Kathleen Wallace

Was The Evagelists your first web series?
No, that was my second web series.

Ah, I only know about that one, I guess, because I judged the Daily Motion Pilot Competition [in the year it was in consideration]. So tell me about the first one.
So the first one was called Settling Up. I submitted that one to Raindance (for 2015) but we were not accepted. But I had already bought my plane ticket and I was like, ‘well, I have the plane ticket, I’m going; I need something to talk to people about and Settling Up didn’t get in, so I’ll wait until the pilot competition and then I’ll submit the pilot of Settling Up.’

And then the competition opens, and it says that you have to have made the show in 2015. Well, we finished filming in 2014, so it wasn’t eligible, so we were like, ‘well, I guess I just have to make a new series.’

So that’s how The Evagelists came to be?
I made The Evagelists just for Raindance for the pilot competition. We came here, and everyone loved it. I’ll never forget it; I went to the Opening Night party and Elisar (Cabrera, founder of the Raindance Web Fest) recognised me and he greeted me and said, ‘I have some people you need to meet.’ And he walked me over and introduced me to Lydia (Schoenberger, Senior Programmer at Raindance Web Fest); she might have been the first person to call me the Vag Lady. And she hugged me and said, ‘Oh, you have to come over and meet Rochelle.’ So we came over to you, and I was handing out stickers and I gave you an ‘Evagelist’ sticker.

Yes, I remember this; someone said to me, ‘Have you met that woman? The ‘Vagina Woman’?’ And I was like, ‘Who!?’ And of course, I had already watched The Evagelists but I hadn’t given you that moniker, even in my head…
Well, other people had already though.

Yes, you also got ‘The Vagina Nun’ –
I didn’t know that one.

Oh, and ‘The Beyonce Nun’… there were a bunch.
I’ll take them, I’ll take them all.

So how did Settling Up come about if that was the first one?
I was writing a short play every month for a theatre company, and they invited me to join a writer’s group. And I needed to come up with pages for the writers group. I had this idea in my mind, I was kicking it around, and I had started bringing in pages about these two women.

[The group] was all men, me and one other woman, and every time I would bring in pages, the guys in the group would say, ‘I don’t understand; she’s an attorney: why is she talking about alimony? I don’t understand: why are they talking about body image? I don’t understand: why are they talking about…?’ And the other woman in the group would lean over and go, ‘It’s really great – just keep writing.’

Eventually, it got to this point where it was like, you know, we should do this. I had a meeting with a friend of mine from graduate school, Amy Kersten; she had a very successful web series. We had a long conversation, at the end of which she said to me, ‘You realise you’re hiring me to produce this for you?’ And I said, ‘ok,’ and within three or four months we’d started filming.

Liz Thaler, who became our director, she was in the writers’ room; she knew what we were going for. She was the one, while I was writing, who would say to me, ‘This is the direction I think you want to go; you’re getting a little too schmaltzy, you’re getting a little too sentimental – bring it back.’ And she’s very funny; she is herself a very talented writer.

So the writers group that you were in: was it a part of a programme or were you all working towards something?
No, it was just a group of writers who wrote for this theatre company and wanted the support, wanted people to read our writing. For me, it helped me be disciplined because I had to bring in pages. So I had to keep writing.

Well, there’s an output and a deadline and it stops being in your head, I guess.
Exactly, you have to get something on paper.

So, if you go back a step, were you trained in theatre or did you go to film school?
All theatre. I have an undergraduate degree in history and theatre studies, and I have a Masters degree in acting. I started writing for the theatre while I was in graduate school. I wrote a one-woman show for myself, based on Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing.

I might make that the title of this interview: ‘From Beatrice to Beyonce…’
OMG, again, I will take it.

So I was writing for the theatre, but I also got to do things like… well, I was in Denver in 2008, and the Democratic National Convention came through – it was the convention where Barack Obama was nominated for president. I was hired to write something for an event where Hillary Clinton was speaking. Count Me In For Women’s Economic Independence (a non-profit organisation) hired me to write a performance piece that would be done as an introduction for Hillary Clinton.

