INTERVIEW | Alyssa Milano on the #MeToo movement: 'We're not going to stand for it any more'

It was like any other day for Alyssa Milano, the American activist and actor, until she started getting ready for bed. While reading a flurry of articles about Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual assaults, her phone went off.

It was her friend Charles Clymer, who sent her a screenshot. It read: “Suggested by a friend: if all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘me too’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.”

“I thought, you know what? This is an amazing way to get some idea of the magnitude of how big this problem is,” said Milano over the phone from Los Angeles. “It was also a way to get the focus off these horrible men and to put the focus back on the victims and survivors.”

Milano added a sentence to her friend’s message before posting it on Twitter: “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted, write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.”

And she sent it out.

Read more here.

SOURCE: The Guardian

---

RELATED PROGRAMMING

Truth and Consequences: #MeToo and the New Sexual Landscape | JUL 27

---

ARTICLE | The Woman Who Created #MeToo Long Before Hashtags

In 1997, Tarana Burke sat across from a 13-year-old girl who had been sexually abused. The young girl was explaining her experience, and it left Ms. Burke speechless. That moment is where the Me Too campaign was born.

“I didn’t have a response or a way to help her in that moment, and I couldn’t even say ‘me too,’ ” Ms. Burke said.

“It really bothered me, and it sat in my spirit for a long time,” she added.

Ten years after that conversation, Ms. Burke created Just Be Inc., a nonprofit organization that helps victims of sexual harassment and assault. She sought out the resources that she had not found readily available to her 10 years before and committed herself to being there for people who had been abused.

And she gave her movement a name: Me Too.

On October 15, 2017, those two words burst into the spotlight of social media with #metoo, a hashtag promoted by the actress Alyssa Milano. Amid the firestorm that ignited, some women of color noted pointedly that the longtime effort by Ms. Burke, who is black, had not received support over the years from prominent white feminists… more.

SOURCE: The New York Times

---

RELATED PROGRAMMING

Truth and Consequences: #MeToo and the New Sexual Landscape | JUL 27

---

BIOGRAPHY | Robert Schenkkan

Robert Schenkkan is a Pulitzer-prize winning, Tony Award-winning, Writer's Guild Award-winning, three-time Emmy nominated writer of Stage, Television, and Film. He is the author of fourteen original full-length plays (including WICA’s production of The Kentucky Cycle in 2010), two musicals, and a collection of one-act plays. He co-wrote the feature film, Hacksaw Ridge (six Academy Award nominations) and The Quiet American, and his television credits include: All the Way, The Pacific, The Andromeda Strain, and Spartacus.

Learn more about Robert Schenkkan here.

---

RELATED PROGRAMMING

The Investigation | August 24, 2019

---

ARTICLE | How Mark Rothko Unlocked the Emotional Power of Color

“The name Mark Rothko is synonymous with sensitive canvases that feature arrangements of rectangular panes in vivid hues. The artist was a skilled colorist. The great joy of experiencing his paintings is looking at how the colors, shapes, and backgrounds interact with one another, particularly around the edges. The soft, brushy borders that surround his color fields create one mood, while the sharper, straighter lines of the central forms elicit another. Alternate juxtapositions of similar or divergent tones—shades of deep blue against dark purple or bright red against brown—elicit disparate emotional responses. In employing a signature structure, Rothko found infinite variation.

Untitled (Red, Orange), 1968

Despite his devotion to this modern, abstract mode, Rothko derived significant inspiration from ancient, medieval, and Renaissance art and architecture. An erudite researcher, the artist transformed his scholarly understanding of art history into pared-down paintings. If they can at first feel opaque to the viewer searching for reference points, Rothko didn’t mind. “My pictures are indeed façades (as they have been called),” he once said. “Sometimes I open one door and one window or two doors and two windows. I do this only through shrewdness. There is more power in telling little than in telling all.” That mystery and complexity have given him one of the most enduring and esteemed reputations in 20th-century art…” more

SOURCE: Artsy

---

RELATED PROGRAMMING

RED | FEB 07-22, 2020

ART TALKS: MARK ROTHKO | FEB 19, 2020

---

BIOGRAPHY | Craig Lucas

Craig Lucas is an American playwright, screenwriter, theatre director, musical actor, and film director. He began his career as a New York-based playwright in the 1980’s. The success of his screenplay for the 1990 film Longtime Companion established him as an important contributor to the dramatic literature born of the AIDS Crisis. Although Lucas is identified with the gay theater community of his time, the characteristic themes of his work address broad issues of life’s absurdity and the arbitrary nature of fate. Lucas’s embrace of absurdity is reflected in the story of his origins.

He began life in Dickensian style, as a foundling, abandoned in the back of a car in Atlanta, beside a plaintive note from his mother explaining that she could not care for her child. His adoptive parents raised him outside Philadelphia, where his father worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. His mother encouraged Lucas’s love for acting and singing. An early interest in writing poems and plays led him to the study of creative writing at Boston University, with an opportunity to study with poet Anne Sexton, who gently suggested that perhaps playwriting was his métier. He credits Sexton with helping him gain admission to the Yale School of Drama and also with encouraging him to skip graduate school and plunge right into the world of professional theater in New York.

Lucas’s first job in New York was as a chorus performer in musical theater, and his career as a playwright has often been punctuated by collaboration with musicians. Indeed, his first produced work was a revue based on musicals by the acclaimed composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. The show, Marry Me a Little, also inaugurated Lucas’s collaboration with Norman René, with whom Lucas worked closely until René’s death from AIDS complications in 1996.

Craig Lucas has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, the Rockefeller Foundations, and The National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pew Charitable Trusts. He has received the Tony Award nomination for the books An American in Paris (2015), Light in the Piazza (2005), and Prelude to a Kiss. He was nominated for the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Prelude to a Kiss.

After penning the screenplay for Prelude starring Meg Ryan and Alec Baldwin; Lucas was quoted as saying:

“When Alec Baldwin kissed the old man onstage [in Prelude to a Kiss], the audience in the theater went, ‘Awww.’ When he kissed him in the film, you would have thought I brought a Rwandan child out and cut his head off. [Laughs] The studio said: Let’s make it a hug instead. And I said: Well, then we’d have to call it Prelude to a Hug. I didn’t come to the film with the adventuresome spirit that you need to take a play and rethink it. If I had the foresight, I would have made a more playful picture.”

---

RELATED PROGRAMMING

Prelude to a Kiss | Jun 07-22, 2019

---