Suzan-Lori Parks on the Covid Pandemic

 

[When New York City Mayor Bill DiBlasio declared New York City the “epicenter” of the pandemic on Thursday, 19 March 2020, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks gave herself an assignment: write a play a day during the first year of the crisis.

[That project became Plays for the Plague Year, a chronological depiction of the life of Americans during a health emergency.  The program is an assemblage of short plays, scenes, monologues, and songs, covering whatever people got up to between that March date three years ago to 13 April 2021.]

 

“PLAYWRIGHT EXPLORES PANDEMIC IN ‘PLAYS FOR THE PLAGUE YEAR’”
by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport 

[Jeffrey Brown’s interview with playwright Suzan-Lori Parks (b. 1963) was aired on the PBS NewsHour on 21 April 2023 (Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks explores the pandemic in ‘Plays for the Plague Year’ | PBS NewsHour).  It was prompted by the production of Parks’s performance piece Plays for the Plague Year, composed during the enforced isolation of the COVID pandemic.

[A note on the text below: for some reason, PBS didn't publish the usual NewsHour site with a transcribed text of the interview formatted and superficially copy-edited.  I've had to use another site with a transcription of the video text, but it's in all-caps, has no paragraphing (each sentence is its own paragraph), and sparse identification of the speakers, so I had to use the video itself as a trot. 

[As if was doing this, I also found that some passages were omitted from the online transcript entirely, and one passage in the transcription didn’t exist on the video.  (Almost all the scenes from performances, that were seen as background sequences in the video, were excluded.  I inserted them here.)  I’ve done my best to remedy these oversights (so the text in this post is partly PBS’s and partly mine).]

Geoff Bennett (“NewsHour” anchor): Is it too soon to explore the pandemic through art?

Not if you’re Suzan-Lori Parks, who wrote a short ‘play a day’ while sitting at home for 13 months and has now turned those into a full-length performance [3 hours] at New York’s Public Theater [Joe’s Pub, 18 April-30 April 2023].

It’s part of a “very big year” for one of the country’s most acclaimed playwrights. Jeffrey Brown has the story for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

Actors in Scene (singing): “I play the writer” [Suzan-Lori Parks] / “I play the hubby” [Greg Keller] / “I play the kid” [Leland Fowler] . . .

Jeffrey Brown: Suzan-Lori Parks both plays and is the writer of “Plays for the Plague Year” . . .

Actors in Scene (singing): . . . “I play the muse” / “I play the stalker” / “I play the principal in the school” . . . .

Brown: . . . a series of songs and scenes.

Actor: “Sit down, catch your breath . . . .”

Brown: Small personal moments . . .

Actor: “I’ll make you some tea and I’ll put some honey in it.”

Brown: . . . and big collective traumas . . .

Actor: “I was just wanting to alert people because I’m a doctor . . .”

Brown: . . . that take us through the first year of the COVID pandemic.

Actor: “. . . and then, I got sick from the virus.”

Actor (Keller): “She says that you probably have it, too.”

Actor (Parks): “Oh, great.”

Brown: It’s based on an assignment Parks gave herself in real time: be present, observe, write every day.

Suzan-Lori Parks: It’s a way to . . . keep watch, if you will. You know, it’s a way to bear witness. It’s a way to say, ‘Yes, this happened. I’m watching and I’m going to write it down.’

Parks (walking through stage set with Brown): I have a bookshelf very much like this . . .”

Brown: It’s also about the roles we all play every day.

Parks (in the set): I have a typewriter, the Olivetti Valentine . . . .”

Brown: And for Parks – who often writes on an old red typewriter – it really is a new role . . .

Parks (singing and playing guitar): “I had a dream last nigh – it was gorgeous . . . .”

Brown: . . . for the first time she herself acts and sings and plays guitar in one of her plays.

Brown: Did you have any fear, trepidation, putting yourself into the story like this?

Parks: Yes. I have so much fear, so much trepidation. And I think a lot of us realized during the first year or so of the pandemic is that there were things we were afraid of, are afraid of, and that we had to really look at those things.

And so I looked at a lot of those things and one of them was, ‘Oh, I’m putting myself in the story.’

Actors (scene from “Topdog/Underdog”): “I’m gettin’ too old to be sleepin’ in that chair, man.” “It’s my place – you don’t got no place.”

