Those Damned Trust Exercises

We started rehearsal last week!!!  This was a particularly interesting beginning for a (not-Broadway) production—the director (and my collaborator), Harry Waters Jr., arrived not having met two of the eight actors.  Harry teaches at Macalester College  in Minneapolis, so couldn’t be present for all the auditions.  He had to trust me and Ed Decker, the artistic director of New Conservatory Theatre.  The most comforting thing was that both Ed and I thought simultaneously: Harry is great with actors so we just need to feel we’ve got the raw material not the absolutely perfect fit…always totally imaginary anyway.

But I was anxious, despite our confidence in Harry’s exquisite ability with actors…I’d witnessed it many times over the several years we’d been doing readings of W4G and years earlier when we were both doing Off and Off-Broadway theatre together.  And it’s not a given that someone who’s also an actor himself will work well with other actors.  (I recently dropped in on the San Francisco Museum of Performance & Design to see their celebration of the 20^th anniversary of the original production of Kushner’s “Angeles in America,” a play Harry had been in!)

But Ed and I had a good sense of Harry and the play, as did Lori, the casting director for the theatre.  She recommended that a friend who’s a drag artist audition; and damn if Lonnie isn’t the one for the job.  He captures every nuance Harry throws at him!  And we’ve only been at it for 5 days!

Then there’s the actor to play Giovanni, the character from Baldwin’s novel, “Giovanni’s Room.”  Harry and I have worked with several actors over the various readings, and each was completely different.  The goal is to capture the ethereal, sensual quality of a fictional character who is also determined and solid.  In the original script Giovanni had no dialogue at all…how unfair to an actor is that!  But when we did a reading in Ohio we had an amazingly intense actor whose presence begged for words. 

Now Giovanni has emotional, surreal scenes with Jimmy and the voices in Jimmy’s head.  But who can play the shadowy yet solid Giovanni.  We had a charming Giovanni when Brian Freeman directed the reading for the Afro Solo Festival a couple years ago; then a fierce, naïve, gamine Giovanni (thanks Nick!) when we did the readings at NCTC last summer and winter.  But his schedule kept him from signing on with the production.

So into the audition studio walks Liam, who so did NOT reflect the Giovanni I’d held in my imagination over the past couple of years.  Physically he’s more a Sam Shepard kind of guy, like a character in his 1964 piece “Cowboys” which I stage managed once.  But there was some quality he conveyed that both Ed & I grasped…naïve, tensile strong, seductive, bewildered, unrelenting.  We looked at each other saying: Hope Harry likes him…he’s it!

And Harry did!

When I started working in theatre in the late 1970s, directors often had the cast do those damned trust exercises.  They were like Violin Spolin run amok!  Guiding each other around a room blindfolded or my least favorite: dropping backward into the arms of someone in the company, trusting they would catch you!  I HATED THAT!  I think of myself as trusting but I always worried (like most women) I was too heavy.

This was the biggest trust exercise I’ve ever done…inviting actors into a space that someone else will take over.  It felt both practical and magical to feel like the actors gave us enough that we could trust they could do it; that we knew Harry’s work well enough to feel he would appreciate our choices and to know he would trust us enough to make that choice possible. 

Any production has to build trust and appreciation among the actors who will live in each other’s lives for the next two or three months.  Sitting around the table together for the first reading of the script I was relieved that Harry, Ed and I had that trust.  Then little by little in the five days I began to see trust peeking out from the actors.  Before they even got to the exercise where that saved each other from crashing to the floor they were listening and thinking together.

Theatre is a lot like real life in that way.  You can tell how things are going sometimes by the way people laugh with AND at each other.

C'est vrai

 

These are the final words that the character Giovanni says in Baldwin’s novel.  The rest of the story is told through the voice of David, the lover who abandons him.  Giovanni says, “It’s true” in response to another character’s statement that: “Americans always fly.  They are not serious.”

The truth of the statement is more than simply about Giovanni’s faithless, ambivalent lover; it is an assessment of the American in Paris.  Or of the American colonial spirit anywhere it swoops in, churns things up then flies away leaving the colonized to piece their culture back together again, usually with disastrous results.

When I started writing “Waiting for Giovanni” I wasn’t thinking much about American colonialism; but rather about the tragic end of the innocent Giovanni who goes to the guillotine.  In the book Giovanni lashes out in a rage that is almost incomprehensible except to those who have ever been in love.  I wanted to find a way to make the love Giovanni held inside, the love that was rejected by David, come alive and have meaning.  In part I wanted to accomplish that because I can be a bit of a romantic. 