It was history: the theme was ‘opening doors’: economic empowerment begets political enfranchisements begets economic empowerment begets political enfranchisement.

So it was basically walking through women’s history in the United States. There were eight actresses who did the piece on the stairs of the Denver Museum. They were in front of the stairs, and then in the background, as they were talking, slowly more and more women would enter until the stairs were filled with about a hundred women. And then, at the very end, everyone took a couple of steps back, and then Hillary Clinton walked in.

It was so good, it was amazing. It was like, that’s Hillary Clinton, and I wrote that thing.

Is it on YouTube anywhere?
No, it was not recorded. It existed in the moment, and that’s the thing about live theatre – it exists in the moment and then you let it go.

Wow – that’s history. And then even more when you think about what we’ve got going on in with the US elections now. So what I’ve gotten from your work so far is that it’s quite political; has that always been a conscious decision in your work? Or is that just in the way that it has panned out?
I think it’s just who I am. Even the things that I’ve written with Amios Theatre Company in New York: they do this very fun thing where they do five minute plays every month, and you get a theme, a line of dialogue, and you get an object that you have to incorporate.

It sounds almost like a 24 hour film challenge.
Exactly. So even when it has absolutely nothing to do with politics, particularly gender politics, everything I write becomes about… well, it’s just because that’s who I am.

I was raised by very strong feminists, from a long line of very strong feminists. And it’s not like I was raised where my mother would sit me and my sister down and say, ‘ok, girls, today we’re going to smash the patriarchy.’ As I was growing up, it was, ‘of course you can do it: why wouldn’t you be able to do it?’ And, ‘of course you’ll have that: why wouldn’t you be able to have that? You might have to work a little bit harder, and that’s the way the world is, but you know what, you work a little bit harder and you prove them wrong.’

There was never any question that I would ever be able to do whatever I wanted to do.

I don’t have children, but my sister has children – she has two girls and a boy – and a lot of my friends have kids, so there are a lot of little girls in my life. And as I look at them, where they are in their lives, and the way the world is, I get even more outspoken. It’s maybe a protective thing, but it’s very much like, ‘no, no, you will be able to, and I will speak out so that you will be able to.”

I don’t know that it’s necessarily always a conscious thing. The Evagelists is great because it gives me a chance to talk about things that I think we should talk about and I get to do it using comedy. One of the episodes we have coming up is called ’10 Things To Do With Your Female Characters Besides Rape Them’.

In the same shoot, we did one that’s like #PeeFreeAmerica and it’s about the bathroom bills –

Don’t even get me started on those.
I find it offensive on so many levels. So these are things that are happening in the world and I feel the need to speak about it, and I’m going to do it in a way that hopefully engenders conversation. And I’m going to use comedy as a way to open the door, because if I can get you laughing about it, it makes it easier to get you talking about it.

Do you find that your fans are drawn from a politically affiliated, consciously aware cohort, or are they simply drawn to a character that, on one level, is a bit of a laugh? I feel as if there are similarities to how Piper was this Trojan Horse character to give a mainstream audience a way into getting educated about the issues raised in Orange Is The New Black. Maybe a simpler question is, how have fans found your show?
You know what’s interesting is that I think a lot of our fans have not actually seen the show. They hear the name, they laugh at the name, and they’re like, ‘please give me a sticker!’ I’m so pleased to hear this because I feel like the word ‘feminist’, and feminism, is so polarising, and it has this very pejorative connotation attached to it in a lot of circles.

I coach a number of women who are recent college graduates and, for them, feminism is something where they want to distance themselves from it. What we’ve done here is we’ve given them, well, they won’t say they’re a feminist, but they’ll say they’re an Evagelist.

Nice.
So it’s a piece of their identity that they can cling to, and feel empowered, and feel a little –

It’s like politics with a little ‘p’.
Yes. But see, that’s where the change happens. If I can get you laughing about what happens to female characters in the majority of media that we consume, I’ll get you thinking about it, so the next time you watch Game of Thrones, you’ll think, “Ok, did that really need to happen? And did you need to have that there?”

