Why We Do Theatre and Advocacy

Theatremakers Elizabeth Hess and Ludovica Villar-Hauser advocate for underserved and marginalized woman, trans, and gender-expansive theatre artists. Elizabeth is a performer, playwright, director, arts educator, and founder of the Hess Collective; and Ludovica is the founder and artistic director of Parity Productions. Their work has evolved over time, and in this conversation, they talk about that evolution and the necessity of creating work that is both a reckoning and a celebration of diversity and difference—especially during the current moment. 

Ludovica Villar-Hauser: Elizabeth, someone asked me the other day how we know each other. The first time our paths crossed was through the League of Professional Theatre Women when we both served on the international committee and were part of the team that created the first Gilder/Coigney International Theatre Award in 2011, and everyone contributed something. You contributed tickets to your production at that time. That was such a collaborative experience.

Elizabeth Hess: Yes, it was called Dust to Dust. It was a commissioned piece based on systematic wartime rape, which I performed internationally, as well as at Stage Left and the United Nations (UN) Conference on gender violence here in New York. I was so determined to take that piece out of the box, and there was a UN Women chapter president at the UN performance who came up to me afterwards and said, “I would love to work with you.”

So that piece led to my next commission, which was called Spoiled. I said to her, “If I'm going to do another piece on violence against women, I don't want it to portray women as victims. I really want to find another way to address gender-based violence.” So I thought, what if I tell these stories from the male point of view, to be performed by women? So they empower women while not appropriating male experience. And that project eventually became my company’s second co-production at La MaMa.

We were literally a day away from going into tech when I got a call from Mia Yoo saying, “Elizabeth, this is one of the hardest calls I've ever had to make. We have to close the theatre because of COVID.” So we pivoted online, and that was part of what gave me the idea to film our third co-pro, No Reservation, which just completed its run.

Ludovica: Tell me more about that. Parity had a similar experience.

Elizabeth: No Reservation is the world premiere of a multidisciplinary performance piece at La MaMa in the Downstairs Theatre. It’s about global goddesses who crash a dinner party celebrating false gods. It opened on 6 February and ran until 23 February. We filmed the piece because we want to submit it to international theatre festivals, share it with educational institutions, and make it accessible to those who weren't able to be there for any reason. So when you said, “let’s have a conversation about advocacy,” I thought filming is part of outreach.

Ludovica: I remember the phone call from New York Theatre Workshop on 12 March 2020, similar to yours, when we had to close Mirrors by Azure D. Osborne-Lee—a deeply personal, powerful work. It’s a story about race, about violence against women, about love between two women. And beyond that, it was about forgiveness and self-forgiveness, the need to heal. It was a tremendous opportunity for the actors, for Azure, for all of us. And then, suddenly, it was gone.

I remember returning to the theatre on 12 March, that we had all left the night before, fully believing we would return to perform. Yet there we were, not to take the stage, but to gather our things.

That night stays with me. One of the actors, AnJu Hyppolite, ran through the entire play in ten minutes. We sat there, laughing, grieving. It was like a wake. That, to me, was community. That moment, we faced it together.

During that time, I was obsessed with one thought: How do we help Azure? How do we help these actors? They deserved to be seen. That’s when we turned to filming. We filmed the play in just four days—four exhausting, stressful, exhilarating days. But we did it. And that experience led us to our next project, Stop-Motion by Liz Kerin, which we also filmed during the pandemic shutdowns. We only recently finished editing it, and now it’s out in the world, seeking distribution, and being entered into film festivals.

It’s funny how things come together, how something that started out of necessity becomes something lasting.

Elizabeth: Yes. Terrific. I mean, you just have to stay the course, right, Ludovica? When it came to No Reservation, I knew I needed to write a piece about a celebration of sisterhood. I didn’t know how I was going to get there, I didn’t know what the journey was going to be. I wanted to co-create it with a group of women diverse in age, race, ethnicity, orientation, and that's what led to this work. At the very end of the piece, there is this collective breath. These four women actually share collective breath that includes all their uniqueness, all their authenticity, and yet all their engagement with each other.

Ludovica: Yes! And that’s why we do what we do. We have to do our art. And then advocacy is because we love our community.

I think the theatre always lags behind, which is a shocking thing to say for a medium that's supposed to lead the way.

Elizabeth: You know, it's interesting too when we talk about work being out of the box, I’d also really love to break out of separate disciplines. There are feminist visual artists, and a real understanding of that movement, but performing arts has lagged behind in recognizing feminist theatre artists who are addressing issues of inequality, invisibility, exclusivity in their work.

Ludovica: I think the theatre always lags behind, which is a shocking thing to say for a medium that's supposed to lead the way, supposed to mirror society and engage conversation or create community. There are reasons for that. And one of them is money. For example, we have to have space. Space is really expensive. And if you go outside or pick a space that's an alternative, well, you've got to bring the lights in. You've got to bring the sound in. That's expensive. You have to pay people, a lot of people—actors, directors, designers, casting directors. If you want to film it, that's a whole other cost. Then you have to be able to market the thing because people have to come and see it. It's an enormous endeavor.

Elizabeth: It is. And I have to say, I am very grateful that my aesthetic is very minimalist. I love to work with next to nothing, and every single thing that is on that stage is transformative. But even when you do solo work, it's not a solo endeavor. It's not like being a novelist, or a painter. It’s a collaboration.

Ludovica: To ensure the experience is collaborative is an enormous responsibility. I just think that it's about growing. And now we're challenged even more because of the recent edicts about certain work not being funded. Like the National Endowment for the Arts, they're literally not allowed to fund gender-based work, which is what we do. At Parity Productions, we advocate for women, trans people, and the gender expansive community.