Brown: Now 59, Parks is best known for her play, “Topdog/Underdog,” in which two brothers, named ‘Lincoln’ and ‘Booth,’ are bound by family ties and the burden of American history.

Actor (“Topdog/Underdog”): We put aside a hundred dollars for the rent.  A hundred a week times four weeks makes the rent and we don’t want the rent spent.”

Brown: It won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, making Parks the first African-American woman to receive that honor, and last fall had a 20th anniversary revival on Broadway [Golden Theatre, 20 October 2022-15 January 2023].

Actor (scene from “The Harder They Come”): “You stealin’ from me!” (Ensemble sings.)

Brown: Part of a busy, attention-getting year for Parks that included her theater adaptation of the 1972 hit reggae film, “The Harder They Come” [Public Theater, 15 March-9 April 2023], and a new play premiered at Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theater titled “Sally & Tom” [1 October-6 November 2022] – that’s Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson – set in both past and present.

“Plays for the Plague Year,” produced at New York’s Public Theater, is her most personal yet and includes experiences at home with her real-life husband, Christian Konopka and their son, now-11-year-old Durham, who’s suddenly as tall as his mother.

Actor (singing in “Plays for the Plague Year”): “I play the guy named Paul.”

They and many other actual people are portrayed onstage by a group of actors who take a variety of roles in short ‘plays’ . . .

Actor (Parks): “I’m scared.  I’m sorry.”

Brown: . . . that unfold chronologically.

Actor (Keller): “I’m sorry, too.”

Parks: It’s really a celebration of everyday things, whatever was happening.

My office is at the kitchen table in our one bedroom apartment, so I was writing at one end of the kitchen table, at the other end of the kitchen table there was our then eight-year-old son who was doing remote schooling like so many kids, and he was having his remote schooling things happen, you know, all that kind of glitching and all this stuff and trying to get used to it. So the play might be about that.

Actor: “I don’t got time to be dead. I have important work to do.  I’m a principal . . . .”

Brown: Also given voice onstage: a number of those lost during the pandemic.

Actor: “. . . And I have kids looking up to me . . . .”

Brown: Parks has honored them with their own short scenes.

Actor: “. . . I’m their example. I can’t let them down.”

Brown: And the social justice protests after the killings of Breonna Taylor [March 2020, Louisville, KY] and George Floyd [May 2020, Minneapolis, MN].

Actors: “You see me lyin’ here? You see a knee on my neck?” “I see it.  It’s real.”

Parks: A lot of people, in this country especially, we think that to grieve, you know, bad things, would bring us down. The opposite is true.

When we look with love and with interest and curiosity towards something that . . . something difficult that happened, we are released from its power to weigh us down.

Brown: But your way to do that as a playwright is to write them into the play and bring them onstage.

Parks: Well, yes. That’s the way the world works.

Brown: The way the world works or the theater world?

Parks: Well, all the world’s a stage. The writer writes them into the play.

That’s why we’re here. We’ve been written into a play. Isn’t it fun?

Brown: The two of us?

Parks: Sure.

Brown: This is a play, right?

Parks: Sure, yeah.  (Laughs.)

Brown: But, is this the way you think about life?

Parks: Oh, yes, yes.  That’s really what’s been going on.  We’ve been written into a series of plays.

You know, that’s what “Plays for the Plague Year” really is looking at: how reality is made.

Brown: That feels like a good definition of all Parks’ work, in fact: exploring how our individual and collective reality is made.

One guide in shaping that approach: none other than James Baldwin [Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA; 1981-85], who first suggested to Parks, then in college and writing short stories, that she try writing a play.

Parks: I never would have gotten into playwriting had it not been for Mr. Baldwin

Brown: But, I mean, that is a high-level mandate.

Parks: He suggested that I might be good at what I do, and I didn’t have the heart to prove him wrong. Yeah.

I mean, someone has faith in me – it means a lot to me.

Brown: Parks, the daughter of a college professor and army officer, came to see her work as a calling.

Parks: My parents used to tell me – because we travel all around the world: ‘You are an ambassador of your race,’ meaning we travel to a lot of places where people hadn’t met black people before.

And as an adult, now I realize I’m an ambassador of . . . one of the ambassadors of the human race. And I’ll take that on.

Brown: One thing I was wondering about with this play is . . . is the question: is it too soon?

