Rachel May
@rhmayatl on her front step with her super cute lamp.
-Theatre-
We made our way to Rachel’s movie room that had two full-size closets FULL of DVDs. And in the shadow of these, we chatted about not only what her theatre is doing and hoping to change but also about being at home with kids in virtual school.
In this second leg of my interviews, I have started reaching out to people who I would deem “arts leaders” because they aren’t just folks with platforms, they are people and artists first. We are all weathering this storm together and none of us have been through something like this before. I wanted to check in on the people we all look up to and Rachel was certainly on that list.
Her theatre has been a lifeline for me as the only place I’ve taken in-person production photos in the last year. She and her team have sheltered me during this time, and for that, I will be eternally grateful.
Interviewed 2.18.21
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Casey: So first and foremost, how are you?
Rachel: It's so interesting, I think, the sort of emotional swings of this time. I mean, on the whole: good. At Synchronicity we've focused on putting artists to work and producing. So there's been a lot of forward motion there, which has been really good. Personally, I've got three kids at home doing school, which is challenging, but also we're together all day and we have midday dance party some days, and on a day when normally I wouldn't see them for eight hours. So there's these weird blessings that we in our family (have) been trying really hard to focus on, not on the stress part.
Casey: I love that. We're so far in that focusing on the good is a great thing.
Rachel: Yeah. We've heard so many friends who have kids who have gone through feeling really stressed and depressed and all that. And ours, on the whole, have maintained a really good outlook, and I think that's because we've been really trying to say, "Well, what's good about this time and how can we focus on that? How can we work on dealing with whatever we can around the stuff that's hard?"
Casey: Yeah. Yeah. I want to ask like how you're doing. You have been plowing through. How does that make you feel?
Rachel: Again, emotional swings. I find that some days are just wildly exhausting and I feel like, "Oh gosh, what did I actually do today? I sat on my computer all day." But the decision fatigue is really real, and the desire to be really thoughtful and intentional and responsive in listening to all of the challenges that we've all been going through over the past year and the artist community's been going through.
As a person, I feel everyone's feelings really strongly, so it's hard sometimes to take a breath and continue to commit to being intentional and thoughtful and responsive while also not carrying the weight every second. Figuring out that balance is hard.
Casey: Do you think you'd still have that weight if you weren't running a theatre company? That decision fatigue is real. Have you given yourself permission to say, "I'm not going to make a decision on this?"
Rachel: I think, yes. I think that we all have worked to support each other in that and just have moments where we're like, "We have no idea. I have no idea what's going to happen." At Synchronicity, we are a really collaborative space in how we work. I think we take care of each other well in that way. So I'm really grateful for the people that I'm working with every day because they are both really good at challenging each other and pushing each other and questioning each other, but also really good at saying, "Wow, we're all really exhausted and how do we take a break?" And as a leader, because of this time, I've tried really hard to be better about saying when I'm just taking a break or I'm just exhausted. Because we all get into that workaholic mode, and I think when you're heading up an organization, people tend to respond to whatever you do.
So I know that (Synchronicity Managing Director Celise Kalke) and I have both really thought about how to say, "Just take time if you need time" or, "Hey, I'm exhausted. I'm stopping at three o'clock. I can't do any more today," and just trying to be really open about that so we can have permission to be human — to be really human. So I feel like this year has been a weird experiment with reminding us all to be more human with each other.
Casey: Obviously you're creating through Synchro, but what have you been doing in Covid? What have you been up to? Any weird hobbies?
Rachel: I've been doing a lot of baking bread, trying to learn how to actually, really bake bread. Like real bread.
Casey: So you got all the yeast? That was you?
Rachel: I have so much yeast if you need yeast. I seriously have more yeast than I can possibly use because I stockpiled it. And I go to Sam's and I get the 25-pound bags of flour and bread flour, so at any given moment there's about 50 pounds of flour in the house and a lot of yeast. So I've been really trying to learn how to actually understand how making bread works.One of my sons started a baking business through this, so he's been doing pumpkin bread and muffins and stuff, so we've been looking at that and helping with that. …
We do a lot of movie watching.
