As I mentioned in the last edition, I’ve spent the last six months reporting on an investigative article, which was published last week in American Theatre Magazine under the title “What Happened At The Lark?” and focuses on the years that preceded the shutdown of the beloved New York play development center. It’s the first time I’ve ever done anything like it, and it proved to be an intense, emotional, and often solitary process, so I thought this week I’d take a beat from the customary recommendations to tell the story of how it happened. If you haven’t read the article yet, that’s okay! This story stands on its own. If you haven’t read the article and don’t care about how I wrote it, that’s also okay! See you in two weeks for a regular Me Gusta.
I started thinking about writing an article
about The Lark a little over a year ago; searching my email for evidence, I found that I had pitched a story about the “complete renovation” of the company, prompted by the appointment of May Adrales as the new artistic director and the departure of multiple staff members. In that pitch, I said:
I’m curious as to what was it that made so many staff members leave (though of course this happened during the pandemic so nothing was normal) and what is the vision for the ‘new Lark.’
The curiosity that animated that pitch was the same that would eventually prompt this article, but I never got a response from that outlet, and I ended up forgetting about the idea.
Then, six months later, The Lark shut down, and not only was I devastated by it, I also did not quite understand why it had happened. I again thought “maybe there’s a story there,” but something about it frightened me. In the original pitch, there would be hope—the old Lark was dead, but there’d be a new Lark to look forward to. Now, there would just be pain and an unhappy ending. I wasn’t sure I wanted to write that, to be faced with what had killed an institution so dear to me.
And yet… people kept telling me to do it. When I talked to my friends about The Lark’s demise and they pointed out the ways in which the official story did not account for all we knew about the company’s situation (notably, the mass resignations were never mentioned), people would often say “maybe you should write it.” I mostly said “eh.” Until one of those friends texted me and said “I’m hearing that American Theatre is looking into it.”
I don’t know why that prompted me to act. Maybe it was a selfish feeling, not wanting anyone else to write this article I had thought of first? Or a protective one, not trusting someone else to handle this delicate story of a place that meant so much to me? Probably a bit of both—and it’s worth noting American Theatre is not the outlet I originally pitched this to, so that probably also made me feel protective, like strangers were barging into my turf.
All I know is that in late October, I emailed Rob Weinert-Kendt (AT’s editor-in-chief, whom I had worked with before) with a tepid approach:
Maybe something better discussed offline, but are you thinking about a story re: The Lark? I know many of the people involved; they tell a different version from what was made public... I think it could be very compelling, plus it stands as a parable for the larger phenomenon of people quitting their theater jobs left and right. I'm interested in writing it while also being scared of it hahaha
To which he responded:
We have heard murmurs about this, and are expecting a pitch from someone about it. Can you tell me more about what you’ve heard?
I did not want to keep talking over email (for some reason, my paranoia was running high) so we jumped on the phone and I explained the outline of what I thought should be investigated in order to get a comprehensive picture of the shutdown. We debated whether it should be a larger look at the industry in general (The Lark is by no means the only place to close in recent history) but, scared as I was of the story, I also knew I only wanted to tell this one—it’s the one I cared about, and that felt important. I argued that in its specificity, it would still relate to the industry at large, and Rob ended up agreeing, telling me to start interviewing people and see if the whole thing had legs. I hung up nervous, feeling like now it was too late to back out.
Looking back, I got lucky
with my first interview. I kinda ambushed my subject (who asked to remain anonymous); we were having drinks for an unrelated reason and I sprung on them “so you worked at The Lark, and I’m writing an article about it. Can you speak to me for it?”
To their credit, they were unfazed and agreed to be interviewed then and there, providing a comprehensive account of their experience at the company and, most significantly, a recording of the meeting in which The Lark’s board informed employees of the shutdown. This recording was crucial, since it showed how the story had been told differently to staff and to the public, and I walked away from that experience feeling there was definitely an article here.
Subsequent interviews were not as easy. I had decided to start with staff members; it made more sense to me to get the perspective of the people with the least power first, which would then inform my interviews with leadership and board. But this posed a problem—the people with the least power were also the people with the most to lose, and with the exception of a couple of sources, most employees were not willing to talk. Some outright declined and could not be persuaded; others took a bit of cajoling, off-the-record exchanges in which I explained my intentions and tried to give them the assurances they needed.
This process was made all the more awkward by the fact that I knew some of them personally, and constantly worried that I was jeopardizing our relationship by being so pushy; or that, if they spoke to me, they could end up being upset at how they were portrayed in the article. I made it clear I had no allegiances, but I knew that wouldn’t prevent them from potentially being disappointed or angry later on.