Parks: Maybe it’s too soon. Ummm . . . I don’t think so. The reactions we’re getting from the audience, it feels like it’s time.

Why stuff the stuff down? Why shove it down and not think about it? Until when?

That’s one of the reasons why I’m on stage. I’m not saying ‘yeah, go reflect on the pandemic,’ you know, ‘go over there’ - no, I’m like, ‘I’m here with you.’

Brown: And so “with you” that audience members are invited to reflect on their experience of lockdown by filling out cards about what they want to remember – or forget.

For the PBS NewsHour, I’m Jeffrey Brown at the Public Theater in New York.

[In his more than 30-year career with the PBS NewsHour, Jeffrey Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe.  

[As arts correspondent, Brown has profiled many of the world’s leading writers, musicians, actors, and other artists.  Among his signature works at the NewsHour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the NewsHour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.

[Anne Azzi Davenport is the Senior Coordinating Producer of CANVAS at PBS NewsHour.]

*  *  *  *
“A SOUNDTRACK OF OUR PANDEMIC-ERA LIVES”
by Maya Phillips 

[Plays for the Plague Year started previews in Manhattan’s East Village at the Public Theater’s Joe’s Pub on 5 April and opened on 18 April; it closed on 30 April.  Maya Phillips’s New York Times review of the three-hour performance ran on 19 April 2023 (sec. C [“Arts”]).]

A work by Suzan-Lori Parks explores stories from more than a year of Covid. 

Upon entering Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater for Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Plays for the Plague Year,” audience members are handed a Playbill, a pencil and two yellow notecards, each with a question about the pandemic: “What would you like to remember?” “What would you like to forget?” The responses are placed in a basket from which they are picked and read during the show. At my performance, someone wrote that they’d like to forget “fear and worry, foreground and background.” People in the audience murmured in assent.

We’d all probably like to forget our own experiences of fear and worry during that first year of zealous hand-washing and ever-changing mask mandates. Parks, however, made a project of remembering: For that first pandemic year, she resolved to write a play a day about “whatever happens,” including the mundane goings-on in her apartment, the deaths of friends and strangers, and the Black Lives Matter protests.

Here, Parks performs a version of herself called the Writer, who creates plays each day while quarantining with her husband (played by Greg Keller) and their 8-year-old son (Leland Fowler) in their one-bedroom apartment.

What unfolds is some configuration of those plays, though “play” is too restrictive a word for these micro-performances, which take the forms of monologues, dialogues and songs. Parks, who also plays the guitar here, is joined onstage by seven other cast members in various roles and a band (Ric Molina, guitar; Graham Kozak, bass; Ray Marchica, percussion).

An accounting of each day — an electronic placard hanging above the stage flashes the date and title of each section, presented chronologically from March 19, 2020, to April 13, 2021 — provides the show with a built-in structure to link what often feels like a hodgepodge.

Parks wisely uses a series of shorthands to quickly bring us back to specific moments in those early pandemic days — an actor, for example, gliding past Parks in an ornate doublet and Tudor-style cap to signal theater closures, the cast hollering and clapping for a brief moment to signal the daily 7 p.m. cheer for frontline workers.

In the plays in which Parks isn’t writing or with her family, she’s talking to a dead Little Richard or negotiating with her Muse who, fed up with Covid, threatens to abandon her. In another, a character named Bob looks for a job. There’s one in which Earth, embodied by a woman wearing a crown of branches and holding a scepter, warns that the pandemic is only the beginning of the world’s disasters.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg appears, on the day of her death, as a triumphant Lady Liberty, and the virus, personified as a horror movie villainess named Corona, wheezes and stalks the stage in a black-gray-white ombré dress and virion headpiece with red “spikes.” The costume design, by Rodrigo Muñoz, is as imaginative and visually stunning as runway couture, especially the layered fabrics of the Muse’s handkerchief hem skirt, made to resemble scraps of paper with scribbled writings, and the 3-D elements, like the butterflies on Earth’s chiffon dress.

But not all days are created equal, and this three-hour production does feel as if we’re reliving a year’s worth of material. At least the variety in Parks’s script keeps things unpredictable enough to hold our attention.

The direction, by Niegel Smith, occasionally gets too darling, like the first scene, when the family members introduce themselves (“I am the writer. I am the hubby. I am the son.”) while passing a red paper heart to one another. But Smith, who also choreographed the show, does make organized chaos in the intimate space (design by Peter Nigrini), rotating characters on a tiny stage adorned with a few pieces of low-sitting furniture — table, armchair, dresser, lamp, rack covered in books.