Perhaps Thelma and Louise survived the crash. 

But also because I saw Baldwin as a person full of hope.  He watched the world explode around him: children bombed, marchers broken by high pressure water, boys hung from trees.  His eyes were unblinking as he took in all of the evil ‘that men do.’ Still in his heart he seemed to believe that human beings had the capacity to be better than their initial instincts might be.  His essays were often searing indictments of the racist institutions that dominate US culture and at the same time a call to humanity to fulfill their potential.

When the curtain goes down on the final act of the play (that’s a figurative curtain since so few theatres use proscenium curtains anymore!) I want the audience to think about the struggle for love and the struggle to be righteous and want to take part in that struggle.  So the truth of how Americans can be—that is callous and exploitative—is not the only truth.  If we can imagine seeing all that occurred during Baldwin’s life and still not hate humanity we can create a new world.

Baldwin said once: “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”  We are those innocents, like Giovanni, who never see the full and horrible reality that surrounds us.

We’ll recycle our cans and all will be well. 

The history is more beautiful and more terrible than is spoken about.  But in order to get to the truth of who we can be we must speak about the terrible things we do as Americans (of all ethnicities) both individually and nationally.

It’s just a play, I know.  But when you start to write anything—a poem, a vampire novel, a play about one of the best minds of the 20^th century—it really helps to think you can write something that will change the world.

C’est vrai

Sweet Lorraine

 

 Five years ago when I was gathering myself together to approach writing “Waiting for Giovanni” I only knew one thing for sure:  Lorraine Hansberry would be in the play.  I hadn’t much biographical information yet but since it was to be a ‘dream play’ I figured it was okay to create a friendship between them even if I found there was none.  (There was.)  The piece is meant to evoke an emotional crossroads not portray anyone’s biography so it seemed natural to have two of the most significant writers of the 20^th century be in the same play

Last week was Lorraine Hansberry’s birthday (May 19^th, the same as Malcolm X!) and it reminded me of why I wanted to include her in this piece.  Hansberry and Baldwin were both admonished to ‘mind their own business;’ that is to stick to writing about topics that directly and literally related to Blackness.

Most oppressed communities go through this. The ‘uplift literature’ of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries was de rigueur for the ‘Negro’ writers who were meant to show a good face for the ‘hood and gain sympathy for the Black plight.  Lesbian literature of the 1970s was often also focused on how ‘normal’ lesbians are.  Not necessarily a bad thing, certainly.  But all writers and their communities grow beyond victimhood if they grow healthy. They begin to see their victimization more than simply aimed at their small corner of humanity and can approach liberation as part of a global movement.

Hansberry was the first African American woman to be produced on Broadway (“Raisin in the Sun” 1959) which would automatically hand her the Race Torch.  Then she wrote “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” which told its story through an interracial set of characters.  The cry of protest went up: “What did that story have to do with the African American Story?” 

The truth is African Americans are unique (as are all people) and African Americans are also universal (as are all people).  The stories Black writers tell are theirs no matter the topic or the characters they create to tell it.

In “W4G” my character Lorraine says:

            “We are all our own topics.  Everything I see, hear, taste, smell and feel

            comes through me and out of me.  I can lift up this skirt and piss out

            the world.”

Critics are notoriously myopic, focusing on whatever detail that strikes a chord within them and often ignoring a larger context or topic. This was what happened and continues to happen with Hansberry’s classic play, “Raisin in the Sun.” 

The piece still crackles with life and ideas more than 50 years later yet most discussions only focus on one element of the story. Walter Lee needs to claim his manhood by using his late father’s insurance money to open a liquor store while his widowed mother insists the family escape the ghetto and use the funds to buy a little house in an all white neighborhood.  That is a formidable struggle but not the only one. 

Hansberry also presented us with other struggles:  Walter Lee’s wife, Ruth, is pregnant with a second child while they live in the crowded poverty of his mother’s tenement.  When she broaches the idea of an abortion she’s met with stony religious rebuke from her mother-in-law but now answers to the question of who has control over her body.  Walter

Lee’s sister, Beneatha, wants to use part of the money to go to medical school.  Beneatha has to suffer the condescension of not just her brother but also of her enthusiastic African beau who thinks women were invented to be wives. 

So many academics and critics follow the same path laid down by the dominant culture the emotional core of writers’ work can be totally buried under archaic interests like how women must stay in a specific role or that there are no gay people in a community.  Hansberry and Baldwin resisted that worn path as much as they could.  When Hansberry wrote to the lesbian journal The Ladder in 1957 she was clearly searching for places to feel free to speak her mind…her full mind not just the Black playwright who gets to be a ‘first’ mind.  She wrote:

…”moral conclusions-based on acceptance of a social moral superstructure

which has never admitted to the equality of women [and] is therefore immoral

itself.”

