Transcripts

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SPEAKER 1: The premise of the play really is that African-Americans have for many years had the franchise on nonviolence. But at the same time, we've also been concerned about what's happening to us, and so we've had many different approaches. And the play really examines all of those and how they come together along with people's individual dreams on one day, April 4, 1968.

SPEAKER 2: Give us an example of what you're talking about with one or two characters.

SPEAKER 1: Well, Wesley's big goal in life is to his own shop and to do so in a nice place, not in a rundown bus station. And so we see the arc of Wesley's character goes from wanting to do that to actually taking steps to do that. And in the end, his reality as a character blends with the historical reality of the United States, that is Martin Luther King's assassination and how it affected all of us in our dreams.

JD's dream is to go to college. And he has, in fact, received a scholarship to go to Michigan. He's very money-driven. He thinks he really is going to make it in the world. And we see what happens to his dream, too, as the play moves on its arc toward its end. And there are many other characters who come through who have dreams. There's a Japanese businessman, for example, who came through and he's working with General Motors.

And so we begin to see the whole Japanese invasion, as it was called at one point, in Detroit. So all of these characters have dreams. And the art, if there is an art in this, is trying to make these dreams real. And then to have the fictional reality blend with the historical reality.

SPEAKER 2: And in terms of staging, the challenge seems to me also to be about to use the language in such a way and then blocking in such a way so that which happens within a very contained space, a shoeshine place, is varied enough and takes enough turns so that your audience stays with you.

SPEAKER 1: Well, I think that's why Miriam McClinton, who is, by the way, the director and does a tremendous job with this play-- tremendous-- I think that's why Miriam wanted to do the play, because he saw the challenge of doing it in one setting. There's no change of scene. And making it varied enough so that people would be enthralled with it. And I have to say, from the opening night audience that they are enthralled with it and they do enjoy the humor and they do get into the drama of the piece.

SPEAKER 2: What led you to this particular scenario and these particular characters?

SPEAKER 1: Many things led me to this particular scenario. But I think the major one was probably that when I was 12 years old, I worked in a barber shop as a shoeshine boy. And I not only learned how to shine shoes, but I learned how to listen very quietly in the background to what was really going on. And I heard a lot of interesting and funny things about my community. And I began, in fact--

SPEAKER 2: What are you thinking of when you say that because your eyes are twinkling and you're sort of grinning through that comment.

SPEAKER 1: That's funny because what really was happening there was that the barber shop was owned by two ministers, supposedly of the AME Zion Baptist Church. But they were involved in some things that were actually pretty shady and illegal. And at 12, I didn't understand all of that. But I used to come home and sort of parrot to my dad what was being said in the shop.

And after a few weeks he said, you know, son, I don't think you ought to be working there because there's some strange things going on. Later on, I learned that they were involved in running numbers and doing other kinds of things. But it was still a great opportunity for me to learn about life at something of a safe distance. So that's where the idea sort of germinated in terms of my own experience.

Also, I was very much involved in the aftermath of the Martin Luther King assassination and the riots that occurred in Cincinnati, Ohio, my hometown. And I wound up, in fact, being in a situation where I came out of my front door one day, the day after that assassination, and saw a tank in the street behind my house. And that sort of made a lasting impression on me as well. So I began to look at things from the 1992 perspective, 1991 perspective when I wrote this play of, we used to have that franchise on nonviolence.

We used to, as Black Americans have that. And yet there's so much talk about Black crime, you would think that we invented it. That we invented crime, as a matter of fact. The fact is that we brought nonviolence to this country. And I think there's some important things in nonviolence in terms of it being a tool that we can recapture today that's really lost.

SPEAKER 2: So does that mean that you wrote this play with that particular ideological position very much in mind so that you have a preference and will show preference as to these characters.

SPEAKER 1: Absolutely. I'm a fan of Brecht. And I believe-- Brecht was a failure at doing what he said he was going to do, which essentially was he wanted to stimulate ideas without people being entertained. But he wanted to simply give them a message. He was an incredible entertainer is what Brecht was. I think I've taken my cue from him in that I want to entertain as well. And I think people will laugh a lot when they go to this play.

But they also will come away in a day later or maybe even a week later will say, you know, there was something important in that play. It's kind of been bothering me. In fact, I've had people tell me who saw the preview night call me up the next day and say, it didn't hit me until later what you were saying about the Black family in America. And I think that's important. I want that to happen to people.

SPEAKER 2: I was just thinking that myself, that my response was very much about the generational pain and generational disjunctions that you have, and that between Wesley, the owner of the shop, and the young college boy, and even Mustafa, the 27-year-old Black Muslim, despite cultural unity, there are inevitably areas of great difference in difference in perspective and in experience.

And that there's an underlying note and theme in the play of the pain of that, and that I found myself during conversations where Wesley is fighting with the younger guys that work for him in the shop. There's something painful about them.

SPEAKER 1: There really is. And there's always pain in intergenerational conflict because it's one group of people, in a sense, separating and tearing away from another group of people. The interesting thing is, in the African-American community, when that happened, there was always a uniting aspect to the relationships. So even when Wesley, for example, and JD fight about, for example, the way JD wears his hair, which is long--

SPEAKER 2: He wears an afro, and Wesley thinks that's awful.

SPEAKER 1: Right. Wesley thinks that's awful. The fact is that there is still a love that unites them based on common experience. And you may say, well, what is that? The common experience of African-Americans has been slavery and trying to overcome discrimination. And at this point, trying to overcome more than simply discrimination, but abandonment in some ways.

And I think that one of the messages I want to give my own community is that we still need to take care of each other. And it turns out that we have a movement toward neoconservatism in the Black community. And a lot of those neoconservatives are being hailed as visionaries today, when in fact, a lot of what they're doing is attacking the little progress that African-Americans have made.

And I don't think that's very positive. So I want us to unite around the things that we have done well as a people and to remember the love that we had and also the faith that we have, which is displayed, I think, very prominently by Wesley in this play.

SPEAKER 2: Do you see yourself as an active member of an African-American play writing community? It's in the last few years that we have been reading in the newspapers about yearly meetings of African-Americans who are involved in theater, who are bringing plays together at one central location. How has your development as a playwright corresponded to the growth of that community?

SPEAKER 1: Well, I think that what's happening in the African-American community-- I think, is worth saying too that historically, African-American theater has not been very active until, for example, the 1930s. And so we started with a little bit of a disadvantage. But we definitely have caught up. There's a large, thriving community of writers and actors and artists right here in the Twin Cities, as a matter of fact.

Miriam McClinton is one of them and one of the great writers locally of plays. But I really feel that one of the advantages we have as African-Americans is that we have two streams from which we can take as playwrights. We are Africans. We are Americans. We can take from the stream that includes people like Ibsen and O'Neill and other European and American playwrights who have wonderful traditions of their own.

We inherit some of those traditions. And then we can pick from the stream that includes Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry and wonderful artists who have distinct voices of their own and beautiful stories to tell. And what I've tried to do-- and I shouldn't even say I've tried to do it. It's just happened-- is I've really allowed those streams to merge and to form what I think is the kind of work that will be accessible to many different audiences.