The show’s music is as eclectic as the storytelling; the songs are short, plucky, with hints of folk, jazz and R&B. The surprising mash-up of genres include the doo-wop style of “Bob Needs a Job,” and the bluesy “Praying Now” soon picks up tempo, turning into an upbeat clap-and-stomp. Most aren’t particularly memorable, but the strongest songs — “RIP the King” and “Whichaway the World” — build with an alternating mix of spoken word/rap and soulful crooning from two performers in particular, Fowler and Danyel Fulton.

Sometimes it seems as if Parks is overreaching, as when she speaks to her former mentor, James Baldwin (perfectly embodied by Fowler, who replicates his posture and cadence of speech), so he can muse about American history. Or in a long ceremony during which the cast hands flowers to the audience at the end of a section about Breonna Taylor, played by Fulton; but Fulton’s performance is poignant enough on its own.

The playwright’s conversations with the dead, however, many of whom begin their scenes unaware or in denial of their demise, is the show’s most compelling motif. She speaks to several who are Black, especially those lost to Covid and those to police brutality. Through these post-mortems, Parks is asking trenchant questions about how we memorialize Black bodies. What would the dead say? How would they want to be remembered, if at all? So the Brooklyn educator Dez-Ann Romain, who died from complications of the coronavirus, snapping “Don’t make me speak of myself in the past tense,” and George Floyd asking, “Would I be safe if Harriet Tubman was on the 20?” become tragic self-written elegies. We’re watching the dead mourn themselves.

Then there’s Parks, who, even playing this version of herself, always feels earnest, as when she listens to the speeches of her characters, while sitting off to one side of the stage, leaning forward attentively. You can easily imagine this being the way Parks sees the world refracted back to her, conversing with the dead, building abstractions.

Unfortunately, her own domestic narrative feels flat by comparison. So “What’s the takeaway? What’s the concept? What’s the tone,” as the Writer’s TV producer asks her at one point during a conversation about the Writer’s plays project.

“Plague Year” never answers these questions; the Writer ultimately discovers that the plays “didn’t save us.” But this isn’t Parks renouncing her ambitious undertaking. She’s offering another way to think about the production, which isn’t always a cohesive work of theater: Perhaps it doesn’t have to.

Theater doesn’t save us, the Writer says, “but it does preserve us somehow,” so this piece still is a record. This is catharsis. It’s preservation.

[The question of what I’d like to remember or forget about the pandemic has intrigued me since I learned about it in the NewsHour segment and then again in the Times review.  Here’s my dilemma: I know what I’d want to write on the cards, but I don’t know in what category—remember or forget—to put my answer.

[I have two responses.  One is the complete and total selfishness of some (many? most?) of my fellow Americans when it came to following some simple guidelines (and, yes, mandates) to keep others, including the most vulnerable and at-risk, safe from infection.  I don’t know if I just want to forget those self-centered people I apparently live among, or to remember that indelible streak of total lack of care and concern for their fellows.

[The other answer I’d offer is the ridiculous—and apparently political—divisiveness that people subscribed to when it came to listening to the experts, scientists, doctors, and epidemiologists as they disseminated what they were learning about the virus.  This included the leaders—governors, mayors, and lawmakers—who took public stands against following any advice calculated to lower the likelihood of catching or spreading the disease.  They all seemed to want to make this a Red-Blue competition.

[#1 or #2?  Remember or forget?  Is a puzzlement—as someone once said.

[I saw several of Parks’s plays before I started writing reports on performances I’d seen.  After I started Rick On Theater in 2009, I’ve published a number of posts on her and her work (not all of them written by me).  Among them are:

•   “How America Eats: Food and Eating Habits in the Plays of Suzan-Lori Parks” by Kirk Woodward (5 October 2009)

•   “A Playwright of Importance” by Kirk Woodward (31 January 2011)

•   “On ‘Re-Imagining’ Porgy And Bess” (14 January 2012)

•  “The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World” (1 December 2016)

•   “The Red Letter Plays: In the Blood” (12 October 2017)

•   “The Red Letter Plays: Fucking A” (17 October 2017)

•   “The Red Letter Plays, Continued” by Kirk Woodward (1 November 2017)

[Maya Phillips is a New York Times critic at large.  She’s the author of the essay collection NERD: Adventures in Fandom From This Universe to the Multiverse (Atria Books, 2022) and the poetry collection Erou (Four Way Books, 2019), which was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award and winner of the 2019 Balcones Poetry Prize and 2020 Poetry by the Sea book award.  She’s the recipient of a Hodder Grant from Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts and the 2020-2021 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism.

