How House Plays Got Chosen By the New York Foundation for the Arts for Fiscal Sponsorship
The debut production of my theatre project, House Plays, sold out at Forbes House Museum last summer. And we've got another show at the Loring Greenough House this October. It's been a good pilot so far. And perhaps one of the biggest things to come from it has been the New York Foundation of the Arts (NYFA, not to be confused with the New York Film Academy) choosing House Plays for fiscal sponsorship. This organization is affiliated with the likes of Spike Lee, Lynn Nottage and David Henry Hwang, among others. But the journey to getting to this point where supporters can make tax-deductible donations every year and we can keep raising the funds to keep this project going was full of a couple of gutsy choices.
In case you are new to this blog and are just learning about House Plays for the first time, here's the definition: we stage live theatre in historic houses, museums and residences during a time where these historically protected spaces are under-utilized and the arts world seems too exclusive for being touted as an environment that welcomes everybody. Not only that, but in our current administration the arts are actively being defunded (NEA cuts and BU Playwriting MFA, check in here) and the stories that spaces hold within them are being erased. I mean, Anthony Burns was captured from Boston and taken back to his master in Virginia during the Fugitive Slave Act, a pretty famous case. And yet, in the Virginian historical archives, we couldn't find any mention of it. We're living in scary times for sure.
So that's what we're eradicating with House Plays. We're creating a performing arts world where anyone can experience it and anyone can share their stories regardless of who they are. The idea was not this developed when I started thinking about it over a year ago. Actual theatre rental spaces are crazy expensive, so usually when you're a small company you usually produce a show in a church or a school auditorium. Armed with previous experience with my debut "This is Not a Bill" (which utilized historic landmarks in Salem, MA to uncover the state's abolitionist history) and with doing student-run productions known as house plays as a high school student in South Africa, I decided to apply for multiple Massachusetts Cultural Council grants. The deadline was approaching, so why not give it a try for some funding? Boston and Milton said yes. Alright, I thought to myself. I guess we're doing this.
The journey has been littered with plenty of setbacks, from people committing and then ghosting us completely, to launching an unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign (this all-or-nothing thing doesn't work), to me having to conduct most of the rehearsals flat on my back because of a herniated disk. And I will admit I did a bunch of weird things to try to raise more money like enter a competition based on how much money could be raised for a nonprofit (don't blame me; the prize was $25,000). But nonetheless, Cambridge Day covered the project back in April and I made my first podcast appearance soon after that.
Following the success of the first run, I started looking into fiscal sponsorship. Because House Plays needed the ability to apply to bigger and more grant opportunities than I can do just as a little entity by myself, and the project already has proof of success. So after a Google search, I saw that the deadline to apply for sponsorship with the New York Foundation of the Arts was approaching, so I went ahead and did it. I'd already spent most of the year swallowing my imposter syndrome and applying to all sorts of bigwiggy things like the Jonathan Larson Grant because sometimes, you just have to think beyond what you think your confines are. And, well, the rest is history.
As I've said in previous posts on grant funding, you have to have a mission statement behind why you do what you do, a budget outlining what parts of the funds go to what aspects of the project, and generally something that is totally out of the box. Unfortunately you'll sometimes get rejected (I wrote a blog post a while ago about the possibility of a Taylor Swift jukebox musical and got lambasted on Facebook) and there's always going to be someone who determines that your ideas are totally stupid, but at the end of the day, your yes to bringing this project to life and your belief in it are the only things that matter. The Beatles were rejected by 22 record labels. Twilight was rejected by 14 publishers. And even Jonathan Larson's musical before Rent, Superbia, was considered too strange for Broadway, which makes me laugh seeing how the subject matter accurately reflects our current times.
House Plays is accepting tax-deductible donations here, and if you need someone to look over your script, create a song, or make words sound like magic, you can drop me a line. In the meantime, use this blog post as proof that you can achieve absolutely anything, seeing as this happened to a 20-something playwright in Massachusetts.
Stay educated,
Alexia