A rebellious spirit and great vision pushed Baldwin and Hansberry to write what was in their hearts. Hansberry didn’t live along enough to further express her love for women (as far as we know…but more information is sure to come). Baldwin himself was ever the rebel that made it possible for him to state that he didn’t want to have to belong to a club to be himself.  However, he lived his life, ultimately, in line with the belief that:

"Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we

cannot live within."

In reaching out to the first national lesbian magazine Sweet Lorraine, as James called her, allied herself with a community which was barely on the radar screen for the Civil Rights Movement of that period.  At least not out loud.  At least not yet.

Trading your life for a sandwich

 This month we're commemorating the 50 anniversary of the Freedom Rides which helped desegregate the south.  The PBS program, American Experience, is showing a documentary about the Freedom Rides also in May: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/freedomriders/

Oprah, on May 4th, will have 150 folks who traveled around the southern states to bring the spot light to the insanity of Jim Crow laws which forbid blacks and whites from eating together publicly.

That makes sense but there's something oddly surreal about the colored queen of daytime TV with all of her international star power sitting down with those who risked their lives when they sat down at segregated lunch counters in the summer of 1961. I'm happy that finally their service to the civil rights movement is being celebrated.  Mostly they were young college students or working people who committed themselves to nonviolence in the face of direct verbal and physical abuse. 

And there was nowhere to turn if you were being beaten or spat on at a lunch counter. The white southern sheriffs were not going to come to the aid of any civil rights activist—black or white.

As a teenager I watched the heroics of the demonstrators on the evening news every night and, was moved to tears.  I was also inspired to participate in demonstrations in my own home town, Boston, often more subtly but just as strictly segregated. 

James Baldwin was deeply imbedded in the Civil Rights Movement of that time, talking with leaders regularly, gauging when his prestigious presence would be a valuable element to the team strategy. His participation was intellectual as well as physical.  His essays helped frame the discussion of racial politics for the entire country.

It was a heady time when we all saw the world changing around us faster than it ever had before.  Every day held hope that equality was just up the road if we kept marching.  But there is always a price to pay for commitment.  The files that the FBI kept on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were spiteful attempts to prove he was at the very least a Communist. If the US government had spent as much time protecting the rights of African Americans as it did peeking through the curtains of black leaders, desegregation might have been less bloody and certainly more speedy.

James Baldwin was also, like most activists, the object of FBI surveillance; but even more damaging than that perhaps was the disapproving eye fellow black activists kept on Baldwin and other ‘known’ gays.  A NY Congressman threatened to spread a rumor that Dr. King was having an affair with Bayard Rustin if King didn't fire his gay colleague.  (Rustin went on to organize the original March on Washington. See the Nancy Kates documentary "Brother Outsider.") At the same time other black activists tried to undermine any influence that Baldwin had.

There's a lovely documentary about Baldwin by Karen Thorsen, “Price of the Ticket,” in which many black activists appear at Baldwin’s memorial in Manhattan to praise their brother.  As I watched it I thought about their severe lack of brotherhood when Baldwin was alive. In his lifetime the nationalist element treated him like the FBI treated them and other black activists.

All of us carry those scars from what sometimes might seem like harmless wounds. We just don t know what residual affects we’ll end up carrying around with us.  Maybe that's what made James Baldwin such an overachiever.  Who knows? 

These were the treacherous waters Baldwin navigated as he wrote “Giovanni’s Room.”  People were risking their lives; demonstrators were being maimed and killed.  How important was it for him to write a book his brothers thought would set back the Civil Rights Movement?

Reflecting on Baldwin’s dilemma does make me wonder what is different today in our many movements.  How dismissive are we with each other? Recent reverberations from the fight against Proposition 8 in California in the hope of legalizing marriage equality was a good reminder of how insular communities can be.  The black community may feel that the gay movement is riding on its accomplishments as if all movements are not made from the same bricks. 

 The gay community may feel so hip it doesn't have time to really look at the past and honor what went before.  But if we can honor that past and invest in a future that includes us all there might be something worth fighting for.  The hard road that Baldwin walked may have been worth it. 

It’s weirdly great that Oprah is honoring the Freedom Riders.  Yes, it’ll be sudsy and glitzy at the same time. But truth is the heartland watches Oprah!  It’s crucial that they and we remember.

