Interview: Continuing the Legacy of a “Collision Artist” Awoye Timpo and Arminda Thomas in conversation with Alisa Solomon

INTERVIEW CONTINUING THE LEGACY OF A "COLLISION ARTIST"

AWOYE TIMPO AND ARMINDA THOMAS IN CONVERSATION WITH ALISA SOLOMON

Brittany Bradford (Julia Augustine). Photo by Henry Grossman.

During a break in rehearsals, Alisa Solomon of TFANA’s Council of Scholars spoke with dramaturg Arminda Thomas and director Awoye Timpo about Alice Childress, Wedding Band, and their theatre collective, Classix.

ALISA SOLOMON Alice Childress is far from as wellknown as she should be, so it’s not a given that one would encounter her in an ordinary course of study or theatergoing. When did each of you first come across her work and what was your reaction?

ARMINDA THOMAS I discovered Childress in the basement of Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee's home. I fell into a job in 1997 putting together their archives and going through their papers found that Ruby Dee was in the first four productions of Wedding Band—in Ann Arbor, Chicago, New York at the Public Theater, and on TV. I saw all the reviews, the programs, scripts, and so on. Just the sheer number of productions and a TV version of a play that I'd never heard of—that was a lot for me! And it was a performance Ruby Dee singled out in her book that she was particularly proud of. So, what was this piece that I hadn’t heard of? I mean, I'd heard of other plays she had major roles in Boesman and Lena and A Raising in the Sun. I had not heard of Alice Childress’s Wedding Band. I read one of the drafts and thought, Wow, this is intense, but it didn't really hit me it until 10 years later when I started working with Elizabeth Van Dyke on the Going to the River festival, and one of our productions was a staged reading of Wedding Band. When I heard it, when the words hit the air, I was just like, how, how, how is this not in a syllabus? How did I get all the way through BA in theater and an MFA in dramaturgy and into my professional years and not know this at all?

Shortly after that, I was asked to consult on a reading of Trouble in Mind and had the same reaction. Then I worked on Childress’s Wine in the Wilderness for New Perspectives Theatre, and the same thing. Then I ran

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into Awoye and as we were walking across the street, she asked, “So, what are you into?” And I just spewed this gushing fan letter to Alice Childress and Awoye said, “Oh, come with me!”

ALISA SOLOMON How did you become familiar with Childress’s work, Awoye?

AWOYE TIMPO I feel like so much of my Black theater history came not from school but was passed down to me orally. I've been lucky that two of my teachers and mentors have been George Wolfe and Ruben Santiago Hudson, who are two of the greatest storytellers on planet Earth. And they are both also historians. So just being around them I have learned so much—from their suggestions about who to read or just from listening to them tell stories of seeing this play or that play. Around 2015 or 2016, as I was assisting Ruben on a bunch of shows, I started asking cast members: If there were any Black plays you could see over again that you saw when you were first in New York or that you worked on, what play would it be? Alice Childress’s name kept coming up as I started amassing a list. And then, same as Arminda, I started reading her and—Where have you been all my life?

ALISA SOLOMON That’s an animating question behind your formation of Classix five years ago, whose purpose—as your website says—is “to explode the classical canon through an exploration of Black performance history and dramatic works by Black writers.” How has it been evolving?

AWOYE TIMPO It really started off as a reading series to say, “Let's look at these plays.” We did readings of four plays that gave a beautiful scope of, style, writing, character. And doing the readings raised so many questions. Why didn’t I learn this in school? How do you get more people to know about these incredible, incredible artists? Why are we doing the readings in

Veanne Cox (Herman's Mother), Elizabeth Van Dyke (Fanny Johnson) and Brittany Bradford (Julia Augistine). Photo by Hollis King.

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Elizabeth Van Dyke (Fanny Johnson) and Brittany-Laurelle (Mattie). Photo by Henry Grossman.

the first place? Questions, questions, questions came up and they felt very deep, and they needed to be investigated and answered. Many artists have had the same experience and asked these questions and figured out ways to create anthologies and put things together to produce works in different theaters all around the country. Our work has been building upon that legacy and saying, okay, what is our part in this? How do we create a space where we can figure out how to integrate more of these plays into curriculum and repertoire? And asking, how do we tell stories not just about the plays, but also about the artists and the communities that were part of their creation? And not only how do we celebrate these incredible works and learn more about them, but also how can we address some of the systemic things that keep the plays away from us?

