EPISODE 5 - Corey Mitchell
Corey Mitchell:
As humans, the thing that we know about theater is that we want storytelling, we want to hear conflict, we want to hear triumph and we want to be together as we do this. And this is weird and this is not normal to not be connected with each other.
Tyler Greene:
Hi there, welcome to This Is My Family, a podcast about building a life with the people you love. I'm your host, Tyler Greene, and I'm so glad that you're here. On today's show we've got Corey Mitchell. He was the first teacher ever to win the Tony Award for Excellence in Theater Education in 2015. His career of more than two decades with the Northwest School of the Arts in Charlotte, North Carolina is extraordinary, and I cannot wait to share this conversation with you.
But first, really quickly, for those who are new to the show, welcome. This is a podcast that I created in order to explore and ultimately celebrate the many beautiful, messy ways we make our families and also the ways that those families make us. We've got four episodes in the can already and I'd love for you to go back and listen to those. The first one in particular is the story of me, my husband, and our son, Sam. We also talked to drag Queens and public radio podcast hosts, and last week a meditation teacher. So please go in and check those out. We hope that you learn something new with these conversations about what family can be, and perhaps more importantly, that you feel connected during extremely disconnected times. So again, thanks and welcome to the new folks. For those of you that have been sticking around, we appreciate you deeply.
Today we're talking to an educator about artistic families and the communities of connection that they create. When I started this podcast, I knew that I had to feature an exploration of the types of bonds that we form in these communities, and even more specifically in the theater. I've been a theater kid since as early as I can remember. I think when I was five years old, I'd be putting on magic shows in my backyard for my grandmother and saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls." My mom still makes fun of me to this day, but my dad took me to see musicals like Annie, West Side Story. I was in marching band, symphonic band, in the drama club, and then I went to college and I acted in college in productions like Hair and directed things like The Threepenny Opera and The Secret Garden.
I'm obsessed with musicals and I'm also obsessed about a theater education and what it can do for people. I think a lot of times people get made fun of for pursuing a theater education, because what real values it have in the world. And I always advocate that theater education prepares somebody to communicate effectively, to navigate tough situations, to really learn what teamwork is.
And so, I wanted to explore family and that context with somebody who's literally been changing lives his entire career. I think like drag queens and drag families, drama kids, and the groups that we form are family, especially queer kids whose family of origin may not be ideal or even safe. And it's the teachers at the helm of these communities, people like Corey Mitchell, it's those folks that shift the trajectory for many kids like me towards the spotlights we didn't even know we needed. So take a moment and remember your favorite teacher from your youth, really imagine that person, maybe even take a breath with me.
I love the idea of this little piece of audio causing all of us to put these people into the universe. Who changed your life in school? Corey Mitchell is that image for many people. If you do a search of him online, you'll find decades of stories about how he changed so many young people's lives, and now Corey calls those decades of students his kids, they're his family. But Corey told me he initially wanted to be a performer. He grew up in rural North Carolina in a big family, after college he moved away, but his college had been paid for in large part by a fellowship that meant he had to return to North Carolina to teach for a few years. We join the conversation as Corey tells me about that time in his life.
Corey Mitchell:
I came back to North Carolina with no money, with no car and knowing that I had to student teach, but I had friends, and sometimes, when we talk about family, those people that you feel like you can rely on. I showed up with a duffel bag at my friend, James' house, his apartment, and I said, "I've got a student teach and I don't have any place to live." And I had given him the couch that was in his living room before I left Wilmington, and he said, "Well, as far as I'm concerned, that's still your couch. So if it's your couch, you sleep on it." So during the time when I was student teaching, I was literally homeless and I relied on another friend who was student teaching at the same school who picked me up and brought me home in the afternoons.
Tyler Greene:
These close friends helped Corey settle back into North Carolina, but he'd left behind a lot when you made the move. He'd been working as a performer, living in Minnesota, coming to terms with his identity as a gay man, and for the first time in his life, he was living happily with a partner, a man named Jose.
Corey Mitchell:
And I will tell you, that was really, truly one of the hardest decisions of my life, because also in that time period, especially when I was living in Minnesota, I finally came to grips with my sexuality. I was actually living with a boyfriend, but I wasn't out to my family. And when I made the decision that I was going to move back to North Carolina and know that I really hurt Jose because I didn't invite him to come with me. And he had made it clear that he was willing to do a reset for us, on his life, from where he was working in his career and doing, because he was a few years older than me, but I wasn't there yet, I wasn't out of the closet, I wasn't ready to have that conversation with my parents, and with my family and friends.
