Vanessa Morosco
Interview Highlights
We must gain confidence to live and work in the discomfort of imperfection.
Contemporary interpretations of classical theatre often lead to female-identifying actors exclusively playing apprentice roles.
Women are practiced at feeling powerful in vulnerability, which is a strong asset in a changing world.
Instead of being enemies or opposites, art and business can benefit from each other’s services.
Find Vanessa Online:
Instagram: @vanessamorosco
Website: vanessamorosco.com
Impact Drama: impactdrama.net
Vanessa’s Current/Upcoming Work:
Impact Drama - creating sophisticated drama for Equity, Diversity & Inclusion and Unconscious Bias training, using multiple means of communication
Cleveland Playhouse production of Antigone runs March 5-27, 2022 (Vanessa as Creon!)
Bio
Vanessa Morosco (she/her) is a New York based multi-hyphenate theatre practitioner who focuses on the intersectional spirit of collaboration through an ethical framework.
As a director, she has created productions for the American Shakespeare Center, Harlem Shakespeare Festival, Gateway Playhouse, Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, Hamptons Shakespeare Festival, Historic Cultch Theater (Vancouver), Palm Beach Dramaworks, and Redhouse Arts Center. She has adapted over 25 versions of Shakespeare’s plays for universities, schools, and educational outreach, as well as using Shakespeare’s text to train professionals in leadership and cultural transformation both in business and Continuing Legal Education. She is dedicated to developing new plays by female-identifying playwrights with Clutch Productions in New York.
As an actor, she has also performed at theatres across the country including Cleveland Playhouse, The Shakespeare Theatre of DC, Yale Rep, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Folger Shakespeare Theatre, American Shakespeare Center, Tennessee Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, New York Classical Theatre, and Great River Shakespeare Festival.
As an ethicist, Vanessa consults for multinational corporations to create drama-based content for use in training and development, focusing on global diversity and inclusion, unconscious bias, and cultural awareness.
Vanessa is a member of SDC, AEA, Statera, League of Professional Theatre Women, and holds an M.A. in Ethics from Yale University.
“I have great faith in the human imagination, and I’m interested in how to push the boundaries of an intersectional collaborative spirit.”
Meet Vanessa
Amy: We are here with the fabulous, multitalented, multi-hyphenate Vanessa Morosco. Vanessa, please share your name and pronouns and tell us a little bit about what you do in the theatrical space.
Vanessa: My name is Vanessa Morosco, my pronouns are she/her, and I self-define as “living in the hyphen.” I’m a theatre practitioner negotiating what the hyphens mean, how they might be sustainable, and how we might advocate for the multiple skill sets we find ourselves with as creative people. How we might bring those into fruition so we can express ourselves, bring our expertise to bear with other experts in the room, and have a greater and more diverse impact with what we create.
If I had to pick the sides of the hyphen, I would say I’m a director, actor, and ethicist. Most of my career has been as an actor, primarily in classical theatre. Finding a way to break the glass ceiling of the classical theatre is something that I’ve always been very passionate about. I came to direct shows in part because I realized that the glass ceiling was not going to come down when I thought it would. So I felt it was important to move into a leadership role if I wanted to have more impact on how I wanted to see the business of theatre change.
I define myself as an ethicist because my master’s degree is in Ethics from Yale. My degrees are perhaps a bit nontraditional for the theater…When I finished my degree, I received all kinds of comments: “A degree in ethics - what are you going to do with that?” Surprisingly, in the last 2-3 years, the response has completely changed. Instead, people say, “Can you tell me more about that?” The increased curiosity has given me a lot of confidence in my work. I always bring my ethics lens to my work, but I’ve been starting to do that in a much more overt way that can serve our community.
The Intersection of Ethics and Theatre
Hayley: Can you tell us more about the intersection of ethics and theatre?