Drama Queen

 

“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.”

                                                                                             Audre Lorde

 When James Baldwin’s first play, “The Amen Corner,” opened in 1965 its neighbors on Broadway represented the spectrum of dramaturgy: from “Danton’s Death” to “The Zulu and the Zayda” with Maurice Chevalier somewhere in the middle.  Coming as it did from the pen of one of the major African American political essayists in the U.S. “The Amen Corner,” must have been kind of a surprise because the story’s central theme was not the internal workings of the Montgomery Bus Boycott or development of the sit in as strategy but rather the personal struggles of a woman preacher and her family.  It felt almost like soap opera to some critics.

But soap is how the world turns!  In many ways it is in the theatre that Baldwin most reflects his dramatic interior life that is kept at bay in his more intellectual essays and in his novels. Both “The Amen Corner” and “Blues for Mister Charlie” (1964) dig into the frayed emotional lives of the characters and the ‘movement’ is the context not the total content.

Baldwin’s approach presages Robin Morgan’s feminist credo: ‘the personal is political.’  Baldwin understood that “Freedom is personal… [it is]…a complex, difficult—and private—thing .”  It is in his drama that Baldwin reveals a variety of personal vulnerabilities that might remain cloaked by his intellectual acuity in his books of essays.

“The Amen Corner” is, at its heart, an exposition of Baldwin’s personal struggle with religion and his family, especially his (step) father David.  “Blues for Mister Charlie” is the cri de coeur of a man who’s spirit lives despite the brutal murders around him.

Baldwin’s other (and more obscure) play “Giovanni’s Room,” (WHOSE SCRIPT I’M SEARCHING DESPARATELY FOR!!!) is based on his novel.  And despite it being set in Paris and its characters being white, not black, perhaps, it is the most personal of them all.  The parallels between the novel’s progress and that of Baldwin’s emotional relationship with lovers in general and with the younger Swiss painter, Lucien Happersberger are both tenuous and obvious. Even though the novel predates their break up by several years I think it illuminates the kind of rejection Baldwin lived with all of his life and had come to anticipate.  Certainly Lucien’s ambivalence about his sexuality didn’t inspire confidence in Baldwin.  But evidence of the depth of Baldwin’s love for Lucien lies in the fact that he maintained a profound relationship with him despite his desertion of Baldwin to marry not just anyone—but Diana Sands, the star of Baldwin’s play, “Blues for Mister Charlie.”

The dramatic conclusion of the novel and the play—the death of Giovanni—does not neatly represent the more mundane resolution of Baldwin’s heartbreak—the two remained close friends as only queer people can do. The ending can, however, be read as a powerful evocation of the emotional turmoil through which Baldwin lived when, like his character Giovanni, he is abandoned by his lover and by the Black writers he admired.

It was with the publication of “Giovanni’s Room,” despite warnings that the homosexual nature of the central relationship would ruin his career that Baldwin finally comes fully into himself as an adult, African American man.  The ghosts of religion, of his father (as represented by the many Black militants who disparaged him) and his own reservations are vanquished.  It is this wholeness that might have aided him in living through the enormity of his heartbreak(s).  Baldwin worked for many years on the theatrical adaptation of the book.  The workshop production at the famed Actors Studio in New York in 1965 as well as another in Turkey did not result in the Broadway production Baldwin had hoped for.  It did, however stand as a testament to the deeply emotional life that Baldwin lead and how insistent he was that the personal journey he made as a lover of men not disappear under his reputation as a writer of and about the Civil Rights Movement.

Having spoken out loud, Baldwin insures that his passion for life live on—both on the page and on the stage.

Toujour l'amour

 

 “I starved in Paris for a while, but I learned something. For one thing I fell in love.”

So James Baldwin is quoted in Randall Kenan’s biography (Chelsea House), and it’s there that I started thinking about Baldwin’s relationship to his novel, “Giovanni’s Room.”

The beautiful symmetry of the idea of starving being balanced by falling in love is amazingly simple yet fully expressive of the experience.  Love fills you up in a way that nothing else can…not even French food.

“Giovanni’s Room” was a revelation in 1957—it was written by an African American man; was set in Paris and about the love affair between two men...not African American men.  Editors, activists, anyone who could catch his ear warned Baldwin against publishing the novel.  It would ruin his career…they said.  Writing for magazines; activism in the Civil Rights Movement; career as a novelist—all threatened according to naysayers.

