Eisa Davis’s Bulrusher is set in 1955 in Boonville, a small town located in southern Mendocino County in the Anderson Valley, approximately 115 miles north of San Francisco. In the 1890s, the residents created a language called Boontling, but today Boonville has a population of under 1,000 people, and the language is nearly extinct. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2007, Bulrusher is making a splashy revival in a co-production between McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, NJ, and Berkeley Rep. Berkeley Rep’s associate artistic director, David Mendizábal, sat down with McCarter Theatre associate artistic director and the director of Bulrusher, Nicole A. Watson, to discuss the play’s use of Boontling, music, magic, and the task of bringing this small-town story to the big stage. David Mendizábal: Can you speak about the presence and use of Boontling in the play? NICOLE A. WATSON: A play that has regional jargon
or a new language such as Boontling requires an audience to listen differently to what the characters are saying and how they’re conveying their lived experience. Boontling is a language that this town created, on some level, to speak in front of people from other towns without them knowing what they were saying. That, to me, speaks about class and the ways in which small places that can be so isolated from the rest of the country have their own language. 8 | THE BERKELE Y REP MAGA ZINE
Yes! Eisa shared with me that this play started out of her love for Northern California, out of a love of hikes she was taking, Rita Dove poems she was reading, and you really feel that in the play. Her love of language, poetry, and music. She has a playwright’s note in the script that says live guitar must be present. What a wonderful gift for the director to know there will be live music! What are some of the other artistic possibilities that you are excited to tackle with your cast and creative team?
Oh, all of it! Eisa’s play commands a sense of fluidity. Like a river, the play has a sense of motion. How do we capture the essence of all the places that Eisa has asked us to go to in one set, while also creating a space that allows the play to just keep moving? We’ve been inspired by the natural elements and spent a lot of time looking at photos of the redwoods, water, flowers, and bulrushes. And video of how light and water play off of one another. I’m also really excited to find ways to capture Bulrusher’s magic. Yes! How does Bulrusher ’s magic impact her story and the relationships she makes?
Bulrusher does have the ability to read people’s futures and at the same time is still trying to figure out her own future. People made fun of her for having this gift, in the way in which we sometimes can be ostracized for the very things that make us special. I think that’s also what’s driving her in the play. Why is my difference the thing that is called into question as opposed to the thing
PHOTO: LIAM ALEXANDER
big stage
SMALL TOWN,
There’s also a musicality to the language.