Vanessa: I remember in my early 20s working on Hamlet and hearing the King speech, and I was struck by how the structure of that speech exactly mirrors a philosophical proof. Hamlet makes a hypothesis: “I think that my father was wrongly killed.” And then he goes through the elements of proof and says, “I think if I bring these players in, I will be able to witness the reaction, and by doing so I will prove my point.” And at the end, he gives his proof in a rhyming couplet: “The play’s the thing/Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” I thought, “Wow, these ethical dilemmas are playing out onstage.” So that was my entry into how to think about ethical dilemmas as they manifest within the content that we create.
As I take on more leadership positions, I’m interested in how the ethical dilemma plays out in the business of theatre. In our industry, we have this idea that because we are excellent communicators and experts in behavior and expression and listening - because that is ultimately the product - that we are also excellent at all of those things among ourselves. Like any workplace, we have workplace dynamics that can be incredibly flawed and problematic. Leaders and decision-makers find themselves confronted with ethical dilemmas on a daily basis. And ultimately, their responsibility is to identify them before they happen and try to divert them OR, once they occur, to help the entire environment recover from them.
I’ve been formalizing this work into an Ethical Leadership in the Arts workshop, which is something I’ve crafted specifically for the artistic world. We’re looking at the mantras or morals that exist - the things we say on a daily basis that express or confirm our values - and asking: What are the values behind that? And how might we create better models from those values that will allow us to have a healthier and more impactful workplace?
I have to give credit to Clutch Productions, a company in New York that works on the development of plays by new female playwrights. I pitched to Clutch: “You commission plays. What would it be like to commission a conversation?” Ultimately, I think a play is a conversation within a community, in shared space. They were great advocates and piloted the program.
We’re not looking to solve the problems right now for the variables that exist right now, but strengthening our ability to live in the dilemma. Ultimately, the goal is to gain confidence at being uncomfortable rather than trying to create a situation that is always comfortable. How can we have the confidence to live and work through that dilemma?
Hayley: Making positive change requires abandoning a perfectionist mindset in service of the good. We’re never going to create the “perfect rehearsal space”, the moment is ever-evolving.
Amy: Right, so what can we do in this moment to make it a little bit better and live in the discomfort that it’s still imperfect? And then in the next moment, we make it a little bit better and just keep iterating.
Vanessa: I’ve been investigating this idea of the “imperfect ally.” One of the barriers to change is that we may not come upon the “right answer.” Whatever answer we feel is right may not feel right to our colleagues. So how do we give space to champion an idea without having to be perfect in doing it? And how can we receive that as well, to say, “Yes, that person wants to champion my idea or is on my side, even though their style of expressing that may not be something that I find invigorating or that is giving me confidence.” How can we be imperfect allies together?
Vanessa’s Creative Work
Amy: Vanessa, what are you working on creatively right now?
Vanessa: Right before the pandemic hit, some barriers started to come down for me as a performer. It was surprising, because I had started to internalize an idea that the only way to make change was to take on a leadership position. The way our model works, actors often come to the table last. It’s challenging to have an impact when your share in the conversation is so late in the process.
When the pandemic started, I was ten days into rehearsal of what felt to me like a barrier-breaking opportunity - a production of Antigone, freely adapted by Emily Mann and directed by Lauren Keating at Cleveland Playhouse, under the extraordinary leadership of Laura Kepley. When they offered me the role of Creon, I was so excited to have that responsibility. Ten days into rehearsal, theatres all shut down. But they have been really dedicated, and it’s going to be produced in March 2022. The politics and practices of classical playwrights have an impact on the structure of the plays themselves, and the contemporary way we interpret those can leave many groups of people marginalized.
Shakespeare, for instance, wrote exclusively for male practitioners. He was really interested in gender politics, they appear all the time in discussion in his plays. But ultimately, if you are writing a play, and you have a male-identifying character and a female-identifying character, your male-identifying character is being played by the masterful actor. This actor is likely a shareholder in the show, so their investment is quite high. They also are more accomplished in their field, so their role is to be a masterful partner to their apprentice.
The master-apprentice relationship is so embedded in Shakespeare’s world, and the apprentice would have taken the role of the female counterpart. So what you have onstage is a boy who is being led by the master through the scene. The playwright gives the challenging moments to the masterful actor and the easier-to-play moments to the apprentice, because he is at the beginning of his career.
In contemporary times, when we embody those roles exclusively based on the gender identity of the character, we end up with female-identifying actors exclusively playing apprentice roles. The result is that you have less voice in the room, and you have to talk outside of the lines in order to have an impact. Which is an enormously challenging dynamic.
Hayley: It’s a huge responsibility to place on an actor.
Vanessa: Yes, absolutely. You can’t demonstrate your choice by being empowered by the lines of the play. You have to ask for the space and talk about what you would like to achieve that you do not have the words to achieve. The cumulative effect of that is really problematic.
So I’m playing Creon in Antigone. What’s really exciting about it is the responsibility. My male counterparts who play roles like Creon have clocked so many more hours in the rehearsal room. They have had role models to look up to. I have to find the confidence to be able to achieve in the same way. In corporate terms, my “hours clocked” look really different than my male counterparts’. And that requires support in the room.
Vanessa’s Creative Mission
Hayley: Vanessa, what do you consider to be your creative mission?
Vanessa: I hope my creative mission will continue to change and be hard to pin down, but retrospectively, I might be able to see a pattern. That will tell me that I’m being highly adaptive. That’s part of the mission, being highly adaptive in creativity so that expression can come in many forms - and be responsive rather than predetermined or iterations of the past. I have great faith in the human imagination, and I’m interested in how to push the boundaries of an intersectional collaborative spirit.
Amy: I love the idea of looking at a creative mission retrospectively. It’s interesting to think that maybe the only way we can authentically do that is to look back and say, “This is what I’ve done. This is what that says to me.”
Thoughts on Womanhood and Mentorship
Hayley: How do you see womanhood as fitting into your identity?
Vanessa: I see it in multiple ways, and then there are some moments when I don't see it at all. That is an interesting dichotomy and conflict - there are moments I am aware of my womanhood and moments that I probably don’t consider it, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not having an impact.
I’m a stepmother, and one of the times I feel most confronted with my womanhood is when somebody learns that. Being a stepmother is quite interesting, especially when you think of the many stories about evil stepmothers. Being a stepmother means you sit outside the traditional model of marriage and that you have a different relationship with co-parenting. It’s not without its ups and downs, like any family, but I really love the role that I play. I love my stepdaughter, I love being with her, I love making sure my daughter has a healthy relationship with her mother and her father. Those are important things for me.
As storytellers, our history of stories with stepmothers is really problematic. I think it speaks to a time when women couldn’t own their own property and didn’t have social mobility, and the lineage of birthing a child was highly important in terms of stability and access and having control of your life. We’re only at the beginning of the journey of what it might be like to have mobility and security for ourselves outside of marriage. We often talk about how that manifests in terms of careers, but I think how it manifests in terms of relationships is still really under-explored. I’m fascinated by how the dialogue about womanhood is so connected to childbearing. As we’re in this exciting time of exploring gender identity, how can we expand our idea of what “woman” is, no matter how it intersects with childbearing, child rearing, or motherhood?
One thing I’m really disciplined about is being mindful about how I name the relationships in my blended family. That plays out in creating theatre as well, in that we’re often changing our relationships to each other. It’s naming a relationship in a way that is current rather than past or inherited. For example, I never refer to my daughter’s mother as “my husband’s ex-wife,” because that’s irrelevant to our contemporary relationship together. She’s my stepdaughter’s mother. That is the relationship she and I have, we are co-parents. I find it powerful to be conscious in naming the relationship, because when you introduce that into a room, we end up having a much more relevant conversation.
