Matt Gould and Griffin Matthews on Dealing with the Press

This video was originally recorded on March 13, 2014.

When he flew to Uganda in 2005, Griffin Matthews was just trying to help some kids at a local orphanage. But he wound up starting his own nonprofit, Uganda Project, to support 10 orphans who couldn't afford to pay for school. Donations from the U.S. dried up during the financial crisis of 2008-09 so Matthews and his partner, Matt Gould—both of whom had studied music and theater in college—organized a benefit concert, a "musical infomercial" as Gould describes it, to raise money.

That first show broke even, but the reactions from the audience encouraged them to keep working on their ideas. The result is "Witness Uganda," which premiered at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge in February. The semi-autobiographical show is about a gay black man named Griffin who travels to Uganda and meets a group of orphans who need his help. During the final week of the show's sold-out run, Gould and Matthews came to the Nieman Foundation to talk about their experiences as gay men working in Uganda and the creative process behind the show. The pair also spoke about the media attention the show has attracted, and some of the unfortunate errors reporters have made while writing about their work. "I would almost say 95 percent of the articles written about us, there's an incorrect something in it," Matthews said. "How much weight can I give this review or this article when the Tony Award-winning [American Repertory Theater director] Diane Paulus's name is spelled wrong?"

Read more here: https://nieman.harvard.edu/events/sem...