And that was tough because it was quite literally the only time in my whole life that I have been in a relationship with someone where we were living together, and I have not had that since then. When I went to Minnesota and I was halfway across the country, that was really the first time, even after college, where I felt this freedom, I felt like I was an adult, and I was like, "This is how I will manifest."
But then when I left Jose in Minneapolis, I literally left what I thought, everything behind that was gay, except for one thing, which was of course back in the '90s, they had these things called dirty magazines, they don't get printed these days. I had one that I had brought back with me, it was my favorite one, and I stuck it under the mattress in the bedroom. And inevitably within a week of being home, my father found it and he did not say anything to me. He actually showed it to my sister who was two years younger, and my father went, "There's nothing [inaudible 00:08:46] being in this, that could mean something." And my sister went, "Yeah, it means he's gay."
He surprised me in so many ways because he really did not make a big deal about it. And then my mother, I remember one time I was home and we were in the kitchen, she was cooking and I was just talking to her and she said, "I still pray that God's going to change your heart someday." And I said, "Mom, why would you pray for God to change my heart instead of praying for me to find happiness?" And it stopped her. She really didn't have much to say, and it put a bit of a rift in our relationship.
We were still close, but there was always this weird thing hanging that had never been spoken. And my mom and I had not really talked about it, and there was always this weirdness between us that lasted for maybe year and a half, two years, something like that. And I was in the car, it was just mom and I, we were going to the mall, and there was an episode of Oprah, where Billy Porter and Carson Kressley were on the show. She said, "I was watching Oprah, and there was this guy and his mother is a minister and I heard them talking and it made me think..." And she went, "I am really sorry, I think I understand now."
And then maybe a couple of years after that, I was in New York and we were at Birdland, what would happen is all these Broadway performers would drop in to Birdland on Monday nights and they would get up on stage, sing a song and do all of that, and Billy was there. I was telling her "I really want to thank you because you helped to salvage the relationship between my mother and I when you were on Oprah." And I just remember tears and I remember a long, long conversation, and it was really weird how things go full circle, because I remember when I was watching the Tonys in 2014, and Billy was the one who was on the Tonys who announced that there was going to be a new Tony award for the next year ceremony that was going to honor theater teachers.
And that night I put on Facebook, "I want to win that teacher Tony. And who knew that the next year it would be that, and the coolest part of that is it was sponsored by Carnegie Mellon. And there are all of these parties and one of the guys, one of the professors from Carnegie Mellon took me over and he was like, "Corey, I would like for you to meet," and Billy went, "You" and I went "you," and it was one of those moments that I never expected that he would remember in any way, because sometimes things that are significant to your life, it doesn't mean that it is significant to somebody else's. And so, I never ever expected him to remember that moment, because when we met in '96 or '95, somewhere around there, it was a small moment. Just him remembering me, that was a significant moment during that whole evening as just about anything else.
Tyler Greene:
Well, we got to hear about the Tony because I think not many people win one. So I think for me, and for a lot of theater kids, we sit there, we watch the Tonys, I cry every year, it doesn't matter what's happening. And now I cry because I think about the young people that are watching and knowing that they're able to see something on stage that is relatable to them that might not be in their small town among other things. You knew you were going to win it, right?
Corey Mitchell:
I did.
Tyler Greene:
So what was it like walking up on that stage and accepting this first award ever in this category?
Corey Mitchell:
That was a surreal evening. I'm regularly asked, who did I take with me? I did not take my mother and I did not take my sister, but instead, I took a young man who embodies the legacy of what it is that I try to teach. So he was a college graduate by then, a young man named James Kennedy, because James had written one of the nominating letters for me, that weekend was a whirlwind, my phone, my Facebook page, how do you say tenfold?
Tyler Greene:
It's like when it's your birthday but times 100.
Corey Mitchell:
Yes. Some of the blessings of that is A, hearing from students that I literally had taught when I lived in Wilmington, students that I had first started at the school with, because by 2015, I'd been there for 15 years. So some of those kids that I had taught in 2001, 2002, all of those kids that were coming out and wishing congratulations, and students who were sharing some of their best memories of being in the class, and being a student at that school, and going through the program, those were incredible, incredible, incredible moments.
And then that night, walking out on that stage, the audience, all those balconies and the thing that they do is they create... If you've been in Radio City, the wallpaper there on the back wall of the audience is more audience. And so, when you look out, even if you're able to see the back wall, you're still looking at audience. And so it just gets this feeling that you're looking out into infinity of people giving love back to you. And that was truly incredible, that was truly incredible. And the weight of that moment of being the first one and thinking about where I had come from, because this high school that was literally surrounded on three sides by cornfield, to go from that, to being at this moment, standing there.
And then what got broadcast on national television standing next to Joe Manganiello, who could... One of my students, I got home and he was like, "Mr. Mitchell, he could get it." And I was like, "Yeah, he could." It was all of that, and then the parties afterwards where Helen Mirren called me over and I was like, "You want to talk to me?" And she opened her purse and she showed me this little gold watch that she said was left to her, that it belonged to her primary teacher who was the first one that she felt really recognized and saw something special in her that she felt is what got her there.
Tyler Greene:
After the rush of a night on the Tony stage, Corey found time to create a teachable moment with the aspiring educator, James, who he'd brought along as his guest.
Corey Mitchell:
And then they're like, "Okay, we're done, you can go to The Plaza Hotel." And I was with James and I said, "Let's walk," because it was just a couple of blocks, because they were like, "Do you want us to call you a car?" I went, "No, we're going to walk." And that quiet time of walking with James to The Plaza Hotel was one of the most rewarding times as an educator too, because we just talked and he went, "That's so well deserved." And I said, "When I will be prouder is when it's yours, when they're calling your name for me to celebrate for you."
Tyler Greene:
Still ahead, I talk to Corey about how he's maintaining the community he's built over the last 20 years and what he sees for his future.
CDC Promo Host:
There are everyday actions to help prevent the spread of respiratory diseases. Wash your hands, avoid close contact with people who are sick, avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth, stay home when you are sick, cover your cough or sneeze, clean and disinfect frequently touched objects with household cleaning spray. For more information visit cdc.gov/COVID-19.
Furnished by The National Association of Broadcasters and this podcast.
Tyler Greene:
Corey calls his students his kids and thinks of them as family. He's constantly juggling school, and directing jobs, and speaking gigs, but he also lives alone. As he mentioned earlier, he hasn't lived with a partner since his early 20s. He said because of the pandemic, his theater life has slowed way down, and so suddenly he finds himself with the time to take a closer look at those choices.
Corey Mitchell:
I live by myself. I don't have a dog, it is just me. And I think probably if I were to look back with a bit of regret, if you will, and that might be a strong word, but what I find is that you either have to have money or you have to have time in order to have a relationship, because it seems like if you have money, you give them enough money that they can go out and spend and be distracted by the fact that you're not there, or if you have the time, then you're able to spend that time with them to create memories. And this is only my weird assessment on relationships. But the thing that I find is that A, being a public school teacher, I never have money, never have money.
Tyler Greene:
And you certainly don't have time as a theater teacher in the public school.
Corey Mitchell:
But that's the other part of that, is that because what I started to do was take on more and more to stave off loneliness. Now, I'll meet someone and you say, "Hey, I'd love to spend with you. Do you think you could wait for three months until I finish directing this production for this theater company over here?" That has not allowed itself for me. This time during COVID has been the most time that I have had to myself. During this pause, I have started taking some assessments, and now I tell my kids all the time, no is also an answer, and I am starting to take my own advice literally.
Tyler Greene:
Do you feel like you're, in a sense, a surrogate parent for some of your students?
Corey Mitchell:
Of course. I do try to build skills. I work hard at building students' skills, but the other part of that is, especially for high school students, I'm trying to help them figure out what their transition into adulthood looks like. And I think that sometimes we neglect what that means. Even in parenting skills, what happens with parents too often is that they feel that their role is to make the road easier for their kids. Because I hear this so much, "I never want to see my kids suffer," but that is a part of the human condition, we have to figure out how to face adversity.
Literally, every movie, every novel, every television show, every play, every musical that you see is about someone handling some level of adversity, and yet parents seem to feel that their responsibility is removing every piece of adversity from their child's life. And so, I will sometimes sit in that place and challenge and say, "That wasn't good enough, what can you do that's better?" I sit in that place because I feel like sometimes 80% of what I end up doing, because I have so many kids that will audition for a musical, our program is not one of those that if you come out on audition, we will stick you on stage someplace, you limit the cast.
And so, figuring out some of these kids how to handle the word know, how to handle, not yet, how to create a opportunity or how to move on to something else and don't let this stumbling become the roadblock for the rest of your high school career, or a discouraging factor in going into the arts, because it's just a part of how that happens.
So as a parent, if you will, I know that there are things that I try to do for my students and step into a void at times, and that I can't take the hurt away, but I can help them see a pathway forward. And if they know that this is a road that was tread, that I tread, that so many of the students, like kids that I have working now, professionally, that they've gone through it and I've had this exact talk with them before that it's a slight relief, it doesn't make it better, it does feel less foreign to them.
Tyler Greene:
What do your students look like? Where do they come from? I know it's a magnet school, right?
Corey Mitchell:
We are a magnet school. So literally any of the kids that live within the county can go to the school. And what's crazy is that in some cases it is an hour's drive for them. I think that our school is a true microcosm of what the population of Charlotte looks like as far as ethnicity, racial and ethnic diversity. I still think that we can do better when it comes to recruiting and working with Latinx students. Also, economic diversity, the number of students who come from true economically depressed parts of the city to students who come from some of the most affluent areas. But the funny thing about that is access and opportunity are results of privilege, talent is an equalizer with that. And so, I work hard to give access and opportunity at our school. When I directed Hair, I had a black Burgher, I had a black Wolf.
Tyler Greene:
I played Claude in college.
Corey Mitchell:
You played Claude Hooper Bukowski in college?
Tyler Greene:
Yes. I had a wig, it was a mess, totally was a mess, but I was naked and my childhood girlfriend and my mother saw me naked on stage.
Corey Mitchell:
Alrighty then, yes, your Kibbles 'n Bits. When we did it, my principal, he said, "You're not doing the naked scene, are you?" And I went, "No." He's like, "Well, that's wonderful, I can't wait to see you." And so really that was really it. So there has been a great deal of artistic freedom. You've got to be responsible with that, but that has been another aspect of what has helped with the program.
Tyler Greene:
And I think that the theater can be such an important and welcoming space, especially for queer kids. So I'm curious, what do you do to try to make sure that that safe space exists?
Corey Mitchell:
I never try to make a space that is particularly queer but I've also never tried to make a space that was exclusionary.
Tyler Greene:
How do you go about building that space? And more specifically, an ensemble, that's what you're doing. So how do you create that?
Corey Mitchell:
The first thing that I do is I do what I call my talk with the leads, where that talk with the leads is a private rehearsal where I get all of the leads there, and then I do a separate one with the leading man and leading lady. And I'll say your first responsibility in this is to talk to... Because generally speaking, they're 11th and 12th graders, and I'm like, "Your first responsibility is to talk to the ninth and 10th graders to make them feel included. Your second responsibility is to talk to everybody because you, as the leading man, leading lady in the show, you're not an Island, and the thing that you want is everybody happy to make you look good."
Tyler Greene:
I have friends who are teaching now, but I haven't talked specifically to someone who is doing the level of theater that you're doing. So I'm just curious how you're keeping a sense of community, what are you doing? What's happening?
Corey Mitchell:
I had made a decision that I went, okay, I'm not going to attempt to do a fall musical this year. It'll be the first time in the entire school's history that there hasn't been a fall musical. I'm like, "Okay, we're going to slow down, you're going to film some music videos. We're going to have a couple of hosts to become your VJs for the evening, and we'll do a live stream that's just going to bring in the videos that you've done for Backwards Broadway for this." Because it's a fundraiser that we do for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights/AIDS.
In my classes, I try to spend a lot more time with the kids in breakout rooms, talking with each other and collaborating with each other, as opposed to... And I have legendary lectures about stuff. I have tried to move away from the center stage and try much harder to let the kids lead and talk to each other. Because the thing that I find disconcerting, even as I'm taking the role, I'm like, "You guys, unmute your microphones so that you can answer me immediately and then mute your microphones after you've said here." Because as we're speaking right now, both of our mics are unmuted and it's a conversation, but it's weird if I were to mute, you ask me a question, we wait that second and a half for me to figure out, with my bad eyes, how to press the space button that runs counter to how we communicate. Thoughts are instant, thoughts just like that.
And so, I want to give my students more opportunities for that immediate response and for them to talk amongst themselves, because most classes they're sitting, they're listening for a while and then they work independently off. And as humans, the thing that we know about theater is that we want storytelling, we want to hear conflict, we want to hear triumph and we want to be together as we do this. And this is weird and this is not normal to not be connected with each other.
Tyler Greene:
Well, this has been really awesome, and there's really only one thing left to ask, which is what's next?
Corey Mitchell:
After 20 years, sometimes you feel like you've become an institution and I'm always looking towards new challenges and I've decided to retire at the end of the 2021 school year and I'm planning a program that I'm calling, Filling in The Gap. I'm going to take students of color and students from economically depressed areas who would like to earn a BFA in musical theater and do almost a year long program of working with them to prepare them for the auditions and also through their FAFSAs and scholarships.
So teaching and working with a cohort of students to get them in. Because one of the problems that I see is that my kids come out of an incredible program, but there are a good deal of programs for which their schools are only producing a musical every other year, and yet these colleges look at their resumes and go, "Well, these kids don't have any experience on stage. They were never given any experience on stage." Well, these kids haven't done any shows outside of school, but there are issues sometimes with childcare, with issue with transportation and issues that come with contributing to the household of getting jobs. So that's the thing that I'm working on now.
Tyler Greene:
And that was my conversation with the incredible Corey Mitchell. I caught up with him over email recently, and he told me that this thing he's been working on, it's been renamed The Theater Gap Initiative or TGI. It's still in the infant stages, so he went on to tell me that he is continuing to teach his "angel babies" remotely and looking out for his family, friends, and colleagues.
I'm so glad that I got to talk with you, Corey, and I'm very appreciative of you for all of the good that you put out into the world. I'm left with a lot of things on my mind after our conversation, but what's remained front of mind is Corey's vulnerability in talking about the slowdown of the pandemic and how it's forced him to rethink a lot of the choices he's made as he's navigated his personal life and his career.
The truth is we're all learning who's really in it with us during this pandemic. The business of the day is slowing down and things are zooming in, clarifying. If we can get any value out of this terrible experience of COVID-19 and the pandemic, and maybe it's what Corey's doing, using the space and the pause to take stock of the choices we're making. And one final thought, creativity and career are fluid, and so is family. And the good news is that Corey has a bunch of angel babies who love him and whose lives he's indelibly changed.
Your homework for this week is to send an email, Facebook message, text, whatever mode of communication you prefer to a teacher or mentor figure that's made an impact on you. I recently connected with somebody that I grew up with childhood and I hadn't chatted with them in nearly 25 years. And while she wasn't a teacher, that connection did wonders for my seasonal depression. Reach out and say thank you to someone who put your education first, you never know what it might do to their day. Next week I talk to children's media creator and LGBTQ plus activist, Linz Amer, about creating queer education for kids and what coming out as non-binary has taught them about family.
Lindz Amer:
I think storytelling has just been a huge part of my life from a very young age, and I think a lot of what I struggled with in coming into myself and figuring out who I was is because I'm not reflected in any of that content.
Tyler Greene:
Thanks for listening to This Is My Family. You can find our podcast on social media at TIMFShow. Our website is timfshow.com. When you're there, please subscribe to our newsletter, we'll be sending weekly emails with more stories from the TIFMShow world soon. This podcast is a production of The Story Producer and it's produced by me, Tricia Bobeda and Jackie Ball. It's edited and mixed by Adam Yoffie. Our music is by Andrew Edwards, our community manager is [inaudible 00:36:30] and last, but certainly not least, our art director is my handsome husband, Ziwu Zhou.
Tyler Greene:
If you like what you're hearing, please spread the love and share an episode with a friend or family member, you'd be surprised how much of an impact a personal recommendation can make. And of course, rate, review, five stars, all those other things too. Thank you so much for listening, I'm Tyler Greene, and until next time, stay beautiful and messy. Is the podcast all done, Sam?
Sam:
All done!