Familiar Bulletin by Playwrights Horizons

MAINSTAGE THEATER BULLETIN

IN THIS ISSUE

PLAYWRIGHT'S PERSPECTIVE

THE BRIDE PRICE

THIS ZIMERICAN LIFE

Danai Gurira discusses the marrying of friends — and cultures — that inspired Familiar.

In Shona culture, formal marriage is contracted through the payment of roora, or ‘‘bride price,’’ by the groom to the family of the bride.

Adam Greenfield considers the double-identity of Danai Gurira, and how it plays into her writing.

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FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

DEAR FRIENDS, Danai Gurira first burst upon the scene in 2006 as co-creator and performer (with Nikkole Salter) of In the Continuum, a timely, intimate, and powerful AIDS play about two women on two continents, linked through illness, that went on to productions throughout the country and the world. Developed originally as a graduate thesis production at NYU, the play ran for months at the Perry Street Theatre before I felt called to attend, and when I did, I went as much to see the directorial work of Robert O’Hara, whom I was just getting to know as a playwright, as to see the play. And even though I loved the play, I found it impossible to separate the skill of the writing from the authentic full-throttle performances and the inspired thematic reach of its conceit. But it was impossible not to take note of Danai as a writer in the years that followed: first the brave and searing Eclipsed in 2009, heading now to Broadway in The Public Theater’s acclaimed new production; then her compelling 2012 historical drama about religion and colonialism, The Convert, that has enjoyed productions throughout the country. Danai’s artistic trajectory joins her to an impressive list of performer-slash-writers who initially wrote work for themselves to perform, but whose scope has expanded to more traditional full-length plays and musicals. Lisa Kron, Eric Bogosian, Taylor Mac, David Greenspan, Kirsten Childs, and Bruce Norris come to mind. These artists often used their work to explore questions of identity and self-definition in relationship to the world. The directionality from inner to outer paves the way for the expansion of the work from solo to multi-character, self to world. Interestingly, Danai’s playwriting jumped quickly to larger-scale work, but knowing that she is a first-generation daughter of African immigrants informs our appreciation of her focus. In the Continuum, Eclipsed, and The Convert are all plays set in Africa. Taken together, one can’t help but feel Danai’s expansive vision, the complexity with which she renders the collision of historical/psychosexual/spiritual/personal forces in her work. When I expressed my regard for her to her agent, he arranged a meeting. What an amazing woman! Charismatic, articulate, brilliant, funny, a true force of nature. We offered her a commission and promised to keep a close watch on a new play she was writing for Yale Rep, Familiar, her first play set in America. As the play began to take shape, I recognized immediately what an important play it was for her, a play that wrestles directly with the questions of identity she writes so openly about in her Playwright’s Perspective. The explorations of Africanness that informed her previous work now rubbed up against her direct exploration of Americanness. Tales of the immigrant experience are common in American literature, and Danai consciously embraces this genre through her title. Tonally, the play also seems to set us up for a family comedy, especially in the impending marriage of the eldest daughter that sets the action of the play in motion. But the play also defies our expectations in several regards. The Zimbabwean-born mother and father are both upper-middle-class professionals, so the play is not about economic struggle. And the gathering of the family for the wedding also brings out tensions between the pull of old world values and new world opportunities. Interestingly, the mother seems the most inured to old world customs while the youngest daughter is most drawn to her African heritage. The bride-to-be seems American through and through as a Christian and a lawyer. She’s even marrying a Caucasian Minnesotan. But she is also exceedingly solicitous of her visiting Zimbabwean aunt, who is inflexible in her adherence to traditional African customs. All of these forces give the play high-energy ebullience; but there is a surprise in store, a surprise that brings the two worlds of the play face to face. Danai navigates this climactic shift adeptly and passionately. In the end, the play both capitalizes upon and breaks free from its “familiarity.” Like all great writers, she shows us a world unique to itself but a world whose uniqueness ultimately provides the key to its universality.

