PLAYWRIGHT'S PERMISSIONS FOR ENGAGEMENT
Consider this an invitation to be your full and un-restricted selves. But I also want you to know that the theatre normative will be disrupted in this space for the duration of this show. And that means some thangs….
It means you are allowed to laugh audibly and give all the “um hmmms” and “uhn uhnnns” you feel inspired to give.
The subject matter might make you think that there is no room for humor. That is a lie. The humanity of both the folk in the present and in the past during times of enslavement mean that they are full and complex. They are not simply downtrodden or in a perpetual state of abuse.
Just like in the present, the enslaved are multi-faceted. We all carry snark and sarcasm. We are all expert navigators of the systemic fuckeries. And sometimes, navigating that shit is painful. And sometimes, navigating that shit is funny.
As always, the theatre can be church for some of us, and testifying is allowed.
Please be an audience member that joins with the village, either silently or vocally, in support of the journey we will take collectively. Exhale together. Laugh together. Say “oh hell no” or “amen” should you need to.
This is community. Let’s dismantle and let’s go.
peaceandlovedominique:)
PLAYWRIGHT’S NOTE
I never know how anything I write is going to go over. For me, theatre is supposed to be a liberation sport. As of late, with visibility and multiple productions comes great opportunity and great scrutiny. Gazes exist everywhere. Toni Morrison talks about the “white gaze,” under which Black writers are constantly restricted and whose stories become qualified by a metrics system outside of the cultural experience from which they write.
I, too, have felt the lash of writing in a continuum that honors this gaze, even when I personally do not hold space for it in my own aesthetic. But there are other gazes as well. As a woman writer, I have also felt the male gaze. As a radical writer, I have felt the gaze of respectability politics. And as a Black writer, I have felt the gaze of Blackness that sometimes is only qualified as one myopic thing, rather than expansive and global as Blacknesss truly is. No matter the gaze, they all feel like one collective thing to me as an artist: oppression.
I believe fervently in freedom. Everyone’s freedom. For me, freedom is not something that comes on the back of other people’s oppression. Real freedom is contagious. In liberating yourself, you liberate others. You inspire acceptance with oneself. You do not seek to restrict anyone else’s existence so that yours can be more comfortable. Freedom is not comfort. Freedom is healthy disruption and positive growth.
It is my desire as a playwright, and our desire as a company, to “get free” in this production.
Hope it’s contagious…