On the occasion of BAMPFA’s presentation of Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground and the Oakland Theater Project’s production of her Begin the Beguine: A Quartet of One Acts, and in collaboration with BAMPFA’s Black Life series, we have invited writer Neyat Yohannes to speak with actor/directors Seret Scott and Dawn L. Troupe about their work and Collins’s influence.

Actor, director, and writer Seret Scott, indelible as Sara in Kathleen Collins’s 1982 Losing Ground, is an associate artist at The Old Globe, where she has directed a dozen productions. Her off-Broadway and regional credits include New Victory Theater, Pan Asian Rep, Second Stage, American Conservatory Theater, L.A. Theatre Works, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Yale Repertory, Hartford Stage, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Philadelphia Theatre Company, among many others. She has received an Ovation Award (Denver), an Amazing Grace Award from New York’s 3Graces Theater Company, the Lloyd Richards Award from the National Black Theatre Festival, as well as a Drama Desk Award for acting. Her play Second Line premiered at Passage Theatre, Trenton, NJ, and later played the Atlas Theatre in DC. Scott is on the executive board of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.

Dawn L. Troupe is an actor, director, and educator. She is codirector and star of the Oakland Theater Project’s Begin the Beguine: A Quartet of One Acts. Troupe’s most recent off-Broadway acting credits include Moby-Dick, Brothers ParaNormal, Anne of Green Gables, Year of the Monkey, and As Much As I Can. She has directed theater in the Bay Area for twenty years, including productions of Guys and Dolls, The Secret Garden, 13 the Musical, Jungle Book, Wonderland, Annie, Bye Bye Birdie, The Lottery, and Dial M for Murder.

Neyat Yohannes is a freelance writer, editor, and researcher based in Los Angeles. Her writing can be found in Criterion, Bright Wall/Dark Room, KQED Arts, Bitch Media, Cléo, and Chicago Review of Books, among other publications. Neyat is currently working on a screenplay and has been trying her hand at film programming. In a past life, she wrote tardy slips for late students.