African Americans

"Almost always when I write, the characters and the story dictate the structure, and I don’t know what it will be until the play tells me what it will be. But I look at it now and it makes all the sense in the world because the whole conversation about race is so disjointed and disconnected, and it’s so hard for us to hold on to it, so it makes sense that a play about something that’s so slippery wouldn’t be in a well-made play structure…"

"There are fundamentally two schools: You stand where you are and demand that actors come to you, or you go to where they are. It’s not just with actors, it’s designers, too. You go to where they are and you try to cajole, woo, seduce, engage, empower them to go on the journey that you think they should. I generally employ [those methods], because I really believe that if you force an actor to do something, there’s a piece of them you never get back…"

"Jazz in itself is not struggling…That is, the music itself is not struggling. It and the baseball history you talk about are two anchors of the African American cultural community. It’s the attitude that’s in trouble. My plays insist that we should not forget or toss away our history."

"It’s like a fairy tale…[Fairy tales] give you a context in which to talk about some things that you’re experiencing in your day-to-day. Theatre works in the same way—if it’s good theatre. When it’s well-crafted, well-honed, it opens wounds for the purpose of encouraging conversation while also giving us the tools with which to have that conversation."

"I am the white woman character, black woman character. I am the black man character, the white man character…I have to stand in that person’s shoes."

"If the action of The Bridge Party moves at what might at times seems to be a snail’s pace, it is because I want the audience to experience the characters as full human beings, not as abstractions or stereotypes…"

"At that time the army had just been integrated in the States. And it was one of the few industries that offered black people the possibility of advancement if you did a good job. Most industries didn’t have that then: you were the last hired and the first fired. He was in Vietnam and we were sitting waiting, and we were luckier than some because he was able to come home and live a pretty good life."

"Black people have had to become great at seeing ourselves where we are not present because that’s where we grew up. I see myself in Downton Abbey. Even before they introduced the black character, I was right there. Some weeks I was upstairs, some weeks I was downstairs! But it is different when you have a character who looks like you, so I’m glad to have plugged that gap a little bit."

"Sometimes, if people aren’t part of the majority, we tend to get flat portrayals of them."

"What happens is this: when we come to believe that the only way to make change is to murder one another, the idea of “the other” makes less valuable the human life it possesses. As a consequence, we can kill the “other” and not feel guilty. Unfortunately, human beings spend too much time rationalizing that war is right under certain circumstances; that it’s okay to threaten and kill other human beings."

"…White people playing people of color is not new; what is new is people of color are now [able to] own their own authenticity. White theater was created to reflect their audiences and white theater must deal with [changing audiences and perceptions]. … I think it’s about what the story requires, and what happens when you cast someone who could not be believable and who could not tell that story…"

"I’ve found that there’s this idea of what a black experience is, and because I write what’s outside of what’s been allowed to be on stage, there’s a questioning of authenticity, which is beyond maddening. For a white producer, executive, artistic director [etc.] to tell me that my work isn’t black enough… I’m losing my mind…"

"I feel black women, specifically, have a history of being erased in terms of their literary contributions in America’s literature. In a lot of ways that’s true for women of color in general, so I think the most important part is to keep these women’s voices alive and active and circulating…"

"Get younger people to imagine what life was like back then, in ways that can touch their own experience. They’ll see people all along have had challenges and lives similar to their own."

"The Vietnam War was raging at that particular time, so I wanted to do a positive play about a country character who was yearning for his home, as I was doing at Christmas…I drew on my experience growing up in the country - plowing mules, cropping tobacco, bootleggers, going to church. The rest was my imagination. I wanted to do something that could be performed on the streets - I love street theater. And I wanted my character to have a conscience."

"Sometimes you feel where it was trying to go down. There’s a residue feeling and so it lasts a little bit longer. Even after you stop choking, you still feel it inside your throat. There’s something about theatre where I want to not be able to get up, walk out and go: ‘Oh, that was nice,’ but really have to engage with it as I go home and think about it and work over what I felt about it. That’s the type of theatre I like.”"

"Meaningful communication is an aspect of who we are as human beings. You don’t need to know exactly what everyone’s saying word for word to hear it, to see people living in a different world and to hear that they don’t speak American English. And you know, I think people will think, “I get what’s going on,” and that’s what’s awesome…"

"“Survival isn't lying down and saying, oh, poor me. It's finding ways to live and keep your light shining in the midst of the darkest circumstances.”"

"In terms of writing, I just wasn’t finding enough stories about contemporary African people—or historical, just anything, the whole gamut. I was raised in southern Africa and I came back to the West for college. I was starting to look for what I would like to perform, what I would like to see put to life onstage, and I was finding many stories about everybody else, but none about my own people. My playwriting became a “necessity being the mother of invention” type thing. I wasn’t finding what I wanted to perform, so I started to create it myself."

"I had been reading Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow, which talks about mass incarceration and mass incarceration being the new Jim Crow. But I really believe education is also the new Jim Crow right now because there is so much segregation in education, and there’s an excessive system of have and have-nots. So I was first and foremost interested in exploring the school-to-prison pipeline because of how personally it affected some people in my life."

"When I’m writing, I can see myself in all of the characters I write."

"I think that’s a goal in all my plays honestly, to get into the personal, but to have a macro ramification, or to look at things that people can look at as a statistic or stereotype in one way, and to make them have to spend time with a person that they may even end up relating to a little in some strange, tiny way, to see the complexity of something they might have thought of as something simply statistical and “over there somewhere.”"

