Do artists have a responsibility to address social justice issues?
I feel like whatever responsibility artists should have in terms of addressing social justice, it’s the same kind of responsibility that other people should have too. I don’t think that it always needs to be reflected in their art, but how they relate to people in their community . . . I think that people can have ways of figuring out “How do you maintain integrity and treat people respectfully within a system that encourages you to not do that?—a system that encourages you to treat people differently according to how much money they have, or what kind of social status, what they look like, and things like that?” I’m in this play now; it’s based on the book The Never-Ending Story and that’s a fantastical story, and people say, “That’s very different than what you do because your work has always been social justice issues,” and here I am in this play, and I’m playing with puppets, as it’s musical children’s theatre piece. And it actually has changed me because I’d forgotten that there w
