Valerie Lau-Kee
Interview Highlights
Building a career in theatre is about saying yes.
Theatre jobs may be transient, but the community and community resources are permanent and strong.
Women are nurturers, but we also need to be able to share responsibility with others.
We all go through phases in life. We need to adjust our priorities and expectations accordingly and create a culture of asking for what we need.
Find Valerie Online:
Website: www.broadwaycares.org
Instagram: @valaukee
Facebook: Valerie Lau-Kee
Bio
Valerie Lau-Kee (she/her) is the Producing Director at Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. An industry driven charity supporting the social services of the Actors Fund as well as over 450 AIDS and family service organizations across the country. Before becoming a staff member, Valerie volunteered with Broadway Cares as a member of Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark, Mary Poppins, Wonderful Town, AIDA, The Lion King, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Grease, Miss Saigon, Carousel, the Pre-Broadway try out of Whistle Down the Wind, the tours of Sunset Boulevard, Secret Garden, the World Goes ‘Round and Phantom of the Opera.
“The strength you have is the space you claim.”
Meet Valerie
Amy: We are here with the amazing Valerie Lau-Kee. Valerie, please introduce yourself, share your pronouns, and tell us about what you do in theatre!
Valerie: I am Valerie Lau-Kee, she/her. I am the producing director of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. I came to this position through being a performer and then a stage manager and then an event producer for Broadway Cares.
Hayley: That’s amazing. Can you tell us more about the journey that you took from performing to where you are now?
Valerie: It’s a journey I think we all take, because we explore doing theatre by doing all of it. The process of doing theatre is about creating the spaces in which we do it as much as it is about doing it. In that process, I learned so much about the environment of theatre that I became enamored of that. That was the journey from being a performer watching load-ins to becoming a stage manager.
But in the process of becoming a stage manager, I went through wanting to be a lighting designer and wanting to know more about technical theatre. Putting myself in places that might not have rewarded me with a paycheck or recognition, but rewarded me with experience, which was an investment in me and what I would end up doing. It’s about saying yes. It is also about the process of watching and observing, which is an enormous education. So rather than getting a degree, I learned by sharing in the experience.
Amy: How did you come to theatre and performing in the first place?
Valerie: From years of dancing. The discipline of dancing really got me onto the stage. It wasn’t because dance was rewarding to me as a performer, but dance was a form of self-expression that I really needed to have. It became my outlet, and therefore it inadvertently became part of my career. I don’t think I came to this as a person who wanted to be in the limelight or on the stage, but it did allow me to find a community that was vital to my growth as a human being.
Valerie’s Current Work and Creative Mission
Hayley: Can you tell us about the work you’re doing now with Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS? What are you excited about?
Valerie: We just finished Broadway Bares, which is one of the events that Broadway Cares does.
Amy: Congratulations! I know that’s a big undertaking.
Valerie: It’s a huge undertaking. When I volunteered for Broadway Cares as a stage manager, it was all about how we could be a grassroots part of fundraising for this organization from where we were at work. And that grassroots fundraising, working inside theatres to do good for others, became a vital part of everything that I did as a stage manager. Which led me to Broadway Cares. Arriving at Broadway Cares led me to do things a little further toward the production end of it than I did before, and that led me to Broadway Bares, and then it became my job.
I’ve learned so much in this process because it is far more production-heavy than any of the other things that we do. And I have to acknowledge the deep donations and volunteerism that come from inside this industry to make it happen. Every bit of lighting, audio, and projection equipment is donated. In the end, it is an 11-truck show. I’ve seen national tours that are smaller than what we do for one night. All the labor is donated. Everything from the people who load it in, to the designers to the people who donate their time onstage, and it’s a 3-week rehearsal process. It’s a unique and incredibly original endeavor.
Amy: That’s all the best things about the theatre industry rolled into one.
Valerie: And the community! It’s amazing, there are people who have worked together on shows and they bring each other. It might be a stagehand and a dresser who becomes a costume designer and a performer and a stage manager who come together. And in the audience too, they come to watch each other. So everybody brings something to it.
Amy: Valerie, do you have a personal creative mission, something you are trying to do with your life and work?