ALISA SOLOMON Alice Childress wrote around 20 plays. What drew you to Wedding Band?

AWOYE TIMPO It is a masterpiece and so largely unknown.

ARMINDA THOMAS And it's so visceral. How Childress layers the range of emotion, the depth, the experiences is so complex and so complete.

ALISA SOLOMON Childress wrote it just a couple years before the Supreme Court issued its ruling on Loving v Virginia, but obviously that case was working its way up before that and was in the news. It feels like the currency of the issue of interracial marriage created an opportunity for Childress, but that isn't really the main subject.

AWOYE TIMPO Yes, exactly. She said that the play that was not all about rooting for interracial marriage. I keep saying that this play, that's masquerading as an interracial love story, is about so much more than that. One of the things that's so beautiful about it is the work that every character has to do, meaning everybody's striving toward something, everybody's seeking something, everybody is figuring out how to negotiate the territory that has been dictated for them and trying to figure out how to create new territory for themselves. I think that Alice Childress is also creating a space and a platform for us to really investigate the question of what community is: What do we mean to

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each other? What's our responsibility to each other? How do we earn trust for each other? How do we take care of each other? And she’s planted this incredible community of women in this backyard space and brings us there to investigate not just what they mean to each other but how they can change each other, as well. That's been the guiding force for how we're thinking about the production. And it's also about what are the forces that try to keep community from staying together, the forces from the outside that make a community actually have to stick together even more.

ARMINDA THOMAS Yes. And one of the things I'm discovering in our process, is the way she shows us how early hostility is seeded. You have a child forced to learn a speech of Calhoun’s at age five. You also have children kind of mindlessly spewing anti-Chinese speech that they don't even necessarily recognize that way, because it's seeded so early, that it's a game. You see how everyday bigotry implants itself young into these childish lyrics, and also things like the little minstrel show –how they happen on children, and how children are both idealized and used. Childress gives us moments of watching a white child and a Black child navigating—“call me ma'am,” “no, you're too little.” We can see the way the world impresses itself on children.

ALISA SOLOMON Yes. It’s striking how present children are in this play though you could tell its story without them. Have you cast actual children for the reasons you were just discussing?

AWOYE TIMPO Yes. We have two children, six and eight years old. Another beautiful thing about it is you see multiple generations of women represented in the play. So, you get to see a lifetime inside of just three days of the play’s action.

ARMINDA THOMAS You see the ways that the culture, not just South Carolina in 1918, but also definitely in America 2022, trains people to see other people as other and not yours. And what happens when you try to live outside of what has drummed into you.

ALISA SOLOMON Which brings us to Herman and Julia. While the play is not primarily a romance, the relationship between them does ignite the action and Childress makes that relationship complex. How do you see it? And how is it coming to life in rehearsal?

ARMINDA THOMAS This is going to sound obvious, but the difference between a romance and a marriage, which is, I think, something that you only appreciate the older you get. That's why it's not a romance. It’s about people trying to live out a relationship. We were going through the first scene with Herman and Julia in rehearsal and they started to revolve around each other and interact, and things that on the page felt like they could be clashes became just the little bumps that you have with your spouse or your old friend.

AWOYE TIMPO Alice Childress made these characters so freaking honest and also honest in their pursuits. Herman's love for Julia is like beside himself. It's not something he set out to do, but in spite of his own training, he has come to to love this woman in a way that was not about investigating her Blackness in any kind of way. He encountered a person and he fell in love with her

ARMINDA THOMAS There is a framework in which their relationship is perfectly acceptable [in the world of the play—and beyond]. A few people make this observation in the play and it’s an important one. All Julia and Herman have to do is pretend that they're not committed to each other in this way. All they have to do is make it a monetary situation. All they have to do is hide over in a corner somewhere. She could be his mistress, and nobody would care. If he got himself married to Celestine, Julia could be over on the side, and people would just turn up their noses, but it would be fine if she could tell Mattie and Lula that she is taking him for his money. So, there is a structure in which this relationship could live, and it is the thing that people assume, but it would have no dignity, it would have no dignity.