On the other hand, more than one source told me “I wouldn’t be talking if it wasn’t to you,” which was a little heartbreaking for the pain it betrayed, but also helped me keep going when it felt like the whole thing was getting too hard—the interviews were, by and large, upsetting accounts, and to be trusted with them was often quite heavy.
As the holidays got closer, I had interviewed all the staff members that would speak to me, and I faced a choice: reach out to leadership and continue reporting, or take a break and put together a draft with the information I had already gathered. I was exhausted (this was far from the only project I was working on) and wanted to rest, but I feared that the more people I interviewed, the more people knew an article was in the works, and I was afraid The Lark’s board was going to find out and go on the defensive (a fear that was somewhat accurate, as it turned out). But I reasoned that no one was going to want to be interviewed over the holidays, so all I’d be doing by reaching out would be to make people anxious and potentially spoil time that was supposed to be relaxing for them. I decided to take a break.
I put together a preliminary draft based on my interviews and research, and sent it to Rob—who found it unbalanced without leadership and board perspectives, but liked it overall, and concluded, for the first time, “I have faith we’ll get over the finish line.”
I went to Brazil
to see my family for the first time in two years in what I thought would be a relaxing and recharging vacation—but, as you might recall, it ended up being the trip from hell (my biggest recommendation for all you international travelers: don’t be an immigrant!)
I had hoped to be back before I started interviewing executive leadership, but alas I was still stuck in Brazil, and that energy certainly did not help me feel okay about those conversations when they got a little heated. Which is not to say people were not forthcoming—just that I could tell folks wanted to focus on The Lark’s achievements, and they were sometimes surprised or upset when I brought up particular incidents of attrition with staff or board. The general response was “why is your article covering that?” I would then explain and justify the relevance of it to the shutdown, often causing them to go off the record to tell me the whole story from their point of view.
There were some truly nuanced conversations in those moments, and I do wish some of that had made it into the piece (though I can’t fault sources for choosing what discussions to engage with publicly). I did my best to fill in the blanks without editorializing, but it does pain me to think that sometimes people inside the same company cannot engage in meaningful discussion—that some topics feel off-limits, that admitting ignorance or doubt feels dangerous.
It made me think of the places I work with. What are we holding from one another? What are people not telling me because they’re afraid of how I’ll react or because they have no faith that I’ll do something about it? The only thing that alleviated my ever-growing anxiety was the hope that the piece would provoke internal conversation in other theaters. I pressed on and, now in the U.S., finished interviewing leadership.
Then Rob and I got an email from a PR rep: The Lark’s board was aware of the investigation, and they wanted to talk.
The offer on the table,
as outlined in that email, was an exclusive on The Lark’s efforts to rehome its programming before shutting down, with a comprehensive list of where each program would go (which was not yet public information). I was confused: if the board had found out about the article, it must have been from someone I interviewed, which means the scope of it must have been communicated as well. While, of course, the rehoming of the programs was part of the shutdown, an article chronicling the internal issues that led to The Lark closing seemed like an ill fit for this exclusive.
Rob and I debated it extensively; I worried about how long the piece was running even without this information, and I could not commit to a deadline (which they had asked for in order to withhold the announcement) before interviewing board members. Ultimately, we decided to pass, and I hoped that it wouldn’t derail my efforts in this last round of interviews.
Sadly, it proved to be the hardest part of the whole investigation. Trustees would agree to talk to me, then change their minds, then change their minds again. Sometimes they’d cancel without seemingly any intention of rescheduling, delaying the process even further until I pinned them down on a new date. When I’d finally sit down with them, conversations would often begin in a very hostile manner, and I was accused more than once of being a mouthpiece for a staff member who had been very vocal about the shutdown on social media. This argument never tracked for me, as I would explain to them, because a) I am just not the sort of person who would do this job at someone else’s behest, b) I had not become aware of that particular staff member until after I started reporting, and c) almost all employees I interviewed were upset, so to believe only one of them had grievances and therefore must be running the show was a bit myopic.
As we talked, board members would often soften and become more candid; more than one interview ended with the source thanking me for the thoroughness of the interview and my willingness to engage. However, that spell never lasted long, and the next time we interacted, the situation would be back to square one, with me back to being a supposedly biased agent who wanted to smear The Lark’s good name over a couple of allegations from a disgruntled employee. One of the interviews was particularly upsetting, as it was with someone I admired but had never gotten to meet in person; they not only accused me of bad faith, but also told me what I was doing was wrong and would “retraumatize” people. Which, granted, it might—I just couldn’t ignore the fact that other people had already been traumatized by an official narrative that erased their version of events.