[She has a bachelor’s degree from Emerson College and her master's from Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers.  Her poetry has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Gettysburg Review, the Missouri Review, the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine, among others, and her arts and entertainment journalism has appeared in the New Yorker, Vulture, Slate, The Week, American Theatre, Mashable, Polygon, and more.

[Phillips was the inaugural arts critic fellow at the Times.  She writes about theater, movies, TV, books, and nerd culture.  She lives in Brooklyn.]

"Anna Deavere Smith Puts Herself Into Other People’s Words"

by Anna Deavere Smith

[Last week, I posted a report from PBS’s NewsHour on Washington, D.C.’s Women’s Voices Theater Festival, a region-wide collaboration of 25 theaters producing plays by women playwrights.  One of this country’s strongest and most prominent exemplars of women in theater, both as a writer and a performer, is Anna Deavere Smith, whose one-women plays have been unique and powerful theater for several decades.  

[Smith’s work is really a form of documentary theater, but instead of digging out records and hearing transcripts of long-past events, she creates her own documents of current issues by interviewing the participants, witnesses, and those affected—and then, channeling them from the stage in some of American theater’s most remarkable performances.  

[On 5 April, Smith presented her “Brief But Spectacular” essay on PBS NewsHour, an explanation of her perspective on how and why she does what she does.  Here is the transcript of that presentation.]

Anna Deavere Smith, actor, playwright and activist, says she has been trying to become America, word for word. By conducting interviews and creating a narrative, she aims to make a current problem come alive. Deavere Smith offers her Brief but Spectacular take on listening to people.

John Yang:  Finally, we turn to another installment of our series Brief But Spectacular, where we ask people about their passions.

Tonight, actor, playwright and activist Anna Deavere Smith, widely known for her roles on “The West Wing” and “Nurse Jackie.” She has also earned critical acclaim for her one-woman shows. The latest, “Notes From the Field,” recently aired on HBO.

Smith shares her unique process for getting into character.

Anna Deavere Smith:  When I was a girl, my grandfather said that if you say a word often enough, it becomes you.

And I have been trying to become America word for word. In the way that you would think about putting yourself in other people shoes, I’m putting myself in other people’s words.

I interview people, and I learn what they say and try to put together a lot of disparate parts of interviews in one whole, in order to make a current problem come alive.

There are certain points in any interview that I do that people start to speak in a way where the rhythm, you know, leads me to believe that there’s emotions stored in there. And so, as an actor, emotions are my fuel, and those are the types of moments that I want to reenact on stage.

Drinking malt liquor. This is not the time for us to be playing the lottery or to be at the Horseshoe Casino. This is not the time for us to be walking around.

I was a mimic as a child. And, you know, I guess you could say that what I’m doing now is a more respectable version of that, which was — you know, inevitably, mimicry is a little bit subversive. I don’t mean to be subversive. I’m not an impressionist.

I’m delighted if audiences think something’s funny, but I’m not making fun of a person.

My most recent play, “Notes From the Field” was based on my having done 250 interviews around the United States on the subject of what we call the school-to-prison pipeline.

I’m interested in complicating the narrative and revealing to the people in my audience that there are many narratives. The more roots you have going off in different directions and grabbing the ground, you’re probably going to be a stronger tree. And that would be my objective.

All of my works of art is a form of activism. I don’t have answers. I don’t indict people. I can let the judges do that. I can let the media do that. I’m a dramatist.

A drama is always a constructive journey, where something is lost and then it’s going to be regained.

I went to New Orleans right after Katrina. And to watch people looking around at everything they lost and trying to make some sense and making an impromptu plan is really important to me in how I view the world.

You know, you could say, oh, my goodness, isn’t that so hard? Doesn’t that make you sad? For me, it’s the opposite. It shows me just how inventive people are.

I believe that the theater and other art forms are an opportunity to convene people around these issues and ask them while they’re sitting together to do something.