TIM SANFORD

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR The Mainstage Bulletin is generously funded, in part, by the

LIMAN FOUNDATION

Photo by Zack DeZon

PLAYWRIGHT'S PERSPECTIVE I imagine myself a kind of cultural schizophrenic — caught between two cultures that could not be more disparate and yet feeling they combine to define who I am. I was born in the Midwestern United States and raised in Harare, Zimbabwe by academic parents. My librarian mother filled the bookshelves with American literature. My awareness of the American experience was acute, though I lived and breathed on African soil. Beyond my own home, there was constant immersion in American culture: movies, music, news. Everything that happened in America was known to us in southern Africa, but the reverse did not seem true. The African in the American mind always seemed so extreme, unvaried, and stereotypical to me. When I returned to the US for higher education, I was amazed at the questions I was asked and the assumptions that were made concerning the African experience, from ideas around our languages — only one, the rest are dialects and all nothing but clicks — to those surrounding cultural practices from female genital mutilation to facial scarring. And of course the belief that we run with lions. The list is truly never-ending. These parallel and jarring experiences definitely led to my need to tell stories. Many of them began from a place of rage, frustration, and the need to break the back of ignorance and misrepresentation. From there my agenda ascends into storytelling; characters start to emerge who take even me by surprise and alter my initial intention. Then I start to pursue them with fear and fascination. That’s when I know I’m on the right track. But ultimately my writing aims to put the African on the American stage in a complex, complicated, messy, and multifaceted fashion. It bridges the inexplicable chasm I witnessed since my childhood between the land of my birth and the land of my heritage just that much to offer realization of our similarities and celebration of our differences. Familiar, a celebration at its core, invites us all to peer inside an African home in America. This play’s inception happened in a way wholly different from all the others. It was at a wedding, an event that illustrated something rarely highlighted in American popular culture: the merging of the these two cultures through matrimony. In the process it asks a question perhaps haunting to many Americans — how do you create a home in a world that’s new and unfamiliar? Can you fully assimilate without your true home, whatever and wherever it may be, calling out inside you, unaddressed and unrelenting? Every African I know comes to the US with a clear ambition, a hope, a dream, and a past. And how American that makes them in a land of migrants! Hence I hope the family on stage is startlingly familiar — surprising in just how “devastatingly normal” they are. And yet simultaneously, I hope, as with every piece I write, that something is learnt, exchanged, and realized around the experience of these peoples — the specificities, culturalisms, and peculiarities, in this case, of the African in a Midwestern suburb. At the wedding where this play came to mind, the initial feeling I had was one of shock and delight rather than of rage, how fascinating my very own blood truly was and how I was left with no option but to adapt it to the stage. I remember feeling that exact way when I read my first Chekhov play. I imagined him staring at a family close to his own and shaking his head with joy and tears and saying, “My people, my people.” Though this is a play inspired by my people and not a direct depiction of them, it is definitely my “My people, my people” play. I hope that by the end, in some way large or small, they will feel a lot like your people too.

DANAI GURIRA NOVEMBER 2015

Photo by Zack DeZon

BACKSTORY

THE BRIDE PRICE

"So are we doing any traditional stuff, respect our ancestors up in here with a roora ceremony or are you just letting this white boy get off real easy?" — Nyasha in Familiar by Danai Gurira The concept of “bride price” or “bridewealth” refers to money, property, or other forms of wealth paid by a groom or his family to the parents of the woman he is to wed. The practice has roots in many ancient cultures, and continues to play a significant role in marriage rituals and customs throughout the world today. In Thailand, bridewealth is called sin sod, and can range from nothing if the woman is divorced, already a mother, or known to have had sexual relationships with other men, to the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars for a woman of high social standing or exceptional education. In China, the groom is often expected to offer a house and car in addition to a cash payment. The custom exists in various incarnations in Central Asia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and throughout the continent of Africa, including — as featured in Danai Gurira’s Familiar — in the Shona culture of Zimbabwe, where bridewealth is called roora. Though the practice is declining somewhat in the 21st century, the negotiation and payment of roora is still by far the most widely observed and socially significant form of marriage in Zimbabwe today. While religious and civil marriage ceremonies may be performed in addition to the traditional custom, such ceremonies are considered by most Shona people as incidental or extra — no substitute for the more meaningful, socially binding traditional practice of negotiating the bride price. "In Zim there is NO marriage without it,” says Nyasha in Familiar. “It IS the marriage." According to custom, an engagement between a Shona man and woman becomes formal, and public, when the man approaches the woman’s family through an intermediary called the munyai, usually a male relative or a close friend of the suitor. If the woman’s family consents to the union, negotiations for the bride price will begin. The munyai speaks on behalf of the prospective groom, who generally is not present during the formal negotiations. The payments brokered in this process consist of several parts, each with symbolic meaning (to honor the father and the mother, for instance), and usually involve both cash and cattle. In additional to the roora itself, gifts for the bride’s family may be offered during the proceedings, such as blankets, shoes, hats, and clothing. Once the bride price is set, the expectation is that the son-inlaw will make a down payment; it may take him years to pay off the balance. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the practice of paying roora has come under scrutiny by some Zimbabweans. Critics of the tradition argue that it is rooted in a patriarchal culture and that the custom objectifies women by reducing them to tradable property, limiting female autonomy and creating a climate in which women may be vulnerable to abuse. But supporters of the custom disagree, countering that women enter into marriages of their own free will,