"We’re just getting out of domestic situation plays in which we were examining our lifestyle. We’ve been portrayed as a unique, complex kind of people…and there’s a lot more that we can bring to the public. The truth is we do everything."

"We speak [in traditional portrayal] one abominable language—hip; we have one interest—women. Our lives have no beginning, no ending. We’re highly emotional in terms of reactive violence, and we do not use our minds in any way."

"My artistic mandate up to that point had always been: “I’m not going to talk about things close to myself. I want to go into vital issues about people who you never hear or see”…And I watched my own family’s dynamics, my own dynamics amongst my kin, and the dynamics of how these cultures had merged, and interacted, and clashed. And I just found the absurdity of our familial dynamics..."

"“I’m tired of lip service…There’s a lot of: ‘We really want to do this’, and then I realise they just don’t listen. They say they want your voice, but when you use your voice, they don’t want to do anything you say."

"I did, not only because of that, but also because there was no value placed on education in my family. My mother just assumed I was smart, and I had glasses so I was called “four eyes,” and I was always reading a book, and so the outsider feeling came from the fact that I really loved school…"

"Because we might not get to truth, we might not get to justice…As, certainly, neither of those really emerged in this saga. But if we as humanity can get to a position of benevolence — which is a greater understanding of one another, empathy for one another, and forgiveness — then that's another beginning."

"I was trying to write a play about race, in real time — at a time when that topic was shifting more than I’d witnessed in my lifetime. Seismic shifts…"

"Sound is the connecting energy to our African past. When thrown into the Middle Passage and the babble of languages, then given this foreign language, English, that had to be learned by ear in this foreign land, Africans, even though they spoke different languages, found a connection and an umbrella culture emerging from the different ethnic groups thrown together by the brutal rubric of enslavement."

"I’m an artist. I write plays. So my first call — to the heavens, to battle — usually involves a call to create in the midst of so much destruction."

"I feel like when I do a play the first time it simply let's me know what I have to do. I do all the things, I make all the cuts, and I really see it for the first time…"

"And there is such a difference in the stories that came from when they were in Africa and the ones they told in America, where their lives were so much rougher. And they keep going back and forth between these two worlds, until finally they get to the dawn, and they are somewhat strengthened so that they can keep going…"

"The words are verbatim. The words are exactly what the people said. When I was a girl, my grandfather said, “If you say a word often enough, it becomes you,” and that’s really my technique. I really believe that if I learn exactly what somebody said, that I will find myself, as an actor, in a similar state of mind as them. I’ll never know what they’re really thinking, but I’ll have some of their feelings…"

"I also learned how they hungered for education. We take it for granted nowadays, that we get free education. That was major, that they didn't have it, and when they had it they passed it on with whatever they knew. After reconstruction, even if they only had a second grade education, they passed it on. The fact that everyone was hungry to learn to read and write was an amazing thing to realize…"

"A lot of my language is always slightly heightened—I’ll throw in alliterations, rhymes, play with onomatopoeia, people speaking over each other. I think it’s fun to be able to do that in theatre. Language is one of our biggest resources, so why not have fun with it?..."

"I’m most excited about being ‘in the room.’ To me, as a theatre artist, it is really one of the best feelings in the world."

"How do I treat this character, given my sensitivity toward being a woman and then my ire being a black person — trying to balance those two?...And as an artist, really wanting to be generous of spirit with all of the characters so that I treat them with humanity and with understanding — to be empathetic without being sympathetic?"

"Language shifts with each character and with time. We were so close that it was difficult to see the end result. A part of it was looking at sound, how sound and language traveled with people through time."

"She doesn’t speak like I speak, because something happens to your chords when you look at the neck. Something has happened. But it was that face that really informed who she is. For me, it was all about the physicality. I had to meet that face. And it’s interesting because that face didn’t show up until the day before my first day on the set…"

"…White racism is about people who don’t feel so bad about fixed things. But white racism is a fixed thing, and it is perpetuated because of fixedness. Anything that we can do that causes people to desire movement more than fixedness is going to disrupt racism…"

"In theatre, people do that all the time. There’s always going to be somebody who wants their own sense of justice, especially with this. They have their own sense of justice that explains if someone else’s is true. Speak for me, speak to me. I want you to tell me who did what. We don’t know who did what within those individual moments. Who was right? Who was wrong? Whatever that means. It’s not, for lack of a better term, that black and white."

"It shocked me and concerned me how quickly we criminalize and don’t give second chances to young men of color, and particularly young African American men…"

"The outsiders. I’m interested in the people that don’t necessarily fit and the thing that gives you permission to be uncomfortable. I like dark work because you’re forced to learn about certain things…"

"[All of the characters] are composites. You’re looking at what could be. There’s theatrical truth to it, which is: maybe this isn’t verbatim, but it’s within the realm of possibility…"

"If you are looking for a sense of justice, that’s not what I’m doing. I’m telling many truths. I don’t have to represent."

"Both of them come from birth. I was born black and gay. I was not socialized to be gay. I always knew I was different; I was always interested in something that a lot of kids were not into…"

"But every time I look at myself and think, oh, my body's not OK or my worth in value are determined by my appearance and my marketability, I'm kind of engaging in one form of this same narrative. So writing this work has been really cathartic and humbling for me."

"That title, I think, really captures the need to travel through life in an artistic sense, in a personal sense, a creative sense. I embrace that title . . . like the different types of ways that people can catch things…"

"My life's work has been to go around America with a tape recorder trying to become America word for word. And I've met a lot of people who I disagree with. I've met a lot of people who you would think I would disagree with. But I have to say it's enriched my sense of being an American to reach out to people who are very, very different from me…"