My name is Anna Deavere Smith, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on listening to people.

[The backstory of “Brief but Spectacular,” a weekly series that premièred on NewsHour in 2015, begins with creator Steve Goldbloom, the creator and host of the original comedy news show for PBS, “Everything But the News,” and his longtime producing partner Zach Land-Miller who conduct every interview off-camera and off-screen.  (The segments are all two to four minutes long and there are no cutaways to reporters or interjections of questions.)  Each Thursday, “Brief but Spectacular” introduces NewsHour viewers to original profiles; these short segments feature some of the most original contemporary figures, offering passionate takes on topics they know well.  These have included household names like actors Alec Baldwin and Carl Reiner, artist Marina Abramović,  and activist Bryan Stevenson.  Topics have included comedian, writer, and director Jill Soloway (Amazon’s original series Transparent) on gatekeepers in Hollywood, journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates on police reform in America, Abramović on the art of performance, author Michael Lewis on finding disruptive characters, performers Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer on the rise of their hit Comedy Central series Broad City, engineer Jason Dunn on creating the first 3-D printer in space, and many more.]

"The Festival Where Being a Female Playwright Isn’t a Rarity"

by Jeffrey Brown

[I recently posted a series of articles from the Theatre Communications Group’s American Theatre magazine that covered various aspects of theater by America’s indigenous peoples—American Indians, Native Hawaiians, and Native Alaskans.  Among those reports and articles was Celia Wren’s “Law of Nations,” on the production of Sovereignty by Mary Kathryn Nagle, directed by Molly Smith at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage from 12 January to 18 February.  Nagle is a member of the Cherokee Nation and her play was Arena’s entry in Washington’s Women’s Voices Theater Festival (15 January-15 February), the only play in the festival by a Native American.  

[On 5 February 2018, the PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown presented a segment on the festival, in which 25 Washington-area theaters produced plays written by female playwrights.  The presenting group started with the originating companies of the 2015 festival: Arena Stage (Washington, D.C.), Ford’s Theatre (Washington), Round House Theatre (Bethesda, Maryland), Shakespeare Theatre Company (Washington), Signature Theatre (Arlington, Virginia), Studio Theatre (Washington), and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (Washington).  Joining them this year are 4615 Theatre Company (Silver Spring, Maryland), Ally Theatre Company (Washington), Baltimore Center Stage (Baltimore, Maryland), Brave Spirits Theatre (Alexandria, Virginia), Convergence Theatre (Washington), dog & pony dc (Washington), Folger Theatre (Washington), Mosaic Theater Company (Washington), Nu Sass Productions (Washington), Olney Theatre Center (Olney, Maryland), Pointless Theatre (Washington), Rainbow Theatre Project (Washington), Rapid Lemon Productions (Baltimore), Rep Stage (Columbia, Maryland), Spooky Action Theater Company (Washington), Strand Theater Company (Baltimore), Taffety Punk Theatre Company (Washington), and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (Washington).]

The Women’s Voices Theater Festival, which produces works written entirely by women, opened in Washington last month.  Jeffrey Brown sits down with three of the featured playwrights to discuss why they believe festivals like this are meaningful, the #MeToo movement, and the unique perspective female playwrights can bring to the stage.

John Yang:  Turning from the political theater of Washington to the dramatic stage.

Almost two dozen theaters around D.C. are producing the second Women’s Voices Theater Festival.

Jeffrey Brown sat down with three of the playwrights to discuss why this effort is meaningful, particularly now.

Jeffrey Brown:  A play about a young American moving with her family to Nigeria in the 1960s by Caleen Sinnette Jennings.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings:  As progressive as theater is in many ways in the United States, there’s still something around the edges that says women’s stories are maybe more precious, less edgy, less intellectually challenging.

There’s a sort ugly cloud that hangs over it, and I think this is a way to dispel all of those notions.

Jeffrey Brown:  A 17th century comedy becomes a story of rich and poor in America today in the hands of playwright Theresa Rebeck.

Theresa Rebeck:  The fact is, women do tell stories in a different way. And there are mighty stories out there waiting to be told. And I don’t believe that playwriting is a gene on a Y chromosome. None of us believe that, right?

Jeffrey Brown:  A personal history that’s also an unsettling piece of American and Cherokee tribal history by Mary Kathryn Nagle.

Actress:  Today, Native women face rates of domