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PHILLY.COM C2 THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER WEDNESDAY, JUNE 27, 2018 Barrymore Awards go gender neutral Taking effect in the fall, the change aims to be more inclusive. Ceramic artist Roberto Lugo (left) helps Justin Pryor, 45, during a pottery demonstration in Kensington, davidmaialetti staff photographer Pottery time, our social and political changes." Three years ago, Lugo was still on the grind: He could be seen at art fairs charging $20 for cups and $200 for large jars. But after winning an emerging artist award from the National Council on Education for Ceramic Arts in 2015, he got a call from Lewis Wexler, owner of an eponymous Old City gallery. Lugo lugged his pots in Walmart bags. Gallery staffers set them on soft blankets.

Then they asked about his pricing. "I was trying to impress them, so I gave them a figure," said Lugo. "And they're just like, 'Well, we don't really sell things for that low' Wexler added another zero to Lugo's going rate. Life for the artist hasn't been the same since. Now that the Elkins Park resident has won a prestigious Barr Arts Fellowship ing artist, said Lugo was always pushing for funding for marginalized artists.

Back on the triangle As Lugo worked at the wheel this week, Mimi Lovell approached on foot. She lives in a tent in a homeless encampment below Emerald Bridge, which stretches above the Conrail tracks nearby. "That's so awesome," she gushed. "It reminds me of, what's that movie? Yes, Ghostl So beautiful." Moments later, a car pulled over. The driver was Lugo's cousin, and she stopped for a hug.

Lugo still has family in the neighborhood. His father, Gilberto Lugo, was a Pentecostal minister and store owner but didn't find much success in either. "It reminds me a little bit of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man," said Lugo, "in that he's physically in a space, but he wasn't able to participate in it." His mother, Maribel Ayala Lugo, who would take kitchen gigs here and there, estimates that the family moved 10 or 11 times during her son's upbringing, switching schools frequently. Lugo remembers seeing his brother brutalized and left unconscious at the hands of a white supremacist youth gang that roamed Kensington in his adolescence in the 1990s. Lugo's mother recalls how he used to speak of his future.

"He said, 'Mami, one day, if I'm able to accomplish what I want to do, I'm going to come back and give back to my community." After his cousin pulled away, Lugo returned to his conversation with Lovell. "I know I'm not Patrick Swayze," he joked. Then he offered a tutorial. He talked her through shaping a mound on the wheel, how pressing her fingers would open up the clay. The sides of a small cup grew grander, rounder.

"There you go, you got a bowl," he said. "Yeah, baby!" she said. "I love it." The hustle for Lugo teaching, advocating, creating may never stop. His bachelor's and master's degrees left him $170,000 in debt. With all those missions on his plate, he can't afford fatigue.

"It just feels like a dream that I'm living in right now," he said. "I don't know when it's going to end. It's like one of those hourglasses where I'm going to run out of time, and people aren't going to care what I do anymore. So I'm taking advantage of it." E3 COwensphillynews.com 215-854-5509 (fficassieowens Continued from CI This patch of an open-air studio was a block away from one of the Kensington houses Lugo had grown up in, and it overlooked the train tracks where Lugo used to spray graffiti. His tag: Robske.

"I just didn't see my life going anywhere," he said of the period after high school. Drug dealing, he knew, could bring in more money, cash to buy Jordans, new rims, and other trimmings that he thought could make him feel "important." And so he started saying to himself, "Well, I want to do that." "And the moment that I had that feeling, I said, 'Well, you know what? I really just need to get the hell out of Lugo moved to Florida and took art classes at a community college, where a couple of new chapters in his life took shape. One of his instructors was a potter who clued him in to the craft. He fell in love with making pottery. And he fell in love with the woman he later married, Ashley Ainsworth, a fellow art student.

After Florida, the couple moved together to pursue studies at the Kansas City Art Institute, where Ashley took a photograph of her husband for a class project. Later, during a critique, a peer remarked to much laughter that Lugo looked like a Mexican gangster. (His parents are from Puerto Rico.) The comment made Lugo reflect on whose faces get venerated on vases. A seed was planted. He started with a self-portrait.

Lugo is known for taking traditional forms of fine china and drenching them in urban aesthetics, creating patterns that resemble paint sprayed on stucco, tribal textiles, or even tied bandannas. Instead of deities, he often selects visages from black history. He works primarily with porcelain and makes reference to the finery of blue-and-white pottery designs and gold. He calls this process "code rather than code switching, or changing from one language or dialect to another, he presents myriad art traditions together in the same piece. Judith S.

Schwartz, a ceramics curator at New York University, said the craftsmanship of Lugo's pieces deserves consideration first: "They're elegant and have a sensitivity to the volume of a vase, the swell, the curvature." Schwartz considers the scale of, say, a 25-inch-high Lugo pot seductive, and noted that multiple portraits invite 360-de-gree walks to take in everything and better absorb his message, "reflecting our By John Timpane STAFF WRITER The Barrymore Awards sometimes called "Philadelphia's Tony Awards" are changing. Starting now, they will be more inclusive, to reflect the makeup of the local theater community, and to respond to criticism that the Barrymore Awards process lacked diversity. On Tuesday, Theatre Philadelphia, which administers the Bar-rymores, announced it was switching to gender-neutral awards. Instead of a best actor and best actress, there will now be awards for best performance in categories that used to be gender specific, and two awards will be given. So there will, for example, be two awards for best performance in a musical, two for best performance in a play, two for best supporting performance, and so on the idea being to open up different combinations of male, female, and gender-non-conforming awardees.

These changes will be in effect when the Barrymores for the 2017-18 season are given out in the fall. "We're in good company," said Leigh Goldenberg, executive director of Theatre Philadelphia. "We've been talking to theater groups across the company and in Canada, several of which have just made changes in their awards to be more inclusive." Theatre Bay Area in San Francisco was first, going to gender-inclusive awards in 2017. The Chicago "Jeff" awards announced nonbinary categories (categories not limited to male or female) in April. Early reaction from the Philly theater community was enthusiastic.

James iJames, who won a 2013 Barrymore for directing, called the changes "fabulous and smart." Playwright Jacqueline Goldfinger said, "Today's Barrymore announcement made me very hopeful." Theatre Philadelphia also is continuing to diversify the ranks of its 76 nominators, who visit plays and recommend them for eligibility, and 12 judges, who choose finalists and winners. "The most notable change is in the group of judges," Goldenberg said. Half of selected judges this year identified as people of color, going from two to six. Ten of the 12 are women, compared to six women and one gender-non-conforming judge last year. Among nominators, 44 percent identified as people of color, a 7 percent increase from 2017, when Theatre Philadelphia made a first effort to diversify that group.

Theatre Philadelphia started its diversity push after the 2016-17 season, noting a preponderance of straight white men among judges and nominators. Orientation for the new, more diverse groups took place on Monday, and a list of all nominators and judges appeared in the Tuesday announcement. Last year's Barrymore Awards were criticized for not being significantly diverse, with only 10 percent of nominations going to people of color. Those nominations, and the awards that followed, prompted a discussion of diversity in the theater community. Asked whether that controversy spurred the revamp of categories, Goldenberg said, "Certainly.

It's up to us to be reflective of our community. And our system is flexible and can respond nimbly to changing times. "I recognize, with a great sense of responsibility, that there are some concrete, visible things we can do to address the issue. Other, greater issues are at play in the world at large that may favor one group or another, and I hope this leads to a larger discussion of that. Who are we hiring as actors, set designers, producers? How can we be more aware of our choices and keep inclusion uppermost?" Judges meet quarterly to discuss the awards.

