much time in rehearsal rooms with male directors that when I direct a play, I know actors are happy to be in a room with me. The environment I run is going to be very different. I’m not going to just sit up here and give you my notes. It’s not a one-way thing.
Amy: It’s a collaboration.
Michole: Yeah, and I assume you can do it better than me. It’s like, “Here’s my take - take it or leave it.” If my take is right, you are going to take it. If it’s not right, you are going to do your own thing and it’s going to be better. Being a woman in a rehearsal room, you aren’t a threat, so you can really observe how things work. I learned so much from watching other directors work. A mentor of mine, Laird Williamson, he was an actor whisperer. No one ever heard his notes except the actor who the note was for. I loved that, because if I give a note to an actor in front of the whole room, then the whole room is looking to see if the actor took the note. If you just tell the actor, then it either gets better or it doesn’t. I learned a lot from being around Laird and watching him work and the respect and gratitude the actors had from that way of working.
Hayley: It reminds me of what you said earlier about putting ego to the side and focusing on the work.
Michole: Yeah, and also your ego will be gratified if the work is good! We all have ego and want it to be good. It’s not about pretending to be egoless, but it’s about creating something that everyone can be proud of and psyched about.
How to Improve the Theatre Industry
Amy: What are some changes you would like to see in the theatre industry? Or things you see changing and are excited about?
Michole: So many new cool plays, new writers, people who have never had their name in lights. For so many years, the same people have directed the top-billed shows, and we are starting to see a lot more diversity of names. The infusion of new voices at all levels is the goal. I don’t mean inexperienced or young, I just mean other people. There are so many talented people working in the theatre. I get that it’s a commercial enterprise - that’s part of it, right? Maybe more people need to be embracing non-commercial theatre. By the time you get to that level, it’s so commodified.
Amy: It’s limiting. You can’t do weird stuff at the top.
Michole: What we really need is funding for makers. When New York City did the City Corps Grants, so much amazing content was started because of that. That funding was found during a pandemic. If we could find those sources of funding other times, the whole makeup of the creative economy could be different.
Amy: It’s a question of our society deciding to prioritize the arts. City funding, state funding, federal funding going toward those things. Saying the arts are a benefit to our society, so let’s put our money there.
Final Thoughts
Hayley: Michole, what are you most proud of in your life?
Michole: I’m here, it’s 2022, I’m living, and honestly, that’s enough. Sometimes that’s doing something really cool like running a theatre company, and other times it’s eating amazing food and staying in bed all day. It’s really hard to be positive right now. I’m proud of giving it a go and hanging in while the world is going haywire all around us.
Hayley: I think many people will relate to that.
Amy: Hearing you say that is healing.