In some ways that response is not surprising in the context of the brutality evidenced in that historical moment: The US military had to be used to escort young Black kids to whites-only schools.  Fourteen-year old Emmett Till was murdered while visiting relatives in Mississippi because he was suspected of speaking to a white woman. Demonstrators found themselves assaulted by bone-cracking fire hoses. Realtors and neighborhood associations conspired to keep neighborhoods white.  Every ugly impulse that had remained unspoken was now howling across the country.

Underlying much of the anxiety, treachery and betrayal of human rights was/is acute erotophobia.  The Puritan roots of US culture are insidiously destructive; they helped keep women in the kitchen, to make birth control almost unattainable, keep victims silent about sexual abuse, prevent sex education in schools…and on and on.  All this while women were increasingly objectified as if that would contain and control the danger of sexual desire.

The convoluted nature of this culture’s relationship to sexuality and how it was visited on Black slaves makes it understandable that African Americans did not want to hear a story about sexual desire and certainly not between two men.

But as Baldwin said: he fell in love.  It was with Lucien, a charming, handsome Swiss nascent painter, eight years his junior who he met in a sketchy Parisian bar frequented by what he called “ambivalent men.”  It was the full feeling of love that Baldwin was working his way toward expressing. 

“Giovanni’s Room” is not a happy-forever-after tale but the core of the story is the inexorability of love.  It is a love that has the certainty of the tides which must be recognized.  This is what people were afraid of in the 1950s as they warned Baldwin not to publish his book.  This is what people are afraid of today when they pass laws decreeing who can be family to whom. Or when they bash queer people on the street.  

Things have changed and yet they haven’t. 

But Baldwin published the book and it’s still in print more than 50 years later. Giving credence to one of my favorite rallying cries from the early Gay Pride marches: An army of lovers can not fail!

The Cross of Redemption

Randall Kenan says in his introduction to his new collection of James Baldwin’s essays “…he was audacious in his love for complex sentences; one might say even fearless in the way he deployed the English language.  Reading a Baldwin sentence can feel like recreating thought itself.”

It's true; and that’s the key to the revelatory nature of his writing and thinking.  If we look to literature to help us open our minds Baldwin’s words reveal that he is taking that journey as well.  In his sentence structure, love of words, and ideas he creates a synergy that enlivens the reader making the engagement an active, not passive one.

That’s what I felt the first time I read Baldwin.  That was before I knew anything of his biography.  And the biography only adds to an understanding of his complexity.

Born into a working poor family in Harlem, Baldwin lived through the Great Depression, the open racism which saw lynching still a sport in the south and the seditious Jim Crow of the north.  Yet his capacity for optimism and believe in human possibility is evidenced in all of his work, even when he portrays the sorrows of loss. Even when others try to dissuade him from his love.

That’s one of the things that makes “Giovanni’s Room” such an amazing novel.  There is no happy, candy coated ending, (spoiler alert) Giovanni goes to the guillotine and his true love remains as faithless as ever. Yet Baldwin’s sense of the power and importance of love remains.  Below is a draft of the monologue which I’m working on for the play for the character, Giovanni who is Jimmy’s muse in the play.

I’ve rewritten it several times after the readings of the play over the past two years and am still honing in on it. Here he rails against those who would suggest Jimmy burn the novel rather than publish it.

            GIOVANNI:

Why would he say that! A burned book is…a burned life isn’t it? 

It’s an entire village of lives tossed on a funeral pyre.  And what of the

bitterness that rises in the smoke? Do we breathe that in?

            A book is a holy vessel carrying into the world what we need.

            This is no a medieval story where the villagers race toward us with

            torches blazing with righteousness.  Do they expect my silence as they tie

            me to   the stake and light the funeral pyre?   Who is the monster here?

           

Some of them are afraid to be revealed…as either loving or not loving

souls.  That’s why they wave their torches at you and scream betrayer.

But revelation is why you write.  The light thrown from their torches can’t

be contained to just one story or another.  All stories are revealed.  If you

find fear and bitterness they stare out from the receding dark.  If you find

love it shines brighter than all fire.  

You can not hide from yourself or from them and hope to ever really see

anything.  If they do not care for who I am, then they certainly don’t care

for who you are.  In truth they do not care for themselves at all. 

And so you must write.

            Before we are words on a page…it is there…our need for each other.

            You ask what should you do with such monumental need? There is only

            one thing: write.

            Without the sound of Luc’s breath on the pillow next to you…you write.

            Against these men who juggle the fires of your destruction as if they are

            in the center ring of a circus… you write.  When the sound of mourning

is so deep the mourners can barely breathe…you write. 

            It is the thing you do to turn torches into lanterns. 

The words wring life from death. 

                                                                        ***