In July, they will meet to choose a final slate of nominees. When those are announced in August, the judges will again meet and choose winners, who will receive the awards in the fall. The time and place of the awards gala has not yet been announced. E3 jtimpanephillynews.com 215-854-4406 jtimpane "Pulitzer: Kendrick and Gwendolyn" (2018) by ceramicist Roberto Lugo. and landed an assistant professorship at the Tyler School of Art, he navigates the field as an artist and advocate, constantly pushing for diversity in pottery.

With the Clay Studio, which is planning to move its headquarters to Kensington, he also gives pottery classes to youth around the city. He runs an Instagram account that highlights potters of color and he curates group shows that feature them. Last year, the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts opened a scholarship for minority students in his name. According to National Center for Education Statistics data for the 2016-17 academic year, one quarter of students who earned degrees in ceramics were of color. Natalia Arbelaez, a 2018 NCECA emerg by a protester who explained that she lacked Rogers' "poise and temperament." But she wasn't backing off.

Virtually everyone involved in these incidents has doubled down on their statements and behavior. Said a Bondi critic: "Sorry, not sorry." Sanders issued a statement on Twitter saying the Red Hen owner disgraced herself. "Her actions say far more about her than about me." Sanders' father, Mike Huckabee, came to her defense, also on Twitter, but that only served to recall his bigoted, anti-immigrant posts from earlier that day. The internet responded with its usual display of probity and wisdom partisans jumped on Yelp to supportdenounce the Red Hen. Haters jumped on any restaurant named Red Hen, including one in Swedesboro that contended with hundreds of "obnoxious" phone calls.

Boycotts were organized. Countervailing Go Fund Me pages established. Grace, for Rogers, would surely mean staying above the fray tending his flock, furthering his mission to provide a healthy psychological and spiritual space for the boys and girls who watched his show. Given that, I don't think he would want immigrant children separated from their parents. He might, on the other hand, want American children separated from theirs.

E3 gthomphillynews.com 215-854-5108 Unneighborly Continued from CI police were summoned near Tampa to escort Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi from a theater where she'd been besieged by hecklers. Protesters displeased with Bondi's opposition to the Affordable Care Act yelled, "Shame on you." In Tampa, their shouts could be heard over the screaming irony that this unneighborly incident occurred after a screening of Won't You Be My the brilliant and moving documentary about Fred Rogers, host of the long-running children's show Mister Rogers Neighborhood. A protester even invoked Fred Rogers as she followed Bondi down the hall and toward the exit ramp. Bellowed one: "What would Mister Rogers think about you and your legacy in Florida? Taking away health insurance from people with preexisting conditions, Pam Well we don't know, because Fred Rogers is currently spinning in his grave, and if he were alive, it is virtually certain he would have said nothing. He stayed away from partisanship lest presumed bias interfere with his sacred mission ministering to children.

Because he was publicly apolitical, most did not know he was a lifelong Republican. Certainly Fox News (in a segment shown in the documentary) did not when Brian Kilmeade denounced Rogers as "evil" for teaching children that they are special. Director Morgan Neville, a University of Pennsylvania grad, intended the documentary to be inspirational, but when I spoke to him last month, I confessed that I found parts of it dispiriting, because the world that Rogers wanted to create built on empathy, respect, compassion has utterly failed to materialize. I was particularly deflated by footage showing that Rogers' funeral attracted anti-gay fundamentalists who were protesting because, well, I don't think even God knows why. But Neville said our culture's escalating broad-spectrum intolerance is precisely why the film has inspired people.

"I've thought a lot about why the film moves people. Fred kind of digested his message down to what I call radical kindness, but Fred himself called it grace. And to him, grace was an idea that could be expressed as: be good to others, even if they don't deserve it." Rogers, the film notes, was on his way to being a minister when he instead found his true calling creating wholesome programming attuned to the complex emotional and psychological lives of children. "He often quoted from the Bible, Jesus saying the one thing that evil really can't stand is forgiveness," Neville said. "Fred was always willing to go that extra step in that kind of way, and that's just such a radical notion in this day and age." The irony of heckling somebody at a screening of Won't You Be My Neighbor? was obvious enough to be acknowledged.