Interview with IVP Executive Director Patrizia Acerra

by IVP Dramaturg, Zoe Rose Kriegler-Wenk

Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background as a director?

Patrizia Acerra:
I studied theater and theology as an undergraduate. Very practical course right from the beginning. [...] I started getting directing gigs right out of undergrad, so I stayed in Milwaukee for 11 years. I helped establish companies. I worked on the first 10 minute play festival in Milwaukee. [...] It was the most amazing thing. And I really feel like that's behind my own festival.

Then I moved to Chicago for a directing gig. [...] I was bringing a show from Milwaukee and then I just never went home.[...] About five years after that, it would be the late 90s, I took a trip to Italy with my parents, and I met a woman who ran a theater company in Rome who did the English language theater. And I thought, “Wow, I didn't know you were going to do that here.” And she said, “You know, if you ever have something you want to pitch to come and direct. [...] I was going to go to Rome for about three months to do this gig and ended up staying a few years.

And it really got involved in international work there. But the thing that always struck me was that when people would ask about the theatre in Chicago, I would say, “Oh, there's a ton of theater,” and they would go, “Wow, we didn't even know there was theater in the US.” So, the amount of exchange of actual scripts was, in my view, very limited.

911 happened in 2001 and I came home. The following year, my gigs in Europe dried up and my job dried up. It was a really tough time. A friend of mine offered me the chance to produce an Italian book on stage that I loved, in translation. And that took the better part of a year.And not unlike my moving to Italy, moving back was the same thing. I came on the show, the show got extended, and I just never went back to Europe.

But it was right around 2002 when I started thinking more about international exchange and about getting these amazing scripts into the hands of Chicago-based directors and actors to get them produced.

Moving on to the show that you're directing for this version of International Voices Project, could you talk a little bit about that script and why it's exciting for you?

So there are two reasons. The script is really fascinating, but the playwright is as well. I’ve followed Kareem through his career. I've met him a few times. [...] In his own consciousness he has brought together these very different worlds: his Egyptian world and his Canadian world. [...] And he brings those worlds into conversation with each other in his pieces.

So the piece I'm directing, A Distinct Society, also does that. It's a conversation about who we believe really belongs in any given place, who has the right to have identity, and I cannot think of a more important thing to be talking about right now right before the 2020 election.

How are you feeling about the virtual platform?

It's funny that the first year we did the festival in 2010, when I put it together, there were 3 staged readings, and they were at the Goethe-Institute, the Alliance and Cervantes. And I came to those organizations saying, “I've got this idea and staged readings. It's going to be great!” But I didn't know who was coming. Will theatre people come? Maybe, maybe not. Would they go to places that weren't established theaters? I didn't know what other people would come. So it was terrifying. The first reading we ever did was at Cervantes, and I can still feel myself standing at the door, that entrance to the theater that you see on our promo now, with those red doors opening. I can see myself standing there going, “I don't know if anybody's going to come by, would anybody want to? How do I know? Did I get the word out? Did I find my audience?” And I kind of feel that way right now. I feel like we're starting over again. It feels like a brand new festival. And it really is. But the difference is I understand the mission of the company.

Could you elaborate a little bit on the history of IVP and then how the festival itself got started?

So I came back to the States in 2002. A little bit after 911. I came with this beautiful novel called Ocean Sea by Alessandro Baricco. And I knew I wanted to adapt it for the stage, but I really came with this sense that, here I was with a foot in the States theater community and an understanding of the amazing work done here and an understanding of the amazing work being done abroad. And I really felt the disconnect between the two. There were so many remarkable voices that will never get heard in the States or on Chicago stages. So for me the mission of the company kind of came by living in that sort of liminal space between two cultures.

So initially, the company started just doing premieres in general and was called Premier Theatre. [...] But it became clear as we did our work that we were constantly moving back to this international space. [...] Eventually we connected with agents in other parts of the world. We had one particular agent in Berlin, who would just send us remarkable work right. [...] All these remarkable people kept coming into the process and it spurred the festival forward which spurred production. So it's kind of like ambition grew itself.

Your mission is to champion the work of global playwrights by creating opportunities for contemporary international work on Chicago stages. Could walk us through the process of finding, translating and producing those plays within the festival?

We've gotten better at it because we've established contacts. But before we had them we would scour global theatre pages. [...] Then we would read reviews and translations, so you get a sense of what the work was about. We would find those playwrights and go “Hey, we've heard about this play. Is there a translation?” That's how it began. Then we started discovering many of those translators are in the States in residence.

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Can revisit the shift to curating work for an online audience and the challenges or opportunities that arise from having to adhere to social distance guidelines? Do you think anything that you've learned in this process will be carried forward even when we can do it live again?

Biggest shift is our global work gets to be seen by global audiences. So it wasn't before, and there were a lot of reasons for that. The technology was only catching up. But now we really can open it up to anyone who wants to see it.And for the directors, the directors can work with any actor they want, anywhere. So for instance, in my piece there there were roles for Canadians and I'm going to explore whether I can get Canadians to be in the show. I could never have done that before. We could never have had the mechanisms to do it properly. That's exciting to me.

One of the things I'm really tossing around in my head as we're going through the process is A Zoom translation process that brings in the playwright, a director, actors and translators into a continuous zoom session, so that the playwright and translator can watch the scenes being performed. All scrolling the original text below. So that playwright and director will be able to go, “I'm not sure if this is the intention of the playwright.” [...] And maybe it sounds awkward or maybe it's not the style they were going for. [...] Now everyone could be part of that process together, which I think is a really exciting proposition.

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And here's another big difference: The cast of each of the readings for the first time ever gets to watch the reading with the audience. [...] They'll have the opportunity to see the whole play together as a play in a way they've never been able to before.

What is the most important thing that audiences should know about IVP?

We take risks. We push boundaries. Like for instance, our first piece is pretty provocative. We're not afraid to have conversations. We’ll warn audiences that we're going to have that conversation, but we really want to have meaningful urgent work on stage that speaks to the moment. We've always been that way as a company. The experience of it may be different, the format of Zoom versus in person, but we're still presenting that dynamic, engaging, provocative work.

Is there anything else that you would like to add?

We have done the festival for free for 10 years. We've done that through donations. So we always ask audiences to donate what they can because the audiences literally make the festival happen.