The hardest thing to navigate, as I pressed trustees for answers, was what I described in the article as “a tale of two Larks”—hearing information that in no way squared with what staff (or in some cases, executive leaders) had told me. I navigated each situation individually, but the overall effect was destabilizing: I didn’t think either side was necessarily lying to me (with some exceptions), but rather that they genuinely believed completely different things. It again made me think of the places I work and have worked with: what was I seeing differently, totally unaware of (or unwilling to consider) how other people saw it?
That parenthesis is significant: a couple of my sources were clearly not in the business of being told they were wrong. During my interview with one of them, I mentioned that my grief over the shutdown was “the animus” of the piece; after the interview was over, they called me to say that animus means “an axe to grind,” and if I really had an animus then I wasn’t impartial and shouldn’t be writing this. To my regret, I answered that English wasn’t my first language and I meant to say that my grief “animated” the investigation—but after hanging up, I googled it and it turns out we were both right. The difference is I googled it, while they didn’t feel like they had to. (To be fair, this happens to me a lot, so English speakers: by all means, please point out when I make a mistake, but please first make sure that you’re right? It’s really grating for me and embarrassing for you when it turns out I know more about your language than you do. But it’s great when you are right: Rob, for example, helped me see I had been getting “disclaim” and “disclose” mixed up all my life).
Still, as the investigation wound down, I felt determined to paint as fair a portrait as possible, considering all angles and letting the reader draw their own conclusions.
I just had to sit down and write the damned thing.
The process of writing
the final draft is the first moment I can think of when I finally began to feel good about the article. It might have been for two reasons. One is that writing is the thing I know how to do and am confident about, unlike all the other parts of conducting an investigation, which I was doing for the first time.
The other, more annoying but quite necessary, is that I became my own very avid and hard-to-please fact-checker, and that rigor gave me assurance. I was aware as I wrote that my experience with fiction will often push me to smooth edges and color outside the lines to give the reader the best experience possible—an instinct that has to be curbed when you’re writing about real people and the real things they said and did. When putting together the preliminary draft, I had quoted a lot from my notes instead of the interview recordings; for this one, I listened to hours of tape to get each quote just right, without the flourishes and simplifications of my notes.
I also read and re-read all the documents I had collected and did an extensive amount of online research, to make sure I could prove each assertion made in the piece. Before this article, I must have used Wayback Machine maybe twice in my life; now, its archiving of The Lark’s website is one of my most accessed pages—I could easily answer a quiz about who worked at the company every year for the last five years.
When I was done, I had what I believed to be a pretty compelling draft that also happened to be carefully notated with the source of each piece of information, as well as a couple of outstanding things that needed to be verified before publication. The only problem, of course, was that it was almost 12,000 words, far longer than the average American Theatre article, and far longer than most articles in general—I sent it to Rob feeling both proud and worried that he’d reject it just on length alone (which he immediately pointed out upon receiving it: “12,000 words is easily twice or thrice the length it should be.”)
However, later that same day, he texted me: “It’s pretty breathtaking.”
After a bit of back and forth,
we arrived at a draft we were both happy with (which ended up being about a thousand words shorter). I did suggest the possibility of breaking it up in chunks, but we both agreed that ultimately it made more sense as a single thing that people could read at their pace—we could only hope people would read it all before jumping to conclusions.
We then proceeded to do due diligence: Rob, with TCG lawyers and leadership; me, with sources I needed to follow up with and with sensitivity reading. Both of which turned out to be better than I expected!
Going back to sources had scared me because I thought people would change their minds about being in the article now that it was a reality with an approaching publication date; thankfully, that did not happen, and even though there was some negotiation about the exact phrasing of quotes I had not caught on tape, people were still on board and willing to get their truth out there.
Sensitivity reading, on the other hand, scared me because I had asked a friend of mine, Hope Chávez, to do it—she’s not only incredibly well-versed in the nuances of anti-oppression, but she’s also capable of standing her ground during tough conversations while still keeping an open mind. BUT she is my friend, and I warned her that I might not always agree with what she brought up and that I hoped that wasn’t a problem, to which she responded pretty much the same thing, as she did not plan to compromise on her notes to me.
However, I had nothing to be afraid of—it was like Hope was looking into my soul as she read. Each of her very thoughtful critiques was about something I myself had struggled with and, in some cases, made the wrong call about, which I couldn’t see until she put it in her eloquent and concise notes. The piece was markedly better once she was through with it; both Rob and I were very glad we brought her on board.
