“We celebrate the power of stories. Their power to thrill you, to entice you, to invigorate you. Their power to make you think. From various walks of life, patrons and artists alike will come together in Shepherdstown, West Virginia to be inspired by new plays and applaud dynamic playwrights.”
These are the words that greet you when you open the website to the Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF) — described in one world guide as a “top 10 theatre festival not to miss this summer.” American Theatre magazine stated that “CATF’s forward focus has helped . . . change the American theatre conversation, bringing new voices and pressing topics to the stage.”
In 2013, I was honored to become a “badassador” (my term) for CATF when Ed Herendeen, the CATF artistic director invited me to become a member of the CATF Board of Trustees. Every CATF festival since then, I have been further honored with the opportunity to interview each of the playwrights. This summer’s festival ended just yesterday, and following are my impressions of two of plays as well as excerpts from my interview with their playwrights.
After clicking on the title of the play, scroll down on the play’s webpage to read the entire interview.
A POLITICAL THRILLER
Memoirs of a Forgotten Man by D.W. Gregory
This was hands down, my favorite play of the season which surprised me because when I first read this play in March to prepare for my interview with the playwright, I didn’t get it. It was confusing (all of the actors except one have multiple roles), plus it was way over my head. I knew little about the Soviet Union in 1938 under Stalin and frankly, didn’t want to know more. Then I interviewed D.W. Gregory. Why write a play about a Soviet journalist with the gift of total recall? Why the preoccupation with memory?
Why did you set this play specifically in the period of Stalin and his Terror campaign to rewrite public memory?
I kind of backed into this play when I came across a book – The Mind of a Mnemonist by A.R. Luria – a Soviet neurologist. The book is the author’s account of working with a young man who had a limitless memory as well as synesthesia – turning sounds into vivid visual imagery. I was intrigued and thought he would make a fascinating character and his story would make a fascinating play, but I didn’t really have a handle on what the play would be.
I was also intrigued by what Luria left out of his account. He was working with his patient in the 1920s and 1930s and even into the 1950s, but there is almost no reference to the world outside. This made sense because in that time and place, the less you said about that world, the better. Here was someone with a novel memory for vivid detail, time and dates, how things tasted, smelled, and looked; living in a time and place where the regime was trying to rewrite history and public memory and that someone is unable to forget anything. The juxtaposition of those two things ultimately took me to writing this play.
How much does your personal experience come into this? In a 2009 interview you shared that a childhood memory that explains who you are as a writer was the sexual abuse you experienced at the hands of your oldest brother.
Everybody has some kind of a driving life narrative that drives her or him again and again to recurring themes. Albee seemed to write a lot about adoption and displaced characters, apparently because of his personal experience of having been adopted.
What happened to me as a child has definitely driven my interest in certain subjects: the power of denial and the lengths people go to maintain a narrative, a fiction. When you are growing up in an abusive household, the narrative is, “Everything’s great.” If parents can’t deal with it, denial is a coping mechanism so they don’t have to face something that would be disruptive if confronted. To survive, denial is the only choice for them.
Although D.W. Gregory wrote this play prior to the 2016 election, read the entire interview to learn of her profound concern about the similarities between the Stalin regime and the Trump administration.
A SENSUOUS (LOVE) STORY
Berta, Berta by Angelica Cheri
This was my least favorite play when I first read it in March . . . two characters yelling at each other for 90 minutes? Really? But then I interviewed the playwright — an extraordinarily kind and generous person — and saw the performance and was blown away by its sexual intensity and obvious chemistry between the two characters. “Berta, Berta” is the name of an actual love song sung by enslaved people, primarily inmates at the infamous Parchment Prison in Mississippi. No one knows who wrote the song or why. The play is the playwright’s creative “back story” about the song.
Parchman Prison is the haunted setting in Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award-winning 2017 novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing. Ward has said, “By the numbers, by all the official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing.”
Look at Freddie Gray. Look at Mike Brown. I could go on – this mentality of our lives being expendable either by imprisonment or death. The mindset of the American commercial infrastructure is still, “This is labor.” You see it happening now with immigration. I live in Los Angeles and witness this mentality about Mexicans and Hispanics: “These people work for us. They do this kind of labor.” If it’s not a black person, it’s a brown person. Some form of infrastructure both in our American psyche and in our commerce necessitates slave labor.
Berta, Berta is a love story. Can love redeem evil – all the injustice going on outside of Berta’s house?
Their love highlights the evil that they are faced with, the evil that keeps them apart. Prison is the only reason why they are not able to be together. The narrative of it will be one of disenfranchisement, which is the same narrative of so many of our people and our history. The prison industrial complex for Berta, Berta was something that naturally sprang from digging deeper into the narrative, but the core of it was always the love story.
We don’t have enough narrative in our canon of African American stories that highlights love. It’s always about the pain of disenfranchisement, violence or injustice. All of this is necessary to document, but if we don’t also document the love and the passion that is part of our narrative, we perpetuate the dehumanization of our narrative.
Note Angelica Cheri’s term, “prison industrial complex.” Discover more insights into why she believes, “Humanity is one experience” when you read the entire interview.
*****
Part Two featuring two more plays and excerpts from the playwright interviews will be published tomorrow.
I would like to thank my beloved friend, Wendy, for suggesting that I post about a few of the plays.
Also, many thanks to my beloved friend, Beth, who occasionally contributes to the Contemporary American Theater Festival.
As always, Sharon, your interviews are spot on and so probing. I especially appreciated your question to Gregory, quoting David Frum, noting our slide towards kleptocracy and how the motivation for our leaders today is greed rather than a strong political/social ideology. MAGA? No–Make ME great again and again and again! These plays must have been so intense to watch! The interviews, too, must have been intense. Bless you for the thorough preparation you bring to these. Awesome!
Thank you for the affirmation, Carol! It means a lot that you read every word of these interviews year after year after year. I’ve done them for five years now — a total of 22. I once figured that I invest between 10 and 12 hours on each one, reading the play, researching the topic and playwright, figuring out the questions, conducting the interview, transcribing the interview (word for word) and then editing the transcription down to about 1,800 words, from typically 5,000 words. It’s a lot of to work, but I truly consider it an honor to talk with these artists to learn more about them and their creative process.
“Their power to make you think.” I’ve always been attracted to stories that make me think. I was interested to read about the young man in Memoirs of a Forgotten Man who had synesthesia. I never heard of this until last week when I saw an advertisement for a lecture on synesthesia to be held at my local library. I thought it would be interesting to attend, but, sigh……, the lecture was cancelled due to lack of interest. That in itself makes me think.
Thanks for your comment, ML and for your interest in attending that lecture on synesthesia. Here is an excerpt from the play, “Memoirs of a Forgotten Man,,” by the character who has synesthesia. It captures what synesthesia is like — turning sounds into visual imagery:
“The air is warming as the sun rises over the rye fields. My breath rings before me like a tin bell -— and the sky smells of cloves and peaches. There are blackbirds winging across the sky as it shifts from purple to a milky pink … and the clouds are wispy and chirp like crickets.”
Bet if it had been a lecture about “The Bachelor” or something, the library would have had to schedule five back-to-back lectures to accommodate everyone demanding to attend. Sigh is right.