Lorraine Looks Good in a Tight Sweater

I didn’t start out to write a play with Lorraine Hansberry in it, let alone Hansberry in a tight sweater and Capri pants! My friend Harry, from my old theatre days in NYC asked me to write something about James Baldwin. Five years later we’re about to open ‘Waiting For Giovanni, ’ a two act play with a cast of seven.’

In 1957 when Baldwin was told publishing a 'gay' novel would ruin his career in literature and that Martin Luther King, Jr. would probably never invite him onto another march he wrote it anyway. Writing the piece has reminded me of the courage it sometimes takes to speak.  And who has as much courage as the actors who speak the words that bring Baldwin to life?

But soon I found I was writing a play with all men and I wondered who were the women in his world?  Lorraine Hansberry jumped right out at me. She was a contemporary and an actual friend of his—not that I couldn’t include her if she had not been since it’s a ‘dream play.’

Hansberry was the first African American woman to have a play on Broadway, “A Raisin in the Sun” (1959). (Please see the film with Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee and Diana Sands and burn any copies you can find of the Sean Combs travesty…or maybe just wipe him off the tape and keep Sanaa Lathan and Audra MacDonald). At 29, she was the youngest and only the 5th woman to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award.

She was an amazing thinker and activist who, before she died, reached out to the lesbian community. She is fabled to have died at home with her long time female lover—something that we hope will be confirmed now that her private papers have been opened up for research.

Hansberry has been a personal inspiration for me as much as Baldwin has. She too was told she was ‘writing off topic’ when her second play featured white characters. It was echoed for me in the 1990s when some people told me that writing a Black Lesbian vampire novel was a bad idea!

I admire Hansberry’s ability to look at the world through a big lens, to be able to see herself in the context of all that was around her not just the narrow life being lived just in front of her. Figuring out who we are can really be aided when we can look at others and see their effort too; that’s why people go to plays after all.


Most critical discussion of “A Raisin in the Sun” focuses on the battle between the older son and his mother over how he should spend the late father’s insurance money. Critics almost uniformly underplay the daughter’s role in the piece. She’s a great stand in for Hansberry: brash, smart, independent and ambitious. She refuses to be subject to her African boyfriend’s insistence on the ‘female’ role or her brother’s dismissal of her career aspirations. Her play also raises the issue of a woman’s right to abortion along with the other ideas few were talking about any where much less on a Broadway stage

A more intimate look at Hansberry’s life is sure to be exciting and illuminating. In the mean time her fans have subsisted on whispers and the brilliance of her writing. Putting her in my play meant I reread her work and essays about her as I constructed her dialogue. It was like getting to have long conversations with one of my heroes. Her genius did not fail.

The actress playing Lorraine, Desiree Rogers, is an amazing embodiment of Hansberry’s spirit and smarts…and she wears a sweater well!

Some rewards for writing can not be predicted.

Happy Birthday Jimmy!

"I know that what I'm asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is least that one can demand—and one is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible." 

                                   James Baldwin b. August 2, 1924

Most of us (Negro and not) have a few moments in our histories and our lives for which this Baldwin quote is appropriate.  I dear friend and sister playwright, Marty Pottenger, sent it to me.  She teaches Maine municipal works--police officers, fire fighters, clerks--how to write, to have creative lives and keep their humanity in the face of both danger and boredom.  Her own plays/performances have highlighted the lives of construction workers and the building of the largest capital construction in New York State history, City Water Tunnel No. 3 (http://www.albany.edu/history/pottenger.html).  She knows hard work when she sees it; so I feel touched that she keeps encouraging me and my work.

The quote comes at a perfect moment in the play production process...we're halfway between that first day and opening night!  YIKES! As I sit in the theatre seats watching rehearsal, I recognize how much of it now lands on the shoulders of the actors.

Acting has had a varied place in culture through the ages.  If someone says Sir Laurence Olivier, the ultimate in craft and class is meant to be evoked. He was Shakespearean performance royalty.  But in colonial Boston Shakespeare's plays and those hoping to act in them were chased out of town by angry mobs who thought actors were disciples of the devil.

Ironically denizens of the "wild west" loved theatre--from the bawdy to 'high falutin' opera. One of the enduring landmarks here in San Francisco is Lotta's Fountain, erected by actor, Lotta Crabtree, in gratitude to the love she felt from SF audiences.  The fountain was the prime reunion site for refugees from the devastation of the 1906 earthquake and fire; and I think of art and safety every time I go past it on Market St.

In undergraduate school I minored in theatre and took an acting class  because the world fascinated me even back then.  When I did my first scene in the class...from Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun"... the professor asked what I wanted to be. 

"A writer," I answered.

"Good," was his retort.

 And there went any vague aspiration that might have been buried inside my unformed heart. So when I work with actors I'm in perpetual amazement...they have to live in bravery constantly...anticipating rejection like that of my professor.  But when it's coming from a casting director, audiences, or  their peers it's not only hurt feelings but their livelihood.

Working with the cast of W4G lets me back into that brave world, where I haven't been since my last play, "Bones & Ash," toured the US in 1996.  As soon as we started doing readings of the play a couple of years ago I could tell immediately how much I missed that world.  The first day of sitting in a rehearsal room with almost total strangers who have little in common except their mutual passion for their art is, for me, like opening a door in a SciFi movie where a huge magical world bathed in sunlight lies on the other side. (Think 'Contact' Jodie Foster 1997.)

 In those first moments it's hard to know for sure that six weeks later the group will know a lot about each other...from allergies (peanuts we know so far) to vulnerabilities (we keep those between us).

The actors in W4G have entered through that magic door from all over the world!   Fairfield, Eureka and Redwood City, Ca, Lynchburg, Va., Germany,Connecticut, Dayton, Dundee, Scotland, Kalamazoo (or Kalabama as I'm told it's known!), Manhattan, and San Francisco.  And that's before we add in the other artists--the tech crew and house staff who all come from universes of their own as well. This is not a lavish Hollywood set so it's only the art that holds them together in the same room.

It's never as simple as that old movie where Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney decide to put on a show in the barn and a full orchestra is heard in the background.  But one week the actors are sitting around a table trying to remember each others names and the next they're helping each other with pronunciations, by the third they're sharing their favorite music.

I brought in copies of the classic book, "The Little Prince" because some themes from the book are threaded through our play. It was a wonderful moment to see the book handed around from Denver to Fairfield to Kalamazoo. These are moments that consultants are paid thousands of dollars to create in staff retreats; artists do it every time they enter a rehearsal room.  Audiences do it every time they sit in the darkened theatre.

Whatever happens with W4G after opening night, I'll never read Baldwin or Saint-Exupery again without thinking of this cast and their expectations of the impossible.  Art carries so much more than whatever the artist intended. When the ingredients are combined just so the potion does become magic and accomplishes the impossible. 

Yes, my dear friend Marty knows hard work when she sees it.

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.