Once Rob got the green light from his side of the due diligence, there was one thing left to do: send it to the board, a few days ahead of publication the following Monday, for an official response.
The board’s response
arrived Friday before the deadline, and caught me riding the MetroNorth back from Hope’s place in New Haven, with my cat Chester in tow (I had left him there for a second trip to Brazil, for my sister’s wedding—yes, this investigation was so long it ended up encompassing two international voyages).
Scrolling through their response using my mobile data (MetroNorth, you NEED wi-fi, man), I found it to be both quite predictable and surprising. The predictable part was that they more or less disagreed with this article existing in the first place and with it challenging the official narrative, which they stuck by. The surprising part was that some objections were backed up with exactly what I had hoped for—email and document copies, as opposed to opinions and arguments.
Not all of that evidence held up, though; some of it proved to be circumstantial or misleading. But on a couple of points, the board’s response did result in alterations to the article, which meant Rob and I pretty much did not have a weekend. I had expected this for myself, but a lot of his texts included things like “at kids baseball game, can’t talk right now.” Sorry Rob! (This was, of course, not unique to us—at one point late Sunday, the Lark’s PR rep texted me a picture of her drink.)
Even then, less than twelve hours away from publication, I was still not sure the article was gonna go up. I kept expecting some catastrophe to kill it at the last minute. When I wasn’t talking to Rob or to the PR rep, I spent my time on the phone with Hope and with my dad (who became an unexpectedly ardent supporter of the piece). My emotions were running very high, both from arguing back and forth with the board and from the fast-approaching reality that soon, everyone with access to an internet connection would be able to read this article and form an opinion on whether I had done a good job—or failed everyone involved.
On Monday morning, Rob sent me the piece as it would appear on the site, for one last review. I read through it trying to control my shaking insides, made a couple of minor edits, and gave it the green light. An hour later, it was up.
I had crafted a statement
to share the article on social media in advance, predicting that my day-of jitters might make me too nervous to write a cohesive message. Even so, I still made a mistake: the Twitter post reads “I thank each of the brave sources who to me for it” instead of “spoke to me for it.”
I didn’t get the chance to correct it because I logged off all social media after posting; I did not feel at all like monitoring reactions in real time. That, of course, did not prevent people from reaching out to me personally, though I’m happy to report those reach outs were positive—one email was even titled “Your article!! (This is a good, friendly email hopefully! Not a hater!)”
I am also happy to report that when I logged back in, at the end of that week, the reaction on social media had been pretty much the same, with people engaging thoughtfully in the discussion; in a beautiful thread expanding on the issues the article raises, playwright Mike Lew ascribed it the intention “to clarify not vilify,” which is very much what I hoped people would feel.
Not every response was positive, which I had anticipated and am okay with. Some people talked about things that weren’t mentioned in the article, which I can’t engage with—anything that didn’t make it in, I left out for a reason, and I can’t in good conscience reopen that discussion. Other people were never going to be okay with this article existing in the first place, and I respect that, while repeating the words of my conclusion: “I don’t have the power to have the last word about The Lark. And I truly hope this isn’t it, because the company really did achieve so much.” Bring on the takes!
What I am happiest about, however, is the industry players who told me they have read it and are thinking deeply about it. I only lived a small portion of this story, so I don’t feel like it belongs to me (I still feel weird when people call it “my” article). But I am the one who wrote it, and I did so under the belief that it could prove healing for our industry in a moment of intense turmoil. I still hope for, as Andrea Hiebler put it, “real change and progress, not just empty talking points.”
If it sounds grandiose, forgive me—I consider myself a realist, but I think inside me lives an optimistic little boy.
That little boy,
however, is trapped in the body of a thirty-year-old who’s very tired. I honestly don’t know what comes next. Hopefully a nap?
Writing-wise, I can’t say for sure whether I’ll do something like this again. I’m happy with how it turned out, but I also had a deep emotional engagement with this piece, and I’m not sure what it would look like to do an investigation into something I have no connection with. Maybe it’ll be less scary? Maybe it’ll be less exciting?
All I know is that, last Sunday, I caught myself thinking about David Chase, creator of The Sopranos. In spite of giving birth to one of the most famous and celebrated TV series of all time (not to mention kickstarting a creative revolution that is responsible for our “too much TV era”), Chase was notoriously unhappy with his success, because he had always dreamed of doing movies and considered TV a lesser medium. Isn’t that bananas? Whatever comes next, be it more journalism, getting a play produced, staffing in a TV show, or quitting writing altogether to become a cloistered monk, I don’t wanna be unhappy because it’s not what I expected.
In the meantime, I’ll keep sending you biweekly recommendations.