Casey: Yeah, you guys have quite a collection.
Rachel: We have a ridiculous collection. That's mostly (my husband) Daniel. So we've been watching films. But don't ask me which ones because then I'm like, "Oh god, what did we watch recently?"
We get outside as much as we can and walk. We have an hour-long walk through the woods right there. And lots of pet time. We adopted two baby kittens during this, so we now have two dogs, three cats, one snake, three kids.
Casey: Yeah. Yeah. That's encouraging. I wonder, speaking of your kids, how do you think they're doing? As their mom, it must be hard to have three kids in the house, and they're not little.
Rachel: No. Fifth and eighth grade. They're doing really well, they really are. And they're enjoying each other still. They'll sit on the couch to watch something and they'll all just squish together. We bought a trampoline which was the best money we've ever spent because every time anyone's in need we just say, "Go jump," and they have to go outside and jump. It's been an amazing resource for us, in terms of them doing school on the computer. We were a family who was hyper-strict about screen time. Our kids don't have any devices of their own. We'd watch a movie on the weekends and they'd get video games for like a couple hours a week, but the rest of the time there were no screens. So that's been a very hard adjustment. (We’re) realizing that no one's doing anything tangible with their hands! Kids aren't even writing with a pencil. They're doing everything on a keyboard. That's worrisome to me. I'm constantly looking for ways, sticking a pencil and a notebook next to them and saying, "As you're listening, write things down. Just write things down, get your hands going." Because they're going to have a year of their lives where they did not do anything physically with their hands in school, and that's bizarre and hard to think about. So I'm trying to think about how to counter that as much as possible.
Casey: Speaking of things that we don't get to do as often, what do you miss?
Rachel: I miss accidental meetings. Not meetings-meetings, but accidental encounters. You know, where you are going to the grocery store and you run into someone and you just go hang out and talk for a while. Because everybody's so focused on, "Get the task done and get home," or "I can't go be with that person because of Covid," or whatnot. I miss those sort of accidental encounters. I miss hugging everybody all the time because I'm a huge hugger. So that stinks. And my entire family up north. I haven't seen them in a year, and I don't know when I'm gonna see them again. It's painful to not be with them. And I miss the beach because we didn't go to the beach like we usually do up in my hometown. So I miss that.
Casey: Luckily, Synchro has found a way to still create art. But I wonder for you, how are you finding the motivation to keep creating?
Rachel: I was really fortunate that I got to direct one of our shows in October. That was really needed at that moment in time for me because so much had been about how to respond to the pandemic. So to go into a rehearsal room and work with Lucy on this beautiful piece and really dive into the artistic land was a saving grace, at that moment, because that was like five months in. It was like, "I have to do something other than think about safety protocols." So that was really helpful.
Now, a lot of it has been in program design, which doesn't sound sexy in terms of developing things or creativity, but I've been leading a lot of work in our Designers of Color initiative and really figuring out: what are the ways we can serve and help in that space? I think that sort of partnership design is really interesting.
Then, artistically, we've just started a project called Women's Work, which is working with three playwrights and a dramaturg and two designers. We are starting to investigate the notion of work and women's relationship to work, historically, through Atlanta. What does that look like across various communities here? We're going to be doing interviews and building a piece based on that over the next couple years, looking at the relationship of self and work and being a woman and kids, especially now as all these things are thrown into the crucible in this house. We have two working parents in this house and we both share the responsibilities by doing some household duties. But it's all kind of landing on the woman to be doing both the teaching and the schooling and the executive management, etc. So I think that, in this moment, to be experiencing that, but also have an artistic project where we're starting to explore that, allows us to kind of be in it but also look at it at the same time, which is really great. Those are the areas that my creativity is channeling.
Oh, and knitting! I relearned how to knit. I was trying to start knitting again.
Casey: What do you think you'll take out of this? Not only for you, but as a parent, as an artist, as a human being — what was this worth?
Rachel: I don't know if we know yet? If I'm being optimistic, I will say that we will take with us a better sense of being intentional and pausing before we react, pausing before we think, pausing before we engage on certain things. I think the notion of taking a breath and pausing that the whole world had to do for at least a short time — I feel like that didn't last as long as we thought it might. But I think continuing to cultivate that sense of pause will help us be better listeners and better, more intentional caretakers of each other.
If I'm being pessimistic, I think we all can take away the polarizing that this time increased. It was already happening, but in the sense that now we haven't been able to be in human contact and sort of calm those responses because we haven't had that human contact. I hope, when all this is done, we get off of our devices and we get very human with each other. And I think art and theatre is going to be a great way to do that. I really think it's going to be very important for us to cultivate that sense of pause and reflectiveness and appreciation for the humans and the humanness in our lives.
Casey: Yeah, that's going to be hard in a field where sometimes decisions have to be made and time limits and time restrictions are very harsh.
Rachel: This is kind of off the topic a little bit, but we had a big conversation a couple of days ago about, "OK, what would it look like if we tried to eliminate 10 out of 12s?" Right? And it took some really hard conversations, because we rent our space and our income is based on rental weeks being available so we can press our own production process. But we were like, "We have control of this, so what would happen if we think about it differently?" So we're looking at that right now and possibly teching across four or five days within the rehearsal process, more than just like, "We're all here, now TECH!" and then we're not ready and everyone's exhausted. We're really trying to take time to think about what systems we have, bound by time and money, that we can really rethink. And this time allows us to do that. We're really trying to say "What are the things that get in our way? We need more money to pay people so really, what does that take?" We're in a big strategic planning process, as well, right now, which is a fun, interesting exercise,. So we're looking at, over the next three years, what does our staff need to be making? What do our artists need to be making? And we increased our artists salaries this year.
Casey: Oh, great. Is that scary, though, to not really know what your audience is and to try to pay people more and to be in strategic planning for a time that you're like, “Does this theatre even exist?”
Rachel: For sure. We based our budget and what we're spending on what we know we had coming in grants-wise.
Just for your knowledge, if people are monetizing their on-the-screen stuff, they're getting about 10% of what they would normally get from a live performance. So we budgeted that. We're like, "OK, none of this is sustainable long-term to spend all this on a show and make this much."
Casey: And have ten people in the audience.
Rachel: If we're lucky. For "Frog and Toad" we had no audience. But we did have virtual audience. For “Mirandy and Brother Wind,” it looks like the numbers might be moving us toward having real audiences. But our feeling is we're also putting artists to work. We're creating work. We're putting it out in the world. … All of that is stuff we're really proud of, even if it doesn't net money. Because it doesn't. I think we made like three $3,000 on "Frog and Toad."
Casey: That's after you've paid everybody?
Rachel: No, that's just income. That's not profit. That's gross income for the show, and the show cost us like $30,000.
Casey: Oops.
Rachel: Yeah. So we knew that. Normally, it brings in like $35,000. So, again, it's about 10% of what we normally would make if it were live. When you look at that you're like, "Uh oh." But we've planned everything and, thankfully, we've been in a good position where we can do that. We put 30 people to work during that show, and that was really important to us.
I think the other thing is redefining what is success right now. For us, and for me personally, success is people having access to things that make them feel good, positive things that make them feel good — like good art and finding ways to connect people and help people in whatever way they need. That's really what's been driving me and what's been driving Synchro.
Casey: No, that's very different. I love that. Is there anything that you want to take away from this?
Rachel: I think the prioritization of family. I do get very wrapped up in my work, so being forced to renegotiate that has been an important, valuable thing. I want to retain that lesson.