Hayley: It sounds a lot healthier. I can see what a positive impact that would have, coming from a place of “We have a relationship.” It’s not about baggage from the past.
Vanessa: It’s not! We all have baggage from the past, whether we’re genetically related or not. It isn’t exclusively the privilege of genetics to have family dynamic issues.
Hayley: Absolutely. Vanessa, have you had influential mentors? And what have you learned from them?
Vanessa: Right now, the people I’m most inspired by are often those who are of a younger generation. I’m really interested in how my counterparts of a younger generation push the boundaries of the ways that I think.
I’m fascinated by conversations with younger female-identifying creatives who don’t experience shame about certain topics that I would experience shame about. I’m interested in how that gives them confidence and how I can be inspired by that. These buttons get installed when we’re young, they get pushed repeatedly, and we spend energy navigating that. The younger generation has a whole different set of buttons, I’m not saying they have it easy - but they inspire me because of the different way they respond to things. I’m also really interested in championing the next generation. I like investing in it.
Amy: I love that about you, Vanessa. You have always been invested in connecting with up-and-coming women performers and supporting them.
Thoughts on Mentorship and the Benefits of Womanhood
Amy: We’ve talked a lot about the glass ceilings you’ve encountered. How has being a woman benefited you in the theatrical space?
Vanessa: I think that has really changed. At the moment, there are more doors to walk through than there have ever been before for me. As a performer, I’ve often found myself in a dressing room with other women. There were often maybe two or three of us in the whole dressing room. That allowed for mentorship relationships and intimate conversation because it was such a small group, and it was often very diverse in terms of age, racial identity, or background. It’s led to really sophisticated conversations and relationships.
I’m six feet tall, and that has its pluses and minuses as a woman in this profession. When I’m looking at a male counterpart, I’ve learned to sit down because it doesn’t ask someone to look up to me who may not be practiced at looking up. That dynamic has fed into the way I think about physical relationships onstage and in storytelling. I am often asked to play moments of vulnerability, because we tell a lot of stories where the female-identifying character needs something from somebody. As a six-foot-tall woman, to achieve that, I have to physically craft that moment so that I can be looking up.
It has made me think about how our necks and our hearts are open when we look up, like a child. As female-identifying performers, we’re often telling that story, and the result is that women often have the opportunity to cultivate great confidence in feeling vulnerable and in need. Being able to feel powerful and have your thoughts together, while at the same moment being in a physical or emotional place of being highly vulnerable - that’s our craft. That is an extraordinary thing to capitalize on, that we can sit in the questions, because we’ve practiced that so many times.
Hayley: That’s a beautiful perspective. In new spaces, I often feel like I have to be very strong. As a young woman, I want people to know that I am a leader in the room, but I want to be a director who can be extremely bold and also vulnerable.
Vanessa: It’s really a challenging thing, isn’t it? I think about women I’ve worked with who are more experienced than I am, and there are so few of them that there’s not a multiplicity of role models to draw from.
I did this production of The Importance of Being Earnest, and it was the first time I had ever worked with two women several decades older than I am, Patricia Connolly and Siân Phillips. They were so different from each other, and they were both extraordinarily accomplished. What was so interesting was how they navigated their age in moments that are specific to female-identifying practitioners. Like when you’re 80 years old, in a corset, and you have to walk through the tunnel backstage and up the stairs and then come onstage and be your glorious self, how do you achieve this? That’s a different task when you’re in a different decade of life.
Those moments I’ve had, I’ve packed away, so that when I reach those barriers in my own life, I’ll have something to draw from. And I hope that there will be more moments like that. I just haven’t had enough. Part of that is making a career in classical theatre. But I feel that’s important to continue, because there are so many theatres in this country that have the word “Shakespeare” in their title.
Work/Life Balance and the Relationship Between Art and Commerce
Hayley: Vanessa, how do you balance your creative work with the rest of your life?
