May 1, 2014 Edition 5, Volume 1
Issues They Didn’t Want You to Know... Exclusive Interview with Kia Corthron
Listen Up! Issues That Might Impact Your Life
Ignorance is Bliss? Keeping Yourself in the Know
Get Back In Touch With Your Inner Child
Editor’s Note
When I sat down to write this month's column, I was a little stumped as to what I was going to write. There are many BIG topics on the minds of young black adults today, so many that I know it to be impossible for me to tackle each one, but I will as always keep you informed to the best of my ability. No longer will we remain ignorant and uniformed; the excuses stop here, and we refuse to be silent. So, what will I tickle you fancy with this month? I've always been of the mindset that it's my job to stay up to date with issues facing the world today, especially those in our own back yards, but our news does not always have to come from a television set. Recently, I read Kia Corthron’s play entitled Force Continuum which addresses the issue of police brutality. Never will I claim to be an accredited critic, but I must bring praise to this work and introduce it to my readers today. Corthron looks at police brutality from both ends of the spectrum, how it affects the community and the police force. The play speaks volumes, but don’t take my word for it, pick up a copy and enjoy.
As a young African American woman growing up within the black community, I never understood why we kept so many secrets; why we chose not to speak about certain topics and/or issues that are vividly present within the community. This is where Kia Corthron struck my interest as a black female playwright. Within her plays, she talks about topics that are prevalent in the black community and she brings them to the forefront where the audience has no choice but to address, discuss, and think about the issue. This month I read one of her plays entitled, Breath, Boom; which discusses the topic of girl gangs, rape, and prison. Corthron gives the audience the chance to explore these topics and how they affect the black community. She opens our eyes to the ignorance that we possess and encourages us to become educated on what’s going on right in front of our eyes. I strongly encourage anyone to sit down, read one of her plays, and become educated. Andrelisae Robinson, Editor
Hey everyone, Tasha here! This month’s issue will focus on a rather controversial topic, abortion. I was influenced to talk about this issue after reading a play entitled Come Down Burning by our feature of the month, Kia Corthron. As you read, a few questions may come to mind like, is abortion becoming a normal and acceptable thing for our generation? What don’t we know about it? And how is abortion affecting us, as Black people? I’m not writing to persuade anyone, pass any judgments, or add to the debate, just doing my job in presenting the facts. You’re probably wondering why we chose Kia Corthron for this month’s cover, but believe me when I say she is a prime example of everything HUSH strives to be and represent. Her works cover some of the most trying issues for the black community and she is not afraid to explore the topics most people avoid. This month’s issue is a reminder of what HUSH is really about, revealing the truth, tackling the issues, and educating the masses. Natarshia Corley,
Carissa Manley, Editor Editor
Table of Contents Editor’s Note ........................................................................................... x
Speak Up and Speak Out: Abortion .......................................................... 3
Don’t Believe the Hype ............................................................................. 6
Abusing the Badge: The Use of Force Continuum ...................................... 9
Getting to Know the Real Kia Corthron ................................................... 12
When Bad Things Happen, Our Hearts Break Too.................................... 15
What a Captivating Show ........................................................................ 17
Kia Corthron: A Playwright Who's Unafraid to Admit She's Political........ 19
Speak Up and Speak Out: Abortion Today, I want to present you with a new view on abortion, the black feminist view. As women, we often forget that someone else is dealing with the same issues and concerns. We also forget that these are our bodies and should be our decisions to make.
The struggle for reproductive rights is not commonly attributed as part of the civil rights movement, but it was a large part of the movement until after World War II.
The activism of AfricanAmerican women in the abortion rights movement can be placed in the context of our same historica l struggle against racism, sexism, and poverty. We are only recently credited with being actively involved with the movement due to its gained attention in politics and the media. Why have our commitment to this portion of women’s rights been buried for so long and still seem irrelevant presently? Here are three reasons:
Did you know that historians and demographers typically attribute the major declines in the African-Amer ica n birthrates to poverty, disease, coercive family planning, and other external factors? They completely dismiss the possibility that African Americans were in any way responsible for the change by choosing to use birth control and abortion.
The movement for abortion rights is seen as belonging to the white women’s movement.
We, in partnership with the rest of the world, African-American community include d, ignore our power as African-American women to make responsible reproductive and political decisions for ourselves.
Opposition to reproductive control came primarily from the Catholic Church, a group of white conservatives who discouraged the availability of birth control for white women. If Black women
were offered this option, wouldn’t white women feel they were entitled to the same rights? Black leaders like Marcus Garvey, who believed that increasing the population would be one way to suppress racial oppression, were not happy with the request for better options in reproduction. Throughout history, Black women have found little to no support on the topic of abortion, white men saw family planning as an insult to traditional motherhood, while some Blacks saw it as a means of eugenics. Unsurprisingly, most of the commotion about abortion comes from men-men who do not have to carry, bear, or nurture children. Although abortion does not automatically mean the end of oppression of Black women, it can be considered a stepping stone to freedom. There should not be a question of whether we support abortion, but how, and when, and why we support it. Aside from the moral debate over abortion, every Black woman must believe that she has a right to control her body simply because she is human. Due to the threat of loss of body ownership, a large amount
of black women have chosen to ignore the debate on abortion altogether. By denying the right to abortion, Black women are still left vulnerable to the belief that our role is to either have babies, based on our social history as builders and nurturers of our nation, or to stop reproducing altogether. As African American women, we must dismiss the rumors surrounding our fertility and develop our own analysis of abortion and birth control that is based more than simply on religious beliefs and moral concerns. We must stand up for our fellow sisters who may need these services because not only are we being judged by other races, politicians, and radicals of the pro-life movement, but by our community. One of the most emotionally charged claims is that of promoting race genocide and suicide. Don’t believe it? Check out a website and organiza tio n completely dedicated to the idea, www.blackgenocide.org. The majority of black men use the argument of tradition, but in traditio na l African societies, the decision of abortion and birth control is completely
left at the hands of the woman.
