Small Town, Big Stage

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.

There’s also a musicality to the language.

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 that should be celebrated? I think about that a lot in relationship to women, in relationship to women of color, in relationship to Black women, that the things that would be celebrated if we were someone else are the things that we are criticized for and how that works in our conversations about sense of self and identity.

I just love that Bulrusher has a very centered relationship to place and to land that helps her move through the world and find her place in it. The land we are on is so significant, and I think Eisa has tied that keenly in Bulrusher’s magic.

How does directing a bicoastal production shape how you approach telling this story?

I love that we get to do this production in Eisa’s hometown and share this story across the country. I think any play, especially this play, is an invitation to learn about a different place. California, Northern California, Anderson Valley are places unto themselves. And Bulrusher gives us the opportunity to excavate their history, people, and to dig deep into the cultures to really learn about this place and its people in a way that feels meaningful and rich.

The play is set in 1955, and this production is happening in 2023. How do you believe Bulrusher aligns with our current cultural climate and what makes it resonate today?

As a Black immigrant woman, I think any story that centers Black female voices is significant, is timely, should not be ignored, and is worth our while to hear. The play is set in the early stages of the civil rights movement, but Bulrusher doesn’t know that much about the rest of the country and the history that we all know of that time. This highlights the ways in which we all can be hyper-focused on our own lives.

We can all be hyper-local, and yet what is happening outside our hometown can affect us and does require our attention. The play reminds us that we have a responsibility to know our neighbors, whether they’re 10 miles down the road or 10,000 miles, someplace else, we are all here.

What do you hope audiences come away with after watching the show?

I hope people will say, “I didn’t know about this place, and I’m so curious to know more.” I also hope they remember what it was like when they were 18, wondering what their future will be like. How we think about our future, whether we look at it with gloom and doom or see it as a bright thing that we all need to work for to improve it for other people, is important. I hope that people leave the play and want to see more of Eisa’s work. I love it when a play invites you to say, “What else? What else is there? What other plays center Black women? What other stories can we learn about California that I didn’t know about? What other tiny towns in America have stories that we should be telling?” Let’s go find those and do those and tell those.