and that the tradition is a public health and a social good, in that it promotes premarital virginity (for women) and longevity and monogamy within the marriage, stemming rates of sexually transmitted infections and fostering stable family units. More significantly, proponents argue, by explicitly attaching value to a woman’s role in continuing the male family line, the practice serves to acknowledge and dignify women. Much of the tension surrounding the custom seems to arise from differing interpretations of its meaning, symbolic or otherwise. “Roora should not be seen as a payment for the bride,” argues one Zimbabwean blogger of the politics of the custom. “Valuables are given to the girl’s family to legitimize the marriage.” The Zimbabwean authors of a 2010 research paper in the Journal of African Studies and Development emphasize that the payment of roora is an outward sign that the husband values and esteems his wife, arguing that the woman who enters into traditional formal marriage “is a role model for both younger sisters and young unmarried girls in the community.” These authors define the practice of roora as “a tying knot that builds affinity and social capital between families,” and frame their discussion on existential as well as social and political terms: “How can we discuss modernity without lapsing into a Western-dominated view of history? How do we avoid losing sight of the diversity of local forms?” While some of this might sound alarming to Western ears, it seems worth considering that the tradition arises from the same impulses which historically have shaped marriage practices and norms throughout the world, for good and for ill: to formally establish the rights, obligations, and roles contracted between the marrying persons and their families, their children, and the wider community; to regulate sexual behavior (especially female sexual behavior); and to organize and regulate the inheritance of property — while also striving, in the best of circumstances, to express and acknowledge love between two people seeking to commit their lives to one another. Though the forms may register as foreign, the tensions that result from these varied and tangled impulses seem decidedly, well, familiar. One sees them playing out in conversations about marriage in the United States today: about marriage equality for same-sex couples, about women’s health and contraception, about divorce and the rights of parents when a marriage is dissolved, among many other points of cultural contention. In Danai Gurira’s deftly humorous, wonderfully nuanced Familiar, they play out within the Chinyaramwira family, whose eldest daughter’s journey towards marriage represents an encounter with her origins, her future, and in the end, herself.

SARAH LUNNIE

LITERARY MANAGER

CASTING UPDATE AS OF NOV. 30 ITO AGHAYERE

PH debut. OFF-BROADWAY: The Liquid Plain, Macbeth. TV: "Orange is the New Black," "Unforgettable."

HAROLD SURRATT PH debut. BROADWAY: Impressionism, Serious Money. REGIONAL: The Convert. TV: "Orange is the New Black."

JOBY EARLE PH debut. REGIONAL: Owners, Compulsion, Richard II (Yale Rep); The Tempest (A.R.T.).

MYRA LUCRETIA TAYLOR PH: Crazy Mary, Fabulation, A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick. BROADWAY: Nine, Macbeth, Electra, A Streetcar Named Desire. FILM: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. TV: "Girls."

MELANIE NICHOLLS-KING PH debut. FILM: St. Vincent. TV: "Veep," "Show Me a Hero," "Orphan Black." ROSLYN RUFF PH debut. BROADWAY: All the Way, Romeo and Juliet, Fences. OFF-BROADWAY: Scenes from a Marriage, The Piano Lesson, Seven Guitars (Obie). FILM: Rachel Getting Married. 4

JOE TIPPETT PH debut. BROADWAY: Airline Highway. REGIONAL: Familiar (Yale Rep), Waitress (A.R.T.). TV: "The Blacklist," "Boardwalk Empire."