It’s not that we can’t talk about it – we absolutely should talk about it – but how are we talking about it? Are we talking about it in a way that engenders conversation, that changes the narratives about it – ‘she wanted it’, ‘she was dressed slutty’, ‘we can’t prosecute him because he has a future’ – all the these different things that we’ve seen: are you bringing this up in a way that challenges these narratives in a way that we know to be wrong, or are you just playing into those narratives, or are you using them just to shock?

So let’s think about this. If you’re going to use this, be thoughtful about it.

And so then, could you hold up the mirror to your own show?
I try to. And I’m very fortunate in that I know a lot of very smart people, and I’m so incredibly lucky with the people that I know. I’m very lucky as well that I have very, very dear friends who will say to me, ‘yeah, no, I think you need to do something different,’ or, ‘I think you missed the mark on that one.’ I have people who are willing to hold my feet to the fire and I cherish those relationships.

You act and write in The Evagelists; are you a triple threat: do you produce as well?
Well, I produce in that I have to because, Amy Kersten, our director, also produces and she really gets everything done, and I fill in as needed. This would not get done without Amy: she is invaluable.

Let’s go right back. Are you from a creative family?
Yes. My parents are teachers. My mother was a teacher in that she was a nurse at a school for special services. She would teach their sex ed, and she would teach parents how to take care of their children because they were special needs children, so I grew up around a lot of special needs people. And I think that that also gave me a lot of empathy.

From early on, I saw my parents saying, ‘ok, who has a voice, who doesn’t have a voice, and how do we give voice to people who are not heard?’ My father is an English teacher and a Drama teacher, and I think that that’s so special because, from a young age, I knew the power of story. From a young age, I knew storytelling as a way of communicating, and not something special that we do – it’s just part of the way we communicate.

And my father was technical director of the theatre, so I grew up around theatres and around people in theatre.

Did they put you into stage school or theatre camp when you were small?
I would put on plays for my parents when I was a child, at dinner. In the house I grew up in, we had hardwood floors in the living room / dining room area, and there was an area rug for the living room and an area rug for the dining room, and in between, there was about a four foot space of wood. I literally tread the boards for my family over dinner.

So I grew up always performing but I always thought I’d be a human rights attorney.

Wait: what!?
When I was in college, I was originally doing History and International Studies with a focus on human rights law. And I thought I was going to be a human rights attorney. My second semester junior year, I had the realisation that I really didn’t want to do this.

Did you not just think you’d major in this but pick up a minor somewhere?
Well, I kept History, but I dropped International Studies and picked up Theatre Studies, so I had two majors. So History [and] Theatre double major.

So did you have an epiphany? Because that’s quite a major leap – it’s not like, say, a move from English to History: it’s going from being a human rights attorney to maybe an actor.
At Yale, they have what they call ‘shopping period’, where at the beginning of every semester you get to try out different classes. You go and pick up the syllabus, you hear some of the professors speak for a little bit, and you have a lot of flexibility in your schedule.

Well, my second semester junior year, I had no flexibility in my schedule because I had so many classes that were required for both of my majors. And I didn’t want to take 80% of the classes – I had no interest in any of them. I thought, ‘why am I doing this, if I don’t even want to sit through this class.’

Apart from your two series, are you actively pursuing the ‘jobbing writer’ route? Is that something you want to do?
I would, but I’m just having a lot of fun writing what I’m writing. If something else comes up that’s interesting, the great. But also, there are other things that I want to write now.

I always have written very short form, which is part of the reason why writing for the web always came very naturally to me. And I actually have a feature film that I want to write now which, when I realised that, was a very ‘no, you don’t; yes, you do’ struggle. But I have this idea that I think I would love to try and take this one thing and expand it into something much bigger.

Having been there myself, one of the great things of your first show(s) is the unexpected opportunities or blessings that they bring you that you didn’t necessarily envisage. What are some of the highlights of your journey subsequent to you having put The Evagelists and Settling Up out into the world?
One of the first things was that, about a month after I got back from Raindance last year, I was at a meeting at a group of female filmmakers that I belong to in New York City, and and we started with two good things that had happened since the last meeting. And I was talking about Raindance and what happened at Raindance.

Then I’m glad you had a good time at Raindance!
Emma Watts (creator of Tales From Tinder) and I talk about this all the time: without exaggeration, it really was a life changing experience. So we’re going around the table, and I talk about Raindance, and I turn to the next woman, and the woman that had gone before me leans over, and is like, ‘I love that idea and I would love to talk to you about executive producing it.’

And her name is Anna Kolber and she is a rockstar. She has been in film and television for something like 15 years. She’s a Swedish transplant to the United States, and it’s funny because she said that, in Sweden, she never understood feminists and feminism because it’s so ingrained there; and then she came to the United States and was like, ‘what do you mean birth control isn’t covered? And that abortion and family leave is debated?’

And because Anna has been producing tv and film for over a decade, she’s very well connected, and she started shopping it around. All of a sudden it became something we could actually get money for.

For a long time we were trying to get money to make more episodes. There’s this Catch 22 where we need more money to make more episodes –

But you need more episodes to beget more money.
Yes, so that’s why in July I flew to LA and I was like, ‘we’re going to squeeze as much as we can get out of this one day as we can, and get as many episodes as we can.’

So that’s the biggest thing. And I started a company to take care of all of this. It’s called Seanachie Communications; Seanachie is Gaelic for storyteller.

My family is very Irish. I told you I grew up in this tradition of storytelling. Dinners with my family were hours long because we would just sit at the table and my father would sit at the head of the table and tell stories.

When my sister and I were little, my parents would get us dressed for bed, wrap us up in blankets, and put us in the back of the car, drive down to the beach, and we would sit and look over the water and my father would tell us our bedtime stories there. So I had this oral tradition, and I didn’t know until I was in high school that my father was telling us Shakespeare’s plays. Twelfth Night was one of my favourite bedtime stories.

Twelfth Night was actually the first Shakespeare that I ever read, and I remember having a very visceral reaction to it.
Well, the twins were shipwrecked, and she used to have to dress up as a boy because it wasn’t safe for a girl to be out by herself because she was a girl…

So I started Seanachie. Through that, I work as a corporate trainer. The woman who started the corporate training company for which I work has become my mentor for Seanachie, and so she has basically helped me turn this into something from… well, a year ago, I was like, ‘I have this show, I make vag jokes and put them on camera,’ and now, it’s really, well, viable. It’s this whole new path that I didn’t know was there.

It’s not something that I’ve done on my own. There has been a lot of help and support and so many lucky coincidences, so many chance encounters, so many ‘right place at the right time’ instances, and I’m really cognisant of how my life has changed in a year, and the potential that exists now that didn’t exist before.

And I want to make the most of it.

And I believe so fervently that feminism has to be intersectional. I’m very, very cognisant that all the videos so far have been this middle class, Ivy League educated white woman talking about these things. I’m very grateful that I have an opportunity to bring up these issues, and I’m looking forward to the day where people identify so strongly as Evagelists that they start making their own videos. That would make me very happy.

That’s surely a campaign and a call to action?
It will come – we’re not ready for that yet. But it will definitely come. The way that women have grabbed on to this…

I work with the Centre for HIV Educational Studies and Training, and we do a lot of work with trans women because that’s a group where there’s a high incidence of HIV. And one of the trans women that I work with, every time I see her, she just wordlessly gives me the Vs.

And that’s so special. If I can create a vehicle for all of these different women to start to feel empowered and to start to talk about these things, and to have their voices heard, that’s everything. That would be everything.

I was going to ask you what was Sister Mary Beyonce’s mission, but it sounds like that’s it.
It’s giving voice, and it’s changing the narrative, and we do that with comedy. So Caitlin Moran – she’s my imaginary BFF, we’re so best buds in my head – in How To Be A Woman, she talks about how comedy is the door into the taboo. So what she’s doing in the written form, I’m trying to do in video form.

My goals are small: I think if you can change the narrative, you can change the world.