Flor de Liz Perez is lightning bottled, a pint-sized streak on the esplanade in front of London’s National Theater. She has light green eyes and a laugh that seems to chase away gray English skies.
Flor de Liz Perez with Ricardo Chavira at the National Theater
Perez just opened a new play, “(Expletive) with a Hat,” by a Pulitzer-prize winning playwright. “The Good Wife” fans will recognize the Lockhart-Gardner receptionist who always fumbles her headset.
Triangle residents were lucky enough to have been able to watch Perez perfect her talent for three years as she completed her Master of Fine Arts degree at UNC-Chapel Hill. She appeared regularly in plays like “Pride and Prejudice” and “All my Sons” on the PlayMakers Repertory Theater stage between 2008 and 2010, when she graduated.
On a recent trip, I was lucky enough to meet Perez, still buzzing from opening-night raves. In the audience was leading British actor David Morrissey (best known to Americans as the satisfyingly deceased Governor in “The Walking Dead”). As Flor and the other actors took their bows, he clapped with his hands over his head in appreciation. After the performance, we schmoozed in the company bar with other actors in town for work, among them Chiwetel Ejiofor, the Oscar-nominated star of “12 Years a Slave.”
I couldn’t help but reflect on a recent screed by the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, which called on UNC’s Board of Governors to cancel degree programs that fail to directly serve the citizens of North Carolina. The center is built on Art Pope’s fortune, and is hard right and embedded in Gov. Pat McCrory’s administration.
The writer didn’t target the acting program, but rather the related (and equally spectacular) costume production MFA. To the writer, it made “little sense for North Carolinians to subsidize the improvement of workforces in California and New York.”
That world view about the point of education – vocational or otherwise – seemed like such a crabbed, parched world view in the brilliant lights of the London stage. I can’t help but conjure in my mind walled cities, policed border crossings and the spectre of intellectual restrictions that stifle the kind of creativity and joy so apparent in Flor’s wonderful performance.
Since when has any university, public or private, seen its goal as exclusively training the residents of its local catchment? Sure, we want trained, able and enthusiastic workers. But how much of the state’s vitality has come from the talents and energy of people born elsewhere?
Speaking of the arts alone, how about our North Carolina Symphony director, Grant Llewellyn, born in South Wales and trained in Massachusetts? Deirdre Haj, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival executive director, is from the very area (New York) where many costume design students find work. Renowned Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman found a home in Duke’s literature department, to the great benefit of thousands of students and faculty here.
The traffic in talent goes the other way, too. We’re rightly proud of the Carolina musical geniuses who’ve made international careers, from jazz phenoms like John Coltrane (Hamlet) or Durham’s own Nnenna Freelon to folk rock powerhouses like the Avett Brothers (Concord). The reality of today’s world is that people move only slightly more slowly than ideas. UNC’s mark is made not only by the students it trains (and who travel) but on the ideas and relationships it generates, far beyond the borders of any one state.
My English friends shake their heads at such provincialisms. After all, in the “new” Europe, it’s easier (and cheaper) to hop a Ryan Air flight to Belgrade or Athens than it is to take the miserable Amtrak Carolinian from Durham to Washington, D.C. The idea of keeping the brain pool sequestered is not only ridiculous; it’s counterproductive. The economic vitality of London today is in large part due to this lively exchange of talents and ideas, unfettered by Pope-level cost-benefit analysis. As strapped as the United Kingdom has been (and will be, with deep cuts looming), the investment in the arts and ideas has proven a clear financial benefit to cities and towns across the country.
We’re at a difficult moment in North Carolina. Cuts in education have already lost us many good teachers. The Republican-led legislature has put a dangerous political squeeze on UNC’s governance with the “firing” of President Tom Ross. Once, the state was well-known for opening its doors, with today’s palpable benefits. But we’re closing those doors, inch by foot by mile at this point. And that’s bad for the Triangle and the state.
I console myself by hoping this political moment is temporary. Closing doors has never worked; our world is defined by connection and exchange. Even a man with Art Pope’s personal fortune can’t build a wall high enough to keep out ideas.
Or Flor if she gets a running start across a stage.
Published in the Durham News on July 1, 2016