Maybe the fight is bigger than abortion and birth control, the underlying principle is the option of perfect choice, tailored to the woman who is seeking assistance, without judgmental and community backlash. This “perfect choice” must involve access not only to abortion services but also to prenatal care, quality sex education, birth control, condoms, maternal health services, infant care education, and reform of the health care delivery system. As African American women, it is time that we demand to be in control of our own bodies and to have access to the best technology without limits. It should be us that make the decision of if and when we have children, not doctors, not the men in our lives, and especially not the courts.
NC
Because mama always said “Have a Plan B.”
DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE!!! ABOUT CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE Unconsciously, we all give into things that we have heard and begin to apply them into our thinking, and interactions with other people. Some of the things that we hear, or even believe, are eventually proven to be myths. This also applies to more
serious aspects in our society, such as child sexual abuse. We have decided to educate our readers and address the eight common myths that are thought to be true about child sexual abuse.
Myth 1: Normal- appearing, well educated, middle-class people don’t molest children.
to believe that the abuser is innocent, even if there is plenty of supporting evidence to prove they are guilty. The reason behind this is that people view abusers as “monsters” and if the person doesn’t look like a “monster” then they couldn’t be guilty.
This myth is completely false and is what child molesters actually use to get close to our children. Child molesters are crafty and use our assumptions against us. They practice their ability to charm the parents, to be likeable, and make the parents feel as though they are sincere and trustworthy. Myth 2: People are too quick to believe an abuser is guilty, even if there is no supporting evidence. The truth is that people do the exact opposite. People are quick
Myth 3: Child molesters molest indiscriminately. There is the belief that if the abuser didn’t attack a particular child while in their care, then the child that was molested must be lying. Sex offenders, including child molesters, do not just pick a random child as their victim. They take time to carefully pick, set up, and May 1, 2014 Edition 5, Volume 1
RESOURCES If you or somebody you know is being abused or has been abused, please get help by using the resources we have provided and let an adult know. •Police 911 •Local Child Welfare Agency •Department of Social Services •Children and Family Services If you need the number to your local agencies, go online to www.childwelfare.gov groom their victim into what they want their victim to be. Myth 4: Children who are being abused would immediately tell their parents. Children have a difficult time discussing their abuse to tell their parents or any adult. Along with the difficulty of explaining what happened, the sex offender makes the child feel as though it is their fault why this happened; which contributes to the child not telling anybody.
Myth 5: Children who are being abused will show physical evidence of abuse. Many people believe that after a child is sexually abused, there should be evidence found in the genital area to show that they have been abused. The downfall about this is that abnormal genital findings are rare. Injuries from penetration heal quickly, especially in young children, which make abnormal genital findings hard to use in a case. Research has shown that even in penetration cases that have been proven, genital examinations were normal. Myth 6: Hundreds of innocent men and women have been falsely accused and sent to prison for molesting children. Only approximately 3% of all cases of child sexual abuse and only 12% of rapes involving children are ever actually reported to police. With such a small percentage, the number of abusers that are identified, convicted, and incarcerated is an even smaller percentage.
Myth 7: If asked about abuse, children tend to exaggerate and are prone to making false accusations. A study was conducted that aimed to prove that this belief was a myth. In the study, children that had been abused were interviewed and asked what happened to them in an interview. Along with an interview there was a doll demonstration session where the children were asked to show on the doll what happened to them. The findings from this study showed that children actually leave out details about what happened to them. Myth 8: By using repeated interviews, therapists or police can easily implant false memories and false accusations among children of any age. It is very common to hear that authority figures have used improper questioning and suggestions in order to hear what they want from children that are involved in abuse. Another allegation is that
therapists try to shape and implant certain details into a child’s statement in order to convict the accused abuser. These allegations were also proven wrong by the same study that was mentioned earlier. Children are more likely to minimize or leave out details than to tell them. Also, it was shown that it is hard to implant negative events into a child’s statement.
Many people have been told these myths and have used them when thinking about the topic of child sexual abuse; however, we have to understand that not everything we hear is true. It is our responsibility, and duty to protect our children as much harm as we can and to trust them when they tell us something is wrong. Also, allow for an open communication between parent and child so that the child knows they can come talk about anything. â– AMLR
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Abusing the Badge: The Use of Force Continuum From Carlos Riley Jr., Jonathan Ferrell and Leon Ford Jr., young black men in the United States are brutalized by those sworn to “protect and serve” us daily. It can be particularly frustrating for anyone when they are stopped by the police, but even more so when there is no basis for suspicion.
The most common forms of police violence reported include pushing, shoving, kicking, and the use of mace.
“They a trip, we be sitting on the front [porch] or something, they pull up just cuz we sitting there. Or we be chillin’ in front of the store, [they] get out checking everybody.” –Shaun
Even when citizens hold a law-abiding status, it does not protect them from physical abuse, which could cause intense anger in the community.
Aggressive policing in more urban neighborhoods makes one question whether the police are really concerned with addressing crime or merely interested in harassing people? “Police over there by me, they stop you just to mess with you for real. That’s what they do. Sometimes they’ll pull up and be like, ‘get that damn crack out your mouth boy!’ and keep going.” –Darnell Frequent negative encounters with the law enforcement encourage negative attitudes and feelings towards the police and weaken officers’ moral authority in the eyes of the community. “[The police] they crooked. I mean they try to do anything [to you]. I ain’t tryin’ to be prejudice[d] but I think the police don’t like black people. You know like all the crooked cops always be in the ghettos, where all the black people at and they try to get as many black people off the street as they can.”-Lamont
“I been thrown on the ground, I been kicked [laughs], I been choked, man I could go on forever.”-Ricky
“I was standing on the corner and we got these police we call the jump out boys. They the police [that be] riding them regular cars and look like regular people. They like ‘What you doing on this corner?’ and I’m just steady talking to ‘em and they thought I had some dope in my mouth. So this one cop grabbed me and just started squeezing [my throat]. I was coughing and spitting up stuff and I’m like ‘What you all doing this for?’ and they kept on like ‘Don’t swallow it son.’ I’m like ‘Swallow, I ain’t got no dope!’ I opened up my mouth after they let go. I was showing them and everything. I mean that’s they job to make sure dope isn’t on the street but I mean I don’t think it is their job to literally squeeze someone’s Adam’s apple.” -Travis Many people are dissatisfied and distrust the police. Experiences of serious discrimination have a cumulative impact on the individuals, their families, and their communities. Policies exist to guide the use of force that officer’s use when trying to resolve a situation. This continuum has many levels to accommodate various situations that may
arise, but officers are encouraged to respond to the situation at hand appropriately and progress to each level. The levels go as follows:
A Few Familiar Faces
Officer Presence No force is used. Considered the best way to resolve a situation. Verbalization Force is not-physical. Officers issue calm, nonthreatening commands. Empty-Hand Control Officers use bodily force to gain control of a situation. Less Lethal Methods Officers use less-lethal technologies to gain control of a situation. Lethal Force Officers use lethal weapons to gain control of a situation â–Ą CM
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Getting To Know the Real Kia Corthron An exclusive interview with Kia Corthron about her plays, inspiration, and growing up in Maryland is that he was miserable a lot of his life. He worked ten hours every day and sometimes went fourteen days without time off. He died from an aneurysm when he was fifty -one, suddenly, while at work.
AG: Where is Cumberland, Maryland? KC: Where I grew up is the skinny part of M aryland, where M aryland touches Pennsylvania. You could walk to West Virginia. It’s a working-class town, probably ninety-seven percent white. I choose that figure because there were about three hundred students in my graduating high school class and ten were black. I think that in the entire four grades of high school there were three Asians. My mother was born in Cumberland, but my father grew up on a farm in Virginia and moved there. He worked for the paper mill, a job he took when he got out of the army. When I was small, the town had the glass factory, the tire company, the textiles company. All of them went under except the paper mill, and my father felt really fortunate. But the reality
I grew up in an atmosphere where everybody was concerned about there not being enough jobs; the unemployment rate was through the roof. I tried for years to get a job at M cDonald’s and couldn’t because it was so competitive, even though fastfood restaurants in Cumberland paid minimum wage. I remember when I was in my twenties, after college, I was working outside of D.C., and a young woman who lived in Keyser, West Virginia, about twenty miles from Cumberland, was killed in a car accident on an icy road, on her way to her job at the M cDonald’s. People talked about what a shame it was, because she was only twenty -three, but nobody talked about the irony and tragedy of dying while going to a job at M cDonald’s. AG: Did you have an awareness of racism when you were growing up? KC: I remember little experiences. One day when I was in high school, we were waiting for gym to start, and about fifteen girls were sitting on the steps between the floor of the gym and the balcony seats. One of them told a joke and whispered it into another girl’s ear, and the other girl laughed and said, ‘Oh, tell it, tell it.’ Then she whispered it into another girl’s ear, and they passed the joke along to every one of those girls. But they didn’t even look at me because it was obviously a racist joke, and I was the
Fast Facts about Kia Corthron Born on May 13, 1961 Graduated from the University of Maryland with a Bachelor’s in communications and film Attended Columbia University to obtain her Masters in Fine Arts (M.F.A) in playwriting A member of New Dramatists Wrote an episode for the TV series, The Wire, entitled Know Your Place Wrote another episode for The Jury called Lamentation on the Reservation Won the WindhamCampbell Prize in 2014
only black person there. But to some degree I suppressed my awareness of racism until I was a young adult, perhaps to survive it. I wasn’t the type to call out to those girls and say, ‘What’s this joke about?’ I knew what was going on, but I suppressed it. I was more outspoken within my extended family and more aware of sexism. I remember being six years old and telling my mother that I wanted to be a preacher when I grew up. We were Southern Baptists-we didn’t go to church that often, but the Bible was there-and I thought it would please her that I wanted to do this. But her response was that women aren’t preachers, and I remember how that struck me. That was a long time ago, though. By the time I grew up, I don’t think she would have discouraged me from anything as long as it made me happy. She was perfectly supportive of my interest in playwriting, despite my lack of any expendable income, long before I had any productions. AG: What was your first experience with theatre? KC: I remember doing small children’s plays in school, although unfortunately, by about the time I got to third grade, the disgusting Board of Education cut the funding for that. I don’t think there was another chance to act until the senioryear play, and I didn’t participate in that. I mostly saw plays on campus when I was in college: A Moon for the Misbegotten, Pippin. I took a lot of English classes, so I read a lot of plays, and I was well-versed in the typical American classics: M iller and O’Neill and Williams. I stumbled onto theatre, really. I was interested in dramatic writing, I was interested in films, I was reading plays. But I only started writing plays when I took a playwriting class with a wonderful teacher named Jewell Rhodes, during my last semester in undergrad. I wrote a two-person play about the relationship between a Vietnam veteran and his sister, set on the day he comes home from the war; their father has died while he was away. I was a child during the Vietnam era, so I just remember being small and I remember a sense of chaos on television. With all that was going on with the war and the Civil Rights M ovement, I had this sense of chaos whenever we turned on the news. Anyway, in this writing course we would share what we wrote every week, and I’d gotten good comments. But it wasn’t
until the last class that we had to put our work up. I had two friends who were engineering students, and by the grace of God one had done some acting when he was younger, because I knew nothing about it. If he had been terrible, maybe I never would have written another play. And my other friend was okay. Jewell said the scenes had to be fifteen minutes, but none of us knew what that meantthese were our first plays. So everybody else’s scene was about five minutes long, and mine went on for half an hour. Jewell had simulated a theatre by turning off the florescent lights where we were sitting, and when the lights came up, there was quiet, except for one woman crying. She was a little older than the rest of us and had written a semiautobiographical play about having to work in a shoe store while everybody else was going to Woodstock, so she was from that era. And she kept saying, ‘That’s the way it was. That’s the way it was.’ Comments for everyone else’s work had been verbose and intellectual, but for mine they were brief: ‘poignant,’ ‘touching.’ People were expressing how they had been affected, the first time I’d experienced that. It meant more than people just saying they liked it, as in my fiction classes. That’s when I started writing plays. AG: Come Down Burning and Cage Rhythm were initially produced together. Were they written to be produced on the same bill? KC: Come Down Burning was written separately. That was the last play I wrote before I finished with Columbia, and Long Wharf Theatre decided to do it in their workshop series. When I wrote Burning, I was thinking a lot about Roe v. Wade, which was looking very fragile at the time. I wanted to address that, because I feel that wealthy women can always get abortions, but the poor have to go to dangerous means. But Burning is short, so Long Wharf asked for a companion piece, and I had no idea that Cage Rhythm was going to become full length. It was a difficult situation, because I literally found out a month before rehearsal that Long Wharf wanted another play, so I was writing it from the very seeds as we were rehearsing. I had no intention of writing that play at that time, but I was interested at some point in writing about women in prison, and because Burning only had women actors, and I had to use the same cast. I thought, ‘Well, I guess it’s time.’ I had to write fast, and that propelled me to a new place in my writing, where I
was very clipped and quick. Cage Rhythm became quick, short scenes that immediately went to the heart of the scene and then left it. That was the first of three plays. Life By Asphyxiation takes place on death row and in Breath, Boom the central character is in and out of jail. AG: Why do you love to play around with language? KC: Plays are about the spoken word. The audience is gonna hear it, not just read it, as in a novel, so it may as well be exciting ti hear. I fiddle around with naturalism: a line is this close to naturalistic-but not quite. So your ear and mind are ready for something, and it’s not quite what you expect. Hopefully this keeps the audience alert and involved. Because it’s not what you expect, you as an audience member are also a working participant in the process of this performance. AG: You talked about the white audience’s response to Come Down Burning and Cage Rhythm. Is that a problem you often encounter at white theatres? KC: Yes. But that was the most extreme experience I’ve had, mainly because Cage Rhythm was so in process and because Long Wharf produced Come Down Burning in a big theatre, and it needs an intimate space. But in general, there is always the issue of how a largely white audience can connect with a back play. Center stage in Baltimore produced Splash Hatch on the E Going Down, and since they always hold a luncheon for their subscribers before a play goes up, they asked me to talk about the script. I agreed, although I didn’t know how we could talk about the play when the audiences hadn’t seen it yet. M ost of the subscribers who came to the luncheon were middle-aged white persons, and they got the information that the central character was a very bright teenager and that she was pregnant, and they became threatened by the idea. They kept saying, ‘Well, how could she be smart? A smart should not get pregnant.’ They started talking disparagingly about girls having babies and their parents having to raise them. I was saying that the girl’s parents are not going to throw her out in the street; they want her to go to college, and she is raising her own child. There was one black man at the luncheon, and he seemed supportive of the play and interested in the idea of it. So there was
some sort of racism involved with this, but also something else: the subscribers were threatened by the possibility that I was advocating for unmarried girls to go out and have children.
us and different from us.’ It was important not to soften the picture in any way, I think what I want to say politically comes across by being as truthful as I can.
After I thought about it for a few days, I realized that those audiences were used to the issue of teen pregnancy coming from outside the girls and to the idea of ‘society’ dealing with this problem. I was trying to write the play from the inside, trying to write what these girls go through and how difficult it is for them. For me, Shaneequa’s speech about how painful it was for her to miss a math test, because she had to find a babysitter, is essential to the play. The subscribers and I were coming from two different points of view.
AG: Once you have the political impetus for a play, what is your process of de veloping the characters and their stories?
AG: You mentioned wanting to address environmental racism in Splash Hatch. Is that how plays begin in you? KC: It always starts with a political impetus. Always, I didn’t know what I was going to write with Splash Hatch, but I knew before I started that I wanted to write about environmental racism, and I decided that the main character would be a pregnant teenager so that I could address teen pregnancy by virtue of that. With Breath, Boom- my newest play and I believe my strongest-I wanted to write about girl gangs, and in the early seeds of that, I also wanted to write about police brutality. But as soon as I started I realized that was too much material unto itself. The play I’m working on now deals with police brutality.
KC: I don’t have a story at the beginning by any means. That is the last thing I have. As I’m learning about the characters, as I’m writing the story slowly comes. It’s very rare that I even know how the play ends. Life By Asphyxiation was one of the few where I knew the outcome, because I knew it would end with the execution of the man. Technically the play ends with the speech of Katie, but the execution is the last action. I have an idea of how I want the audience to feel at the end. So I sort of get to know the characters. The more I develop the story, the more I write, the more I get to know them. Story is my weak point. I can write forever. I can find characters, develop characters, do dialogue. I have a facility for that. But story’s the hardest thing to come to me. I have this perhaps sexist theory that men come to plays with story first, and women with character first. And for that reason, in some male writers’ work you see an incredibly structures story but don’t really understand the characters at all, whereas some female writers’ work is episodic and there isn’t really a story, but you understand the characters.
AG: You r best play seamlessly mingle political issues with the emotional lives of your characters.
AG: Many of the characters in your plays are women without men.
KC: I feel that way with Breath, Boom and also with Light Raise the Roof. In relation to Light Raise the Roof, I’d seen other theatrical pieces about homelessness, for a while with the homeless person talking to the audience. But I felt that often the work was about talking to the audience, about how wethe-homeless are not any different from you-who-are-watching. I wanted Light Raise the Roof to be about a community. Not that I wanted to excuse people who are not homeless from responsibility, but I didn’t want to say, ‘These people are just like you in the audience, therefore you should like them and help them.’ I wanted to say, ‘This is a community, and they’re human beings-human beings like
KC: I tend to write more often about women than men, for personal interest and to fill a gap. But when I do write about men-Splash Hatch really being the exception-it’s also about men without women, so I actually tend to do singles in general. When we were preparing the reading of Light Raise the Roof at M anhattan Theatre Club, the actors were going on about whether Cole had a thing with Arnell-they were sort of making a joke. But many a truth is said in jest. I said that if they knew my work, they’d know it’s generally asexual. Usually I do have people that are on their own, maybe because I am. I’m not going to let them have more fun than I am as the playwright. Breath, Boom is almost all
women. There’s an allusion to a couple of girls in prison having a relationship, but for the most part the main character is asexual. AG: We haven’t talked about writerly influences at all. KC: I can name my favorite playwrights, but the influence question is always hard, because I feel I’ve been influenced by every single thing I’ve read, even if I hated it. I read Adrienne Kennedy relatively late-wasn’t introduced to her until graduate school-but I’m really drawn to her language and where she’s coming from politically, because it changes. Wedding Band, by Alice Childress, had an impact on me. I saw a dramatization of that on TV when I was a kid and I remember the mother of the son, in the face of her potential black daughter-in-law, screaming, ‘Nigger, whore.’ Being a black child and seeing that on TV really disturbed me. AG: You said earlier that when you begin to write a play you know how you want the audience to feel at the end. S ince you start with a political impulse, how would you describe the purpose of your art? KC: I hope that someone leaves the theatre thinking a little differently than they did when they came in. If someone leaves Life By Asphyxiation thinking it was terrible that Jojo murdered Katie, but that we are equally animals if we execute him- if someone thinks that at least to a degree- I feel I’ve been successful. But whether or not you think the way I do after seeing one of my plays, I want you to know where I’m coming from. I don’t put out the issues and then sit on the fence, ever. There’s some place I’m coming from, and whether you agree or disagree, you have to hear it or I wasn’t successful in what I was saying. Not to belittle agitprop, which can be immediate and theatrical, but I think what I’m doing affects an audience more emotionally. But my plays cause maybe a gradual change. M aybe down the line, when it comes to voting about the death penalty, you will think differently than you did before. M aybe down the line you will think in a new way about pregnant teenagers or environmental racism or girl gangs. M aybe you will see an issue differently. ■Alexis Greene
Because
Shape
No
Size Matter Your
Our
Or Color
Is Our
Health
Strength!
“When Bad Things Happen, Our Hearts Break Too” The people in Come Down Burning are not the sort you’d find in a history book. These everyday, powerless people -- the kind you might see across town or next door or in that ramshackle house at the top of the hill -live everyday, powerless lives, lives that in playwright Kia Corthron’s hands are just as important, just as political, as any president’s or prime minister’s.
mess, but we find out she has hidden talents - knowledge of trees and stars and faraway places -- that really never found a way to blossom in her difficult life.
Even in these modest surroundings, big issues emerge, as two poor black women grapple with equal access to education, abortion rights, healthcare and the legacy of injustice. In the end, they prove that they deserve our attention, our sympathy, our respect. And certainly better care. Guest directing for Krannert Center’s Studio Theater, Lisa Gaye Dixon does a masterful job of making something extraordinary from these ordinary lives, weaving a web around these two complicated women. Skoolie, so named because she tried school but “spit it out,” is pragmatic, fiercely controlling and proud. A hairdresser and midwife of sorts, she does what she needs to do to get by. Skoolie usually does just fine, even though she can’t walk and moves around on a little wheeled cart. Her younger sister, Tee, is more immature, careless, and a bit of a dreamer, as she tries to bring up her three children without depending too much on Skoolie. Tee seems mercurial, defensive, more than a bit of a
These characters are written in full, with depth and life and spark. Female characters like these are few and far between in contemporary American theater, and maybe that’s why these two are so fascinating. With excellent performances by Crystal A. Dickson as Skoolie and Tinashe Kajese as Tee, the sisters act like real siblings who know how to push each other’s buttons. As they alternately bicker and band together against the world, you get the feeling they’ve been fighting the same battles for years and years. Physically and emotionally, Dickinso n and Kajese are the real deal. Although the sisters certainly take center stage, the underlying issue in “Come Down Burning” is children -- having them, caring for them, standing up for them, deciding not
to have them. These are women trying to make choices about their lives, to control -in some way, large or small -- their own destiny.
design contributes to the intimate feel, with a simple, homespun set bracketed by high arched beams and a blue sky beyond.
The tension builds as Corthron weaves injustice, both past and present, through her naturalistic dialogue, as she moves inevitab ly from everyday occurrences like haircuts and school scuffles to a dramatic, terrible conclusion.
Supporting actors complete the tableau, adding other shades to the story. Shanola Gralyn Hampton is confident and classy as Bink, a longtime friend, while fourth-grader Kendra Afiya Charles and second-grader Bryson Jarell Davis-Johnson make a charming, lively impression as Tee’s children.