Elizabeth: You have to find the funding somewhere. And however that happens, you need to find the tools to do it. No Reservation was conceived and developed before the election. And I thought, “Okay, we're going to have our first female president—this piece is going to be such a celebration!” Then what happened is: Now this piece is all too timely. I would have loved it to have been so celebratory. And yet, you know, Ludovica, it still is. It's still a celebration of the human spirit because we are doing it.

Ludovica: I love that. And although advocacy is critical, especially now, you can't tell people what to do, and you can't tell them how to do it. I learned early on that you can't force people to change—you can only create the conditions, and hope that people respond. As student union president at Hammersmith and West London College, I fought for abortion rights and fair treatment of international students. We rallied, organized, and took action, but I kept hitting a wall, thinking if I just explained things passionately enough, people would listen and act. That came from my childhood—my father, deeply political, had fought and eventually fled Franco’s dictatorship in Spain. I grew up steeped in activism—I attended my first protest at the age of ten. But at nineteen, I realized advocacy isn’t about convincing people through sheer will. Change happens when individuals come to it on their own. It was a humbling lesson.

Fast forward to 2009: I attended a town hall at the Women's Project (now WP) alongside New Perspectives Theatre, Susan Jonas, Elizabeth Van Dyke, and others. During that meeting, I had a shocking realization—we women weren’t getting the work. The rudimentary numbers and conversations made it clear: The lack of opportunities wasn’t just a personal struggle; it was systemic. I understood the bigger picture. Leaving the meeting, I walked thirty-five blocks home, and by the time I arrived, I knew what I had to do. Julie Crosby, then the executive director of WP, put it simply: “We’re over 50 percent of the population. Just put your money where your mouth is.” That moment led to the creation of Works by Women. Later, we merged our theatrical and advocacy efforts, forming Parity Productions to build programs that address some of the disparities.

My job is to take you on a journey. Not to tell you who you are, how you should feel. I leave you alone to have your own experience because that's what will happen anyway.

Elizabeth: I agree with all you’ve said. One of the things I really feel strongly about is that my job as a theatremaker is to be a brilliant storyteller. If there is a message in there that happens to resonate with you, that's wonderful. But my job is to take you on a journey. Not to tell you who you are, how you should feel. I leave you alone to have your own experience because that's what will happen anyway. And, actually, that's a much richer, fuller experience. I'm a preacher's kid—a Mennonite minister's daughter—so I can smell a sermon coming from a mile away in any guise. It doesn’t matter how you dress it up! So I couldn't agree more with you, Ludovica, that you cannot change anyone. Also, I don't want to. It's enough responsibility to take care of my own voice, my own vision, my own heart, my own authenticity.

Ludovica: That's the job, to be authentic.

Elizabeth: And I think that the theatre is in the best sense a sacred space. Someone once said it “has the power of prayer.” And there is something about that. It’s a place to live within whatever is alive within you in the moment, and to create the space where we can do that for each other.

Ludovica: It's the permission to be able to do, to risk. And it's the reason why I also think the Parity Development Award, which we give to two early career playwrights every year, is so important. Because we are living in a society where a lot is expected of us. And I just think, where's the space to make mistakes? Where's the space to be able to try things out? And what's a mistake, anyway?

Elizabeth: There's no such thing as perfect. I do believe that there's such a thing as excellence. There is such a thing as integrity, but the word perfect can go out the window. And anyway, according to who is something good, bad, a mistake, a success? The very words themselves are much too dualistic for me. There's a lack of generosity of spirit in those words that doesn't interest me. We don't want physical girdles, and we don't want psychological girdles. Take those things off. No constraints here.

Ludovica: Yes. Because we're all culturally different and we all grew up in different families and different circumstances. And so that is part of the joy, celebrating difference. I think that's what's missing right now. We’re so busy “othering.”

Elizabeth: Where does the fear of that come from, Ludovica?

Ludovica: I don’t claim to have all the answers—I can only share what I observe. When there is cruelty, abuse, a lack of kindness, generosity, or education—and I don’t just mean formal schooling, but all forms of learning—people can feel profoundly alone and angry. Excessive control and systemic neglect can create a deep sense of injustice. What I see now is a world where so much suffering and unkindness are manifesting in destructive ways, played out on a global stage. It all stems from the same roots—neglect, oppression, and a failure to nurture empathy.

Elizabeth: That’s very wise. I also have the sense that the patriarchy is very threatened these days. Regardless of what's going on out there in the world, we are continuing to make art, and they can't kill that. These old regimes are absolutely terrified of being dismissed, dismantled.

Ludovica: I think you're right. It's the fear of the loss of control, the loss of power, and the inability to understand that “if I let go, maybe I can learn something. Maybe I can expand. Maybe what I will learn is greater joy, greater happiness.” Our job is joy. Being alive is to create joy, to feel joy, to experience joy, and that's not the world we're living in.

Elizabeth: That personal joy can be very threatening. My spiritedness was very, very, threatening to my parents. If you're lucky enough to do what we do, Ludovica, if you're lucky enough to have the tools to be able to create out of the destruction, we need to share that.

Ludovica: And the sharing is the advocacy. We don't want others to go through what we went through. We want it to be a better world. Look at the mess we’re in, at the lack of grace. I have to continue supporting wherever I can.

Elizabeth: I think that's beautiful. You know what I say to my New York University students in the very first class? There's only one rule. You may not hurt yourself or anyone else physically, psychologically, or emotionally. Otherwise, everything is game.

Ludovica: That's very good. Very good.