THE AMERICAN VOICE

THIS ZIMERICAN LIFE

Until 1979, the Republic of Zimbabwe was the Republic of Rhodesia. The region had been forced to live under the thumb of colonization since the 1890s, when British and South African pioneers settled there, and the dissent of African nationalists seeking an end to white minority rule spawned the Zimbabwe War of Liberation (also known as the Rhodesian Bush War) in 1964. This conflict pitted three forces against one another as the Rhodesian government faced two rival nationalist organizations, ultimately leading to Zimbabwe’s independence and the election in 1980 of Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s first Prime Minister and current president. The brutality and political instability that spanned this 15-year war, and the corruption and economic freefall that afflicted Zimbabwe in its aftermath (present-day Zimbabwe is considered one of the most corrupt nations in the world, ranking 163rd out of 176 countries on Transparency International’s latest “Corruption Perceptions Index”), prompted a massive wave of emigration in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s: a Zimbabwean diaspora, displaced from their ancestral land, caught between a longing for home and the need to make a new one where they can. Danai Gurira has described herself as a “Zimerican.” Among the first wave of emigrants were her parents, academics who emigrated from Rhodesia to the United States in the 1960s to work at Grinnell College in Iowa; her father was a chemistry professor, and her mother a librarian. In 1983, when Danai was five years old, the family returned to a newly liberated Zimbabwe, settling in the middle-class suburb of Harare, where Danai lived until she was 19 and returned to the US to attend Macalester College in St. Paul. She has kept one foot in each country ever since, and a look into her collection of plays to date reflects a writer who’s suspended between the two cultures, an artist in pursuit of the intersection between these aspects of her identity. “Time has brought more and more immigrants into the United States from Africa, who build homes here, and build lives here, but also bring their language and their expression of self, and they create this sort of hybrid,” she said in a 2013 PBS interview with Tavis Smiley. “It’s fascinating to me to watch my own family, to see my cousins have children here, to see the generations go on. We’re still very connected to our home but are actually, of course, Americans too. That hybrid sense of self is something that I yearn to see expressed more.” Danai is fully immersed in American culture — to the extent, even, that we see her killing zombies weekly (that most American pastime) on one of our most celebrated television shows. But she’s also fully immersed in the cultural and historical ties she feels to Zimbabwe, where her family still owns a home she visits frequently, and where she recently started a nonprofit foundation to support theater there. Her plays marry these two: she tells stories of the African experience which, unlike like the majority of American plays about Africa, are actually from the African perspective; yet in doing so she employs Western dramaturgical models that seem to resemble the theater of Shaw and Ibsen more than African performance traditions. Danai’s playwriting and acting debut came with In the Continuum (2005), which she co-authored and performed with Nikole Salter. Interweaving the stories of two black women from vastly different economic and cultural

climates — Abigail is a middle-class wife and mother in Zimbabwe, and Nia an unmoored 19-year-old in Los Angeles — whose lives are upended when they’re diagnosed as HIV positive. Though these characters’ journeys are wildly divergent, the play draws a connection between their shared struggles. Danai’s play Eclipsed (2009) is set in 2003 during the Liberian Civil War and tells the story of four women abducted by a rebel commander and forced to live as his “wives.” As they strive to retain dignity and self-hood against this harsh reality, this heartbreaking play reveals the struggle for these African women to live during wartime. The Convert (2012), set in 1895 in Salisbury, a city in Southern Africa that would later become Harare, is a trenchant, epic tale of the struggle for power between the native populations of southern Africa and the oppressive English colonial government. And though, crucially, Danai tells this story of colonization from the perspective of the colonized (all of the characters in this play are natives; we never meet the British), the dramaturgy of The Convert was inspired by the plays of George Bernard Shaw, particularly Pygmalion, which seems at first counter-intuitive, but then brilliantly appropriate. “It’s my colonial heritage!” Danai said in a 2013 interview for the Wilma Theater. “I found adopting a Shavian style from an African perspective was not only organic to my upbringing and culture, but also specific to the world of the play, the clash of worlds, the act of colonizing, and its influence on the colonized. As for Pygmalion, it’s all about taking someone being what you consider primitive and converting them into something more along the lines of what you consider acceptable…Having seen that even in the current post-colonial Africa, the need to take the African and make them as Western influenced as possible in order to give them viability in the global realm; this made the themes of Pygmalion very immediate to me.” Set in the upper-middle-class home of the Chinyaramwira family, in a posh suburb of Minneapolis, Familiar continues this intersection of Danai’s dual life as a Zimbabwean and an American. The portrait of a family confronting the contradictions of these two worlds on the eve of their eldest daughter’s Photoof by the Derrick Little wedding, and sudden difficulty that arises from the expectation for these worlds to coexist, this is an incisive and deeply felt account of the African experience in America; and yet it seems drawn genetically from the DNA of Ibsen, with traces of Kaufman and Hart. The writing itself, in other words, mirrors the rift in the Chinyaramwira household, who on one hand are a diaspora community, retaining a collective connection to Zimbabwe, the true home to which their family may eventually return. But who, on the other hand have totally assimilated, obsessing over Rachel Maddow and American football, embracing cozy Midwestern home décor, and practicing feng shui. Though the story of cultural assimilation in melting-pot America is no stranger to the stage — likely because so many of our greatest writers and artists are immigrants — Danai’s plays stand alone, unique not just in the cultural specificity and precision with which she writes, but also in her stubborn, rightful unwillingness to melt.

ADAM GREENFIELD

ASSOCIATE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

Leadership support for the New Works Lab is generously provided by the Time Warner Foundation.

Special thanks to the Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater for its generous support of Familiar.

SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW At PH, we celebrate the new while honoring our theatrical legacy. Our donor programs are no different; in addition to the benefits that donors have always loved — the best seats in the house, cocktail parties with artists, and invitations to readings — this year our Patrons, Friends, and Gen PH members are receiving brand new benefits, such as private post-play discussions and an exclusive behind-the-scenes experience.

TRY SOMETHING NEW. Visit PHnyc.org/support-us to learn more. Familiar is generously supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

PERFORMANCE CALENDAR SUN

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POST-PERFORMANCE DISCUSSIONS

8:00 PM

PPDs with the creative team have been scheduled for the following dates:

2:30 PM 8:00 PM 2:30 PM 8:00 PM 2:30 PM 8:00 PM 2:30 PM 8:00 PM 2:30 PM 8:00 PM 2:30 PM 8:00 PM

FEBRUARY 17, 21, AND 26 We hope you can take part in this important aspect of our play development process.

Post-performance discussion

2:30 PM Open Caption performance

We recommend Familiar for ages 13+ Please note performance dates and times are subject to change

HELPFUL INFORMATION HOW TO RESERVE YOUR SEATS

u ONLINE: visit our ticketing site TicketCentral.com/PlaywrightsHorizons

and click on BUY SHOW TICKETS to log in and select your seats. u BY PHONE: call Ticket Central at (212) 279–4200, Noon–8pm daily. u IN PERSON: visit Ticket Central at 416 W. 42nd St. (9th/10th Aves). MEMBERS Tickets (reg. $75) are $45. YOUNG MEMBERS 30&Under Member tickets are $25; Student Member $15. PATRONS & Gen PH MEMBERS Reserve your house seats by calling the Individual Giving Assistant at (212) 564–1235 x3143.

GUEST TICKETS subject to availability

u SUBSCRIBERS: You may order one guest ticket for $50 each per package. u FLEXPASS HOLDERS: You may use tickets in your account to bring guests. Add tickets to your account by calling Ticket Central, while supplies last.

u MEMBERS: Order one guest ticket per package per production for $50 when you reserve your own. u YOUNG MEMBERS: Guest tickets are $35. u PATRONS: You may order up to two tickets for $50 each. u Gen PH MEMBERS: A maximum of six membership tickets may be used per production. Two guest tickets per production may be purchased at the guest rate of $50 each. Additional tickets are full price.

TICKET PICK-UP AND RELEASE POLICIES

We would prefer to hold tickets for pick-up at the box office to expedite ticket exchanges. If you request that your tickets be mailed, they will be sent out immediately, UNLESS your performance date takes place in fewer than 10 days, in which case they will be held at the box office. If you are unable to attend a performance for which you have a reservation, please call Ticket Central at least 24 hours prior to your performance.

NEIGHBORHOOD DISCOUNTS RESTAURANTS These restaurants have given generously to Playwrights Horizons. We encourage you to support them.

CHEZ JOSEPHINE 414 West 42nd Street French (212) 594–1925 Complimentary glass of house wine with dinner. Reservations suggested. WEST BANK CAFE 407 West 42nd Street American (212) 695–6909 Complimentary glass of house wine with entrée, per person. Reservations suggested.

SUBSCRIBERS AND PATRONS: If you are unable to exchange for another performance, PH will issue a receipt for a tax-deductible contribution at the conclusion of the run upon your request. If you do not release your tickets 24 hours in advance of your performance, we will be unable to provide seats for another performance or a tax receipt.

GETTING TO THE THEATER

The closest subway stop is 42nd Street on the A, C, and E, trains at Eighth Avenue. You may also take the 1, 2, 3, 7, N, R, Q, or S trains to 42nd Street/Times Square, or the B, D, M and F to 42nd Street/Bryant Park at Sixth Avenue. The M42 Crosstown & M104 buses are also available for your convenience.