I found “Come Down Burning” very moving, not the least because it is so intimate. This is a small story and a slender play. When bad things happen to these people, it breaks our hearts as well as theirs. Joseph J. Rial’s scenic
The only downside to “Come Down Burning” is that this production only runs for four performances. It deserves more. Julie Kistler
What a Captivating Show!!! As staged by Playwrights Horizons under the direction of Marion McClinton, Kia Corthron’s Breath, Boom is a startling and unflinching glimpse into ten years in the life of Prix (Yvette Ganier), the leader of a female gang. The play opens with a scene in which the sixteen-year-old Prix coolly presides over the brutal beating of her colleague and friend, Comet (Heather Alicia Simms), and charts Prix’s trajectory, in and out of juvenile detention centers and prison. Corthron neither condemns nor romanticizes her protagonist, offering instead an objective, and subtly hopeful, portrait of her character, avoiding both sentimentality and easy remedies in this intricately plotted drama. The complexity that Corthron builds into the story becomes most evident in her deployment of the controlling metaphor from which the play derives its title: the fireworks that constitute Prix’s ambition and fantasy escape from the grim realityof her day to day life. Following Comet’s beating, Prix sits on her bed and creates makebelieve fireworks out of pipe-cleaners, bending and tangling them into starbursts, enthralled by the “controlled chaos” of pyrotechnics. The playful hobby is skillfully set at odds with her attempt to control the chaos of her real world—a world permeated by sexual abuse and violence—through both her ascension in the ranks of her gang and her attempt to detach herself from her own emotions. The fireworks metaphor is bent and transformed throughout the play as deftly as Prix’s pipe-cleaners, and its meaning evolves and changes as it is interwoven with Prix’s life. In a later scene, she projects herself a dramatic death by fireworks,
reveling in a vision of being consumed by flame in an explosion in her own fireworks factory, accidentally set off by the frivolous but deadly error of wearing silk socks to work; silk, after all, creates friction. This glorious fantasy of death, however, is later juxtaposed to her fear of another type of death-by-fireworks in the form of a “black shell,” the shell that does not explode midair. You cannot see it, and you do not know where it will fall, and whether it is hurtling straight at you—invisible but deadly.
Neither the glorious explosion nor the frightening black shell, however, end the play, and Corthron’s refusal to simplify either her character or her plot by choosing either extreme leads to a far more complex and involving ending. Prix finally succeeds in her dream of acquiring professional quality fireworks, and she orchestrates a big, exploding climax, enabled by Ken Travis’s sound and Michael Philippi’s lights. The sheer joy in Prix’s eyes at her achievement is thrilling to watch, and a lesser playwright might have ended the play with Prix’s triumph, allowing a deceptive escape from dismal reality through this bold, artistic creation and fantasy. But Corthron refuses to create such an escapist ending and instead interrupts Prix’s grandest moment with her
lowest. Bitterly accused by a woman whom she had critically injured years before (played by Dena Atlantic), and horrified not so much by the act itself, but by the fact that she cannot even remember it, Prix’s triumph cedes to despair, as she breaks down, emotionally spent and sobbing. Offering the dramatic heights of the dream realized, then crashing her protagonist back to reality, Corthron rebuilds, out of this devastation, a smaller, subtler, but truer, final scene. She establishes the seeds of a reconciliation between Prix and her estranged mother (Caroline Stefanie Clay), as they meet (against Prix’s will) to watch the extinguishing of the lights on the Empire State Building. The lights do not, in fact, go out as her mother had anticipated, but the anticlimactic nature of the scene opens up the space for a grudging emotional connection to be re-established between the two women, as her mother asks about all those pipe cleaner fireworks Prix used to make. The glorious exploding fireworks cede to the simple pipe cleaner fireworks, but the small triumph becomes the bigger emotional victory.
The play is unquestionably centered on Ganier’s brilliantly nuanced portrayal of Prix, but McClinton’s cast and crew provide a solid anchor for Ganier’s performance. Set designer Michael Philippi’s fluid stage space
alternates between a sense of limitless depth and stifling enclosure through the simple manipulation of graffiti-covered flats and chain link fences. He creates visual depth in each scene, always suggesting a space beyond—a space that cannot be entered. The supporting cast all give depth to the wide range of characters that each is called upon to play, from the hyperkinetic Cat (Donna Duplantier), Prix’s fellow inmate in juvie, to Comet’s chillingly cold daughter Jupiter (Pascale Armand), an adolescent who supervises the beating of Prix when she botches a prison code, ironically turning the tables on Prix. Kalimi Baxter gives a riveting portrayal of a heroin addict, Malika, and Russell Andrews gives a strong performance as Prix’s abuser, Jerome, although he has the difficult task of appearing first as a real character and then as a ghost. Rosalyn Coleman gives a particularly impressive performance as Prix’s friend Angel, a performance that reaches its peak in a scene at the prison. In a monologue that brilliantly crystallizes the unsentimental tone of the piece as a whole, Angel shows off her scrapbook to an uninterested Prix. Rapturously narrating each entry, detailing the achievements and photos and friendships of each friend and relative immortalized in her scrapbook, she rounds out each of the entries with an equally glorified narration of the subject’s funeral. Coleman’s delivery of this speech is magnificent, destabilizing the audience and leaving it unsure whether to laugh at her seemingly blurred border between life and death, or react with a sentimental empathy to the deaths that she describes. Here, as throughout the play, Corthron refuses to give us the answer, challenging the audience to dispense with easy sentimentality, empty climaxes, and glib resolutions. ■Sarah Lansdale Stevenson
Kia Corthron: A Playwright Who's Unafraid to Admit She's Political ONE of the boldest things about the playwright Kia Corthron is her willingness to embrace an identity that most American writers would consider a professional liability. "I consider myself a political writer with a political point of view," she said recently. "I don't write agit-prop because I think the point gets across much stronger if the audience feels something rather than being told something intellectually. But every play of mine starts from a socio political issue." A few years ago, for instance, the Atlantic Theater Company approached Ms. Corthron about commissioning a new play. "We said, `What are you interested in writing about?' " recalled Neil Pepe, the company's artistic director. "The first thing she said was, `The situation of police brutality in New York.' " The result is Force Continuum, a drama about three generations of black police officers, which opens at the Atlantic on Thursday, directed by Michael John Garcés. "Police brutality was my original impetus to write the play," Ms. Corthron said recently, peeling a clementine in the Atlantic's rehearsal studio. "I started thinking about it around the time of Louima, before Diallo." The names she mentioned loom large in the recent history of race relations in New York City. Abner Louima is the Haitian immigrant who was sodomized with a wooden toilet plunger in a Brooklyn police station; Amadou Diallo was the Bronx resident who died in a hail of gunfire by plainclothes officers who said they thought he was armed. "Now," said Ms. Corthron, who is 39, "I don't call it a play about police brutality, because it's more than that. I say the play is about the relationship between the black community and the N.Y.P.D." The central character of Force Continuum is Dece, a 24-year-old black rookie policeman
living with his grandfather, who is retired from the housing police. Dece is following in his parents' footsteps: his mother, who died of cancer, was a housing policewoman; his father, a patrol officer, committed suicide after taking part in the beating of a black man stopped for a traffic violation.