Valerie: My greatest mission from the position that I am in is to connect Broadway Cares inside the stage doors. More than creating any theatrical piece, what I’m trying to create is a sense of community, so that people know not only that they can do things to help fundraise, but that they are members of the community that can also use the services of the Entertainment Community Fund (formerly the Actors Fund).
Whether they are recipients of the help that’s offered to the community, or whether they’re people who fundraise from where they are because of the skills and access they have, it is all part of the fabric that weaves our community. Whether they’re inside a theatre or between jobs or on another show, it’s always going to be there. I always think of Broadway Cares as the warp and the people in the theatre community as the weft. You may be going from show to show, but Broadway Cares and the Entertainment Community Fund are always going in this direction, so it makes fabric. It’s about trying to create a permanence, no matter how transient we are.
Thoughts on Womanhood, Parenting, and Mentorship
Hayley: Valerie, how does womanhood fit into your identity?
Valerie: It’s interesting because that nurturing aspect of community is what women bring to this. A lot of people are nurturers, so I will say that women especially have that as a reflex and an instinct. Like in the challenge of parenthood, is that a strength or a weakness? We bring the strength of nurturing into this work.
Hayley: I’d love for you to talk more about being a parent and what that means to you.
Valerie: My son is now 23, I should start with that. I found in the process of parenthood that when two parents are working and you have moments that have to be covered by a parent, somebody is going to have to say, “I’ll put that to one side and I will be there for this moment.” In a lot of ways, that’s like playing chicken. Who’s gonna say “Uncle” first? Swerve off the road and take care of it.
Amy: That’s very real to my life.
Valerie: Right? It’s just two people being parents, and if you’re both working, there is a moment where something’s gotta give. In this moment, I have found that women reflexively understand the priority.
Oftentimes in my position, now that I have a grown child, when I talk to other women, I will say that we are brought up to believe that we are responsible. But as David Brooks wrote, “Just because you didn’t create the problem doesn’t mean you're not responsible for it.” In other words, we are so inherently involved with the creation process, so we see the responsibility. And we have to create a generation of people who bring up children to understand that they’re both responsible. We have to nurture our young men to consider their responsibility in parenthood. And we have to raise a generation of women who understand that they share responsibility and that they can relinquish things that are a shared responsibility.
My mother, may she rest in peace, was very much about taking responsibility for everything that involved the children, making me feel as though I was raised to take all the responsibility. We as women take responsibility for many things that we can share responsibility for. And it’s worthwhile to raise young women to learn to share responsibility. I think that will help us. As somebody who is in a position where people look to have opportunity, I can endorse that by allowing a moment of shared responsibility among the room.
Here is an example - an assistant choreographer whose nanny got sick for a day asks, “Can I bring my 7-year-old son to rehearsal?” It’s my opportunity to say yes. Everybody in that room can share the responsibility that there’s another body there. So I pick up the phone and call the stage managers and say, “We are all accepting responsibility.” And of course, the stage managers say, “Absolutely!” We can all share responsibility for that. We all endorse that moment. I think that we are all willing, and we all can. It’s an opportunity to say yes.
I think the world is ready for this, we can help each other in these moments. Some moments are more difficult than others. But we can say yes, and we can think of how we can share that responsibility. A lot of it is the fear that if somebody else takes responsibility, they take ownership of something that we would like to maintain control of or acknowledgment for. There’s a fear of missing out. So what we can do for each other is say, “I still acknowledge you as being ultimately responsible for this. But I will help you toward this goal.”
Hayley: How did you learn this lesson of shared responsibility?
Valerie: Hmmm. It’s about watching what stopped me. In the years that I look back on and feel as though I could have done something more, what could I have been given to do more? And some of it was really to give myself permission. To give myself grace to not have to be responsible for everything. We push so hard to achieve. We say, “If I stay an hour and a half after the workday is over, then I’ll be better prepared.” If we relinquish the responsibility so somebody else can answer the question, that’s legit. If being able to answer all the questions and have all the authority is not a necessity, then knowing what is key and that your viewpoint and your voice is unique and needed is enough.
