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I recently made a mistake.
When asked by a reporter for a major newspaper what it meant to me to have been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship I talked about plans for the future, plays I wanted to work on.
And while that's all well and good it wasn't until after the interview that I realized that the reporter was going to attribute my receiving the award to those plans, or to the success of my plays The Great Khan and 1984.
Don't get me wrong - I am very proud of both those shows, and I am working on another non-Mime Troupe script which I mentioned to the reporter - but those are separate from the reasons I was awarded the Fellowship. Unlike many artistic grants the Guggenheim Fellowship is not purely project based; it is also very much based on the work you've already done, and the promise of more to come.
This is why the award is really a validation of my work with the San Francisco Mime Troupe. While my stage adaptation of 1984 has been widely produced, and I have high hopes for more productions of The Great Khan, it is undoubtedly the plays I've written for the never silent, always revolutionary Mime Troupe that put me on the list and over the finish line for the Fellowship. Long before my time The Troupe was creating amazing, challenging work - loved by audiences, cheered by activists, misunderstood or attacked by the corporate press, and denigrated by the conservative political establishment - and I have been proud to continue those traditions.
In particular I think the last two season of almost twenty episodes of activist political comedy radio plays/scripted podcasts that I wrote for SFMT during the national theatre shutdown, the fact that we decided despite the turmoil and restriction to keep the political theatre flag flying, may have been the final thumb on the scales in my favor. I guess they were listening.
I should have made this clear to the reporter.
My plays written for the San Francisco Mime Troupe are what the Guggenheim Foundation has really understood, and what they are honoring. I can't say how great it has always felt to have smart, passionate people get what I've been writing for The Troupe, but this sort of wonderful, national validation will make it that much easier when dealing with those who don't.
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