"While I was writing, I felt first of all that it would be very easy to write a play about white cops beating up a black man, which we know happens," Ms. Corthron said with a nervous laugh. "I decided to complicate it by focusing on a black cop and those contradictions. But also I really wanted to find solutions. I didn't want to just say: `This is a problem.' We all know that. I wanted to see if there's a way to bridge the sense of black people not trusting the police, police not trusting blacks — if there's a way to go beyond that." In a cultural era who’s most successful television show ("Seinfeld") proudly declared itself to be about nothing, it takes courage to stuff a play as full of substance as Ms. Corthron does. Not everyone appreciates her intentions. Virtually every review she has received talks about the trouble with Kia Corthron. "She tries to cover too much ground," The Boston Globe groaned about her play Digging Eleven in 1999 at the Hartford Stage Company. "There seems to be one theme too many under scrutiny here," a Baltimore critic wrote about her play Splash Hatch on the E Going Down in 1997 at Centerstage, "making the end result dispersed rather than concentrated."
University, nine of the 15 plays she has written have been commissioned. In other words, major nonprofit theaters have paid her to write plays for them, including the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, Second Stage in New York and the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Such complaints almost always run alongside acknowledgment of Ms. Corthron's gifts. Reviewing her drama Seeking the Genesis in 1997 at the Manhattan Theater Club, Ben Brantley of The New York Times said the "overstuffed, often awkward play, crammed with medical and sociological data" takes on "larger social and moral issues than even George Bernard Shaw would have been comfortable with." Yet, Mr. Brantley said, "the play shows beguiling evidence of an original theatrical voice and intelligence." The playwright is willing to weather the criticisms. "Because I try not to preach on a single issue, my plays become bigger and take in more of the world," she said. "Ultimately, I want people to feel in the theater, but I also want them to think." Force Continuum is the first of three plays by Ms. Corthron that will be seen in New York this season. Another, Safe Box, begins performances on Feb. 13 at the Signature Theater Company as part of "Urban Zulu Mambo," a program of short plays by four black women. (The other playwrights are Suzan-Lori Parks, Ntozake Shange, and Regina Taylor, who organized the evening as a homage to the poet and playwright Adrienne Kennedy.) Brief and fierce, Safe Box rips into community standards that allow industries to dump carcinogens into the air and water. And in April, Playwrights Horizons will stage Breath, Boom, an intense drama about girl gangs, which the Royal Court Theater in London commissioned and produced last February to positive reviews. Since 1992, when Ms. Corthron graduated from the master of fine arts program at Columbia
It was Ms. Corthron's unusual, stylized language that caught the attention of Susan Booth, the literary manager at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, which commissioned Seeking the Genesis and produced its world premiere in 1996. "I read two one-acts of Kia's," Ms. Booth said by telephone, "and I was knocked out by the fact that she created her own language with an unassailable logic and its own music. The primary reason we wanted to commission her was that we couldn't compare her to anyone else. You couldn't say, `It's like (insert iconic playwright here).' That rarely happens. When it does, you have to pay attention." The object of all this attention is a tall, friendly woman with light- brown skin, green eyes, and dreadlocks down her back. She speaks in a high quirky voice — Minnie Mouse as Valley Girl — which you would never expect to emerge from the author of her tough, gritty plays. She likes confounding expectations. "I hate clichés," she said. "They give me a tummy ache." Ms. Corthron grew up in Cumberland, a factory town in the tiny sliver of Maryland wedged between Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Her father worked at a paper mill, where he died of an aneurysm at 51. Observing his working life, Ms. Corthron got early lessons in the exquisite complexity of injustice. "He used to work 10hour days, and sometimes he'd go 13 or 14 days without a day off," she remembered. "And my mother said that he would train these white men 20 years his junior to be his bosses. He would do their jobs when they weren't there, but they would never promote him. The excuse they had was that he'd never completed college." Writing came naturally. When her older sister started school, Ms. Corthron would amuse
herself by creating dialogues using clothespins as stick figures, but she didn't start writing plays until her last year as a film student at the University of Maryland. A yearlong writing workshop with the playwright Lonnie Carter led to graduate school at Columbia and a life in the theater. The first playwright who impressed her was David Rabe; she was especially struck by the heightened language and political content of his Vietnam plays The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Streamers. Most writers she admires now work in fiction, like Gerald Vizenor, Annie Proulx and Junot Diaz. "I like writers who fiddle with the language and you have to keep up," Ms. Corthron said.
as was a book entitled The Police Mystique by Anthony Bouza, a former Minneapolis police chief and N.Y.P.D. veteran. But she also kept in mind something she had read in the Brazilian director Augusto Boal's book Theater of the Oppressed arguing that to institute social change, an audience has to be left with a sense of hope that there is a way out of a bleak situation. What might be the solution to the conflict between law enforcement and black New Yorkers? "Community police," Ms. Corthron said. "Recruiting from the community. I live in Harlem, and a few weeks ago when I came out of the subway there were policemen passing out job applications. I found that very hopeful. There are definitely ugly, ugly, ugly moments, like Dorismond" — Patrick Dorismond, an unarmed security guard who was fatally shot by police last year in Manhattan — "Diallo, Louima. But I think things are changing." Don Shewey
Force Continuum is her first work in New York since Seeking the Genesis, her first full-length play, which concerns a single mother with a hyperactive 8-year-old son and a 15-year-old lost to guns and gangs. It is typical of Ms. Corthron's work that instead of presenting a crisis and then solving it tidily, the play expands outward, exposing more dimensions of the central dilemma. It also showed that Ms. Corthron is unafraid to be didactic, in the sense of being instructional rather than pedantic. Where most plays these days might drop the word "Prozac" as a punch line, Seeking the Genesis spends an entire scene having a professor explain the chemistry of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors to a mother agonizing over whether to medicate her child. Ms. Corthron does extensive research on sociopolitical issues for each play. For Force Continuum, personal interviews with a housing policewoman named Karyn Carlo were crucial,
We supplied you with some facts and opinions, but let’s see what you know. Answers have been provided on the next page. i.
There are four types of abortion. (True/False)
ii.
You can die from complications due to abortion. (True/False)
iii.
Medical abortions make up about 28% of all reported abortions. (True/False)
iv.
In 2010, 95% of all abortions were performed on unmarried women. (True/False)
v.
States are required to report their abortion data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (True/False)
vi.
In 2010, reported abortions declined by 3% in comparison to 2009. (True/False)
vii.
25% of all pregnancies (excluding miscarriage) end in abortion. (True/False)
viii.
Eighteen percent of US abortions are teenagers, while women in their twenties account for more than fifty percent. (True/False)
ix.
Black women are more than five times as likely to have an abortion as a white woman. (True/False)
x.
It has been estimated that since 1973, Black women have had about 16 million abortions. (True/False)
So let’s see how well you really did on that quiz. i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. vii. viii. ix. x.
FALSE. There are only three types of abortion: Medical, Surgical, and Late. TRUE. According to the CDC in 2009, eight women died as a result of complications from known legal induced abortion. FALSE. According to the CDC, medical abortions make up 17.8% of all reported abortions. FALSE. Only 85% of all abortions were performed on unmarried women in 2010. FALSE. States voluntarily send in their statistical information to the CDC. TRUE. FALSE. Only 21% of all pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion. TRUE. TRUE. TRUE.
So how well did you do? Remember, here at HUSH we’re all about self-education and spreading the knowledge, so check out these sites for yourself for more facts and statistics. Also, before you go spreading the knowledge, please remember that abortion is a very controversial topic and some facts and information is biased. Don’t just base your knowledge off us, even though we are pretty amazing. www.cdc.gov http://www.guttmacher.org/
Quiz Me Please 1. What should you do as soon as you see blue lights in your rearview mirror? a. Pull over as quickly and safely as possible b. Keep driving until you are sure they’re pulling you over c. Gradually slow down for about a minute before pulling over d. Keep on driving in the hopes they will give up on you and move on 2. Which a. b. c. d.
of the following should you not do after stopping your car? Roll your window down all the way Turn off your engine Reach for the glove box Leave your hands on the steering wheel
3. Which a. b. c. d.
is safe to do after being pulled over by the police, but before they get to your car? Rummage through your pockets for your license Reach into your glove box for your registration Reach under your seat for something Roll down your window
4. Which is the wrong action to take if you are unsure the person pulling you over is a real police officer? a. Just as they arrive to your window, leave it closed and drive off as fast as you can b. Ask for their photo identification c. Ask them to call for their supervisor to assist them d. Ask them to follow you to the nearest police station 5. Which a. b. c. d.
action could wind up getting a gun pointed at you? Not getting out of your car when asked Getting out of your car when asked to stay inside the car Failing to open your window Starting an argument with the police officer
6. _____ Sometimes police are allowed to arrest people without reading them their Miranda rights. 7. _____ Police are required to reveal themselves as police officers if someone ask them directly if they are a cop. 8. _____ Police are not allowed to pat search you unless you have been arrested. 9. _____ You have a right to know why you are being detained. 10. _____ If a cop directly asks for your cooperation, you must submit to a search of your possessions.
1(a) 2(c) 3(d) 4(a) 5(b) 6(T) 7(F) 8(F) 9(F) 10(F)
Figure It Out!!!
Across 4. Strike or propel forcibly with the foot 7. Enforcers of the law 9. Something believed to be true but is not 10. Coercion with the use or threat of violence 11. Action of sex 13. What one does with a gun? 14. Action African American women are taking in the abortion rights movement
15. Opposite of the abuser Down 1. Where the featured playwright is from 2. Shows in July 3. Termination of pregnancy 5. Fought for in the 1920s 6. The A in CSA 8. Name of featured playwright 12. Prevention of pregnancy