ALISA SOLOMON I read in Kathy A. Perkins’s Introduction to the volume of Childress plays she put together that Childress called herself a “liberation writer.” As you know, she was active on the left. She was affiliated with the Communist Party and organizations like the Jefferson School and the

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Committee for the Negro in the Arts. She was working for the Marxist monthly, Masses & Mainstream and with the women’s anti-racist and feminist group Sojourners for Truth and Justice, and hanging out with Paul Robeson. The FBI followed her for five years! I'd love to hear your thoughts about that idea of liberation writing—what that meant in the 1940s and ‘50s and ‘60s for Childress, and what that means now.

ARMINDA THOMAS In a conversation Childress had with Toni Morrison [for The Black Creation Annual in 1974] Childress has the closing quote, and she says, “all Black writers, whether they intended to or not have been writing about not being free. Always—from the beginning of America right up to now.” So, the subject of all her plays is freedom because we're not free and how do we get free? Sometimes it's by pushing against the system itself, so in Trouble in Mind there's a push against people who perhaps have more power to change the framing, to force them to acknowledge the frame. Then you have Wine in the Wilderness where Tommy interacts with a bunch of people who think that they know the way to freedom, so there's an internal look at, how do we bind ourselves? The characters in Wedding Band don’t always see what forces in particular are binding them, but they know they’re not free. All the women—and Childress is very clear that she's 's writing about women and about all the women—are stuck.

AWOYE TIMPO I hadn't heard that she called herself a liberation artist before. I call her a collision artist. What I mean by that—and I see it in all her plays—is that the ideas collide with each other via the heart, the soul of the characters. I don't know another playwright who is able to do that in this way. And there are so many. We could count probably 200 collisions over the course of the single play.

ALISA SOLOMON For example?

AWOYE TIMPO Start right at the top of the play. Everybody's sleeping. A little girl loses her quarter. That interrupts everything. How do we restore order? Fanny's got to collide with Mattie to get her child in order, stop making so much noise. Lula has to try to intercede to make sure that they can find the quarter so everything can go on. She's got other stuff to do. They're colliding with her day. Then Julia wakes up,

Max Woertendyke (Bell Man). Photo by Hollis King.

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Phoenix Noelle (Teeta) and Sofie Nesanelis (Princess). Photo by Hollis King.

and Julia has to collide with them. They're trying to intervene in her space. It's like every single moment is a collision of people's desires, which makes the whole thing so active. It's vibrating throughout the entire piece.

ALISA SOLOMON That leads into something further I wanted to ask about liberation writing: how it relates to form, if at all. Amid what’s widely been called a renaissance of Black playwriting today, it’s striking how experimental this new generation of work is, going far beyond breaking the fourth wall, to breaking the spectatorial givens with an audience through all kinds of formal disruptions. With Wedding Band, we have a very traditional style of play. Can you, in 2022, still be a liberation playwright in a naturalistic form?

AWOYE TIMPO A collision of ideas is always gonna vibrate, no matter how realistic the framework. We have had lots of conversations about that in thinking about how to design the space. How do you create a space for the ideas without necessarily rooting it in naturalism? But I also think that Childress was very deliberate in saying, this is the form in which I want to explore these characters. So, our job is to honor that. We are breaking away from some of the naturalism of space, but it doesn't take away anything from the collision of the ideas.

ALISA SOLOMON Would you say more about your approach to the design?

AWOYE TIMPO Arminda and our set designer, Jason Ardizzone-West, and I went to Charleston, South Carolina [where the play is set and where Childress was born] in October and had an amazing trip. What really struck us was the breadth of the space and how there's so much that you can’t see from the streets and how you kind of want to peek into people's backyards. We wanted to really capture the feeling of the earth, of that South Carolina sweet grass, that feeling of nature. And because the play really does take place essentially in the backyard, we were interested in the natural elements that we can create to embody the

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energy of the space without sitting too much inside of the realism. But sometimes what can you do? There's a bed. You can’t get away from that! It’s been fun to explore those things that feel like contradictions of form and figure out how to let them live.

There is also something for all playwrights, but particularly Black playwrights, in seeing the incredible craft of her writing. She is slowly, slowly pushing characters—particularly Julia, but everybody—into different dimensions of being, and that's the thing that is beyond realism, but still inside of the play. She's pulling on ancestral traditions that are beyond realism and naturalism. So, there's an illusion of a naturalism, but it's rooted in a world that is seen and unseen.

ALISA SOLOMON Which has always made me wonder if August Wilson studied her work

ARMINDA THOMAS It does have that feel to it because you're in realistic space yet so much is struggling to push out of it. At some point, you get the piano that plays itself, or you're on this ship and she is talking to you and he is on this ship and they are on this journey and it's the incantation that makes it so.

AWOYE TIMPO The other thing is that Childress and Wilson are pulling from Black traditions, which are in their own way, things that are working on us that we cannot see, but we have tools—Fanny reading the tea leaves—to understand the ways we can move forward. So, they're both pulling from the same traditions that Toni Morrison is pulling from, too. They manifest differently in the work, but it's there because it's so rooted in how we move through the world, what the forces are that are shaping our existence.

ALISA SOLOMON The “N-word” appears a lot in the script, within the community in the first act, and aggressively in the second act. There's so much controversy about allowing that word to be spoken anywhere, even in quotes, even by fictional characters. I wonder what conversations you’ve had about that and what decisions you’ve made.

AWOYE TIMPO We're taking a lot of care around the N-word in the rehearsal room, but we're very much thinking in terms of the way that word is really activated and weaponized inside the play. We’re not running away from the history of how people talk in this country. To be honest and true to the play, we're also being honest and true to the language and the sentiment of the time, and to do that, it's important to exercise the language and the ways that people have weaponized things over time and continue to weaponize things in our present day. So, there's no way we say, “Oh, that's a thing of the past, and we're not activating that today.” It feels important to honor the language of the time to activate the energy of the play, and also to understand the ways in which this play, that is—quote, unquote—a “thing of the past” is actually a thing of the present.

ALISA SOLOMON Childress’s work was firmly rooted in the activist and artistic institutions she affiliated with. She had cultural homes and community and was part of a movement. It’s hard to imagine her producing all the work she created without them. What is your sense of the importance of such institutions? I think Classix is one itself.

ARMINDA THOMAS One of the things that we want to do with Classix in terms of audience education and artist education—and one of the things that we are learning as we go back and explore ourselves—is to dispel the notion of exceptionalism. Alice Childress is a brilliant and exceptional playwright, but she didn't come out of nowhere. As we lift up Alice Childress, we have to lift up the American Negro Theater and where they came from. And there is a whole tradition of Black theater-making that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years and that built the ground for the next generation, which often knew about those people. But somehow it falls away, it falls away, it falls away and we don't know about it. So, a lot of people say, “Well, this is the first …” No, no, no, it's not. And anyway, how tiring is that? There's nothing interesting about being the first. especially not in 2022. There's so much to learn from the rises and the falls and the workings-out and negotiations, the successes and failures of these communities that came before. And, yes, of the artists whose work endures.

AWOYE TIMPO That’s one of the ways that has Classix has evolved. We started it thinking about

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plays and how to get them into production. What has beautifully emerged is a much longer conversation about tradition, legacy, knowledge, and celebration. It’s vast. We’re learning all the time and getting to make beautiful discoveries and share them with other people. To be able to do this and be able to share what we’re learning with a wide group of people is pretty amazing.

ALISA SOLOMON It’s always a little silly to think about fictional characters this way, but I think Childress leaves us to wonder: What do you think happens to Julia—if there were an Act 4? Or an Act 24?

ARMINDA THOMAS Oh my goodness. That is a great question. I feel like Julia goes on to live her life. I think that she finds a peace. I hope she feels free. Because she gets to do the thing that she needs to do. Which is, they get to live into their vows. They get to be who they say they are to one another, and they get to do that until the end. And then she's released. It's not that his death is necessary to release her. The conversation is necessary to release her. They come to a peace about what their life has meant and where it has failed and what it means. So, to come through, to come to clarity about a commitment, to renew that commitment and to see it through, then she's free. She’s free. •

This interview has been edited and condensed.

ALISA SOLOMON is a teacher, writer and dramaturg living in New York City. She directs the Arts and Culture concentration in the MA program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Her criticism, essays and political reporting have appeared in a wide range of magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, Nation, Forward, Theater, and Village Voice (where she was on the staff for 21 years). Her book, Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender (Routledge, 1997) won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. She is the co-editor (with Tony Kushner) of the anthology Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Grove, 2003). Her latest book is Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof from Metropolitan Books (Holt).

Brittany Bradford (Julia Augustine) and Thomas Sadoski (Herman). Photo by Henry Grossman.