Vanessa: It’s something I think about all the time, because the idea of work/life balance is really crucial and is currently evolving. One of the biggest barriers to work/life balance in our industry is the fact that most of us are independent contractors. What’s really exciting right now is that we’ve been able to not just have that conversation as artists but connect to professionals in other fields who are having similar issues. Right now, the portfolio career is really popular in business - which means having multiple careers throughout your life. That reflects the way the majority of our industry works, and so I’m hopeful that it will become an easier conversation.
Recently, I’ve become much more practical about the choices that I make. Or at least I value the practical side of whether I say yes or no to something. For example, I was offered several directing contracts and a few acting contracts coming up, and I couldn’t do them all. One of the barriers to being a multi-hyphenate artist is that our unions are not set up to support that. I could work the whole year - half as an actor, half as a director - and never qualify for health insurance. That is just not sustainable. In a country without universal health care, it’s unsustainable, it’s impractical, it’s also grossly irresponsible to myself and my family. I say that now with confidence in a way that I didn’t a few years ago, and that confidence helps me with balance.
So I’ve become more ruthless with myself - given these choices, what’s the one I really want? And what are the other choices that will support that to lead to a healthy year? Creon is a hugely important project for me - not just because of the role, but also because of the team I’ll be working with and the things they’re championing. I want to support that and be an active part of that. That means I will therefore be doing more acting contracts over the course of this health insurance year. That sounds so unromantic, and people outside our industry do not want to hear it.
Amy: But it’s real. We tell beautiful stories that touch people’s hearts, AND also we need to have health insurance.
Vanessa: Yes, absolutely. Praise and applause are not compensation, any more than they would be criteria for buying a house. I can’t pay my rent with gratitude or applause. So it's much more about the choices I make to balance.
One of the big changes that I’ve made is investing a lot more energy into the diversity work I do, which I’m hugely excited about. My husband and I use the tools of theatre and drama and work with actors all over the world to create content for training programs in equity, diversity, inclusion, and unconscious bias for multinational corporations.
I get to direct actors from all over the world - talk about a room of diverse people! They’re all artists, but they come through their own cultural filters. They authentically represent intersectional issues that are occurring and can speak to those issues with confidence. It’s a highly diverse team, often with multiple languages as well, and managing that team is exciting.
I want to reinvigorate the relationship between art and commerce. We have historically had different and better relationships than the ones we have now. How can we move away from seeing each other as incomprehensible opposing forces? Why not serve each other? What if we use the tools we have as creatives to serve a community that actually really needs our help?
Hayley: That's a really beautiful way of looking at it. We’ve been talking a lot about the ways in which capitalism can impede progress in theatre. The perspective of: How can it be a symbiotic relationship between our industries, and how can we allow those things to feed each other? That’s a way of thinking that I hadn’t considered.
Vanessa: Producers, board members, development managers, and grant writers often talk about the need of theatres to cultivate financial resources. But on the flip side, I’m interested in how we might expand our ideas as creatives to see the corporate world as a community that can benefit from our services as well. And of course what’s so practical about that is they have the ability to compensate for it.
It’s an audience that could really be served by the expertise that we have, because corporations across the world not only have enormous influence on political decision making and how the global economy functions - but right now they have a great need to consider their corporate cultures, their behaviors, and their communication styles. Which is actually our expertise. I’m really interested in serving that community because it has a tremendous impact on our world.
Final Thoughts
Hayley: Before we go, can you please tell us what you are most proud of in your life?
Vanessa: I have had this life goal for a really long time that I continually invest in: Always practice being a beginner. Being able to have the confidence to be a beginner at something - as one gets older or becomes more set in their comfort zone of expertise, it becomes a harder and harder challenge. So I’m always practicing being a beginner at something to keep that compassion for what it’s like to be a beginner alive, as well as continually build my confidence in the experience of failure and not knowing.
Amy: That’s so cool. Thank you Vanessa, we really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us.
Vanessa: Thank you for what you're doing!