Amy: That is so powerful. Valerie, can you talk a bit about influential mentors you have had and what you’ve learned from them?
Valerie: You know what’s interesting? My influential lessons are often byproducts of small conversations with people who make observations about what they truly respect. Taking in an acknowledgment of what people respect makes you understand what you want to try to be and achieve. The people who are most influential to me are actually people who are younger than me. It’s about listening to the voice of people who want to change the world. For example, you guys who are sitting here talking about women and their roles, it’s because you want to change the world. So it is my responsibility to sit in this chair and try to create the environment that you want to see. It is not the people ahead of me, but the people behind me.
Hayley: That is a really cool perspective.
Benefits and Limitations of Womanhood
Hayley: How do you feel your gender has benefited you, and what barriers have you experienced because of it?
Valerie: There are doors that have been opened to me because of my gender. When we make a team as stage managers, we want to fully represent the people in the building. In the past, there have been many men who have been stage managers, but a woman should always be present. Because the people in the cast need to be served and a feminine voice is necessary. I have been able to be the woman on the team, and that has opened doors for me because I represent a group of people who are present. So other women being present has made me be able to be present, and that has opened doors for me. That is how my gender has helped me.
In terms of barriers, I don’t know that there are rooms that I haven’t been allowed into. It’s about the places I want to go. I don’t think any place where I have wanted to go has been closed to me because of my gender. The question becomes: Do I choose exactly where I want to be? Once again, it’s about saying yes. Because if I want to be in a room, I have to do what it takes to learn about being in that room. I have had to adapt to being in a room. But it hasn’t necessarily stopped me.
You just have to approach being in that room differently. It’s like saying I am in a world with only swing sets, so now I have to sit on a swing set. The chair’s gonna move, and I can’t take my feet off the floor because I’m gonna fall over. But I just have to adapt to being in that particular room. I might have to speak differently, choose my words accordingly.
Sometimes I ask myself, “Do I WANT to be in that room?” We do our own editing about what rooms we want to be in. I once got a gift, a card inside a box, and the card said, “You choose what party to attend.” We self-edit because we want to be in places where we are comfortable, where we are treated in a particular way, where we are able to say the things we want to say.
Because I’m a woman of color, I am accustomed to the kind of code switching that involves being able to communicate with people. I realize that it is in the nature of working with many kinds of people. The room is going to be diverse in age, color, gender, sexual identity, it’s going to have all of those flavors. So we always have to adapt. We may love it, we may hate it. But we have to figure out how to do that anyway.
Amy: Can you please say a little bit more about code switching and your experience with it for readers who may be unfamiliar with that term?
Valerie: Code switching is a really unique and individual experience. People expect us to converse with them in a manner which they find respectful and in a language that is what they are accustomed to with a vocabulary that they are accustomed to. So we change the things we say so that they hear it in a way that they accept. I can’t walk into an office and tell a man that his opinion is not going to be heard because he’s speaking to a bunch of women. But I can say, “Maybe we shouldn’t say that in this moment.” People prefer to hear a suggestion as opposed to an ultimatum. Our code switching is how we display the suggestion in a form that is palatable to the person who’s hearing it. We are doing it because we want the people we’re doing it for to feel heard and seen.
Amy: Thank you for that. You mentioned before the interview that you are the only woman in a senior staff position at Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. Can you please tell us about that?
Valerie: Being the only senior staff member who is a woman at Broadway Cares - it does make how I express myself oftentimes have to be tempered. But we all find ourselves doing that, it’s what you do as senior staff.
Going back to the parenthood element, I couldn’t get rid of my FOMO. I did all the things, so I had all the experiences, so it lined me up for this moment when I was able to say, “I know how that’s done.” That’s because I wasn’t at home doing the other thing. But that sacrifice was a brick that I laid into the foundation. I could have used a different brick or half a brick to be here. So I want to teach the next generation: If you can use half a brick and lay half a brick as the basis of a foundation at home, do that. Take the half-size brick that is knowing enough and influencing enough and use it as your foundation for moving up.
You don’t have to do it all, you can do enough of it. You can strategically choose knowledge that leads to the foundation you want. As senior staff, I don’t have to do it all. I am very fortunate because I have learned how to nurture and listen to the staff in the production department, so they support me in every way possible. I try to understand where they’re coming from and what their needs are and to serve them. So I am blessed by the fact that it’s reciprocal, it works. I have to figure out how to support them best so that they can support me best.
How to Improve the Theatre Industry
Hayley: Valerie, if you could make one change to the theatre industry, what would it be?
Valerie: I’m gonna take a big risk here. If I could change the commercial theatre industry in a strategic way, I would ask us to look at the way we structure our baseline pay scale. When we came back from the pandemic, all of our unions and the people we pay were based on eight shows a week. Yet COVID took us away from the ability to securely know that we could do eight shows a week. If I could change this industry based on our present circumstances, I would ask every union to please say, “Let’s do a four shows per week pay scale.” And if you do eight shows a week, you see more money. But I would rather all of our people get more weeks of health insurance because a show can run longer than have to close it because it couldn’t do eight shows a week and couldn’t pay all the people.
Amy: That’s a really interesting idea that we have not heard before.
Valerie: I bet you there are a lot of people out there who would say, “I would take a smaller salary in order to get more health insurance weeks.” To know that I could be covered for a full year with health insurance. I mean, I would change how our health insurance works in this country, period.
Amy: YES.
Hayley: Say it again!
Valerie: That would be better. But barring that, maybe we could change what our industry does. And maybe we’d have more people working, because maybe more people would take a chance on shows.
Thoughts on Work/Life Balance
Amy: You’ve talked a bit about this, but how do you think about balancing your work with the rest of your life?
Valerie: I have so much better of a concept now about how to balance my work life with the rest of my life. And that is because 1) I’m in a new place in my life because my child is grown, so I have the luxury that I don’t have to go home and make dinner for my child or go to any school events. So it’s so much easier to balance it because of that. And 2) I am now single. So once again, I don’t have to go home to take care of a “child" who needs to have dinner. (laughs) So I get to make decisions completely on my own, which makes the balance so much easier.
Now that’s cheating, because it’s a totally different balancing game. You’re asking me at a point in my life where it’s easy - it’s either work or me. It’s not that easy when you’ve got all those other things to balance. So maybe my life is easier ‘cause I’m not balancing a tabletop on top of a ball, I’ve just got a plank on top of a coffee can, it’s a lot easier. So that’s bad advice to give someone.
Amy: No, but it’s your experience. And it says a lot!
Valerie: Yes, it does. I also have the luxury of the fact that I have one job now. When I was a stage manager, looking for the next job was part of my job. When you’re freelancing, it’s ever so transient. And when you’re trying to do it with a family, it is good to acknowledge that the balance between work, looking for work, and family is going to change according to what’s happening at that moment in any of those lives.
Commercial theatre is a mixed blessing. If I was working on a Broadway show, I’d get two weeks of vacation and three personal days, which is less time off than if I was looking for work. So when you are looking for work, give yourself the grace to realize that you can take that as an opportunity. Because when you start working, you don’t get that freedom. Look at it a little bit as freedom, not unemployment.
Also, when you are working, do not be afraid to ask. We need a culture shift. For so long, we have taken pride in the fact that we work on the holidays. "No, you don’t get to ask for the holidays off!” At a certain point, I said, “I’m a parent. I’m going to ask for the holiday. My kid’s in school, and he only gets a certain amount of holidays.” Our lives work in phases. Don’t be afraid to ask. Because our kids don’t get younger, and those phases are fleeting. That’s parenthood.
Final Thoughts
Hayley: Valerie, what are you most proud of?
Valerie: I’m gonna cry. I am most proud of this next generation, of the women who are coming into this industry now. When I talk to young women, and I look at their awareness and the space that they claim… I’m so proud that hopefully my generation has broken the mold of, “The strength you have is giving of yourself to make it work.” No. The strength you have is the space you claim. And I am so proud that there’s a generation - you guys - who inspire me to do that. I’m getting all emotional, it’s true.
Hayley: Thank you, Valerie!
Amy: Thank you! Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Valerie: Thank you so much. These conversations - talking it out helps me grow so much. So I thank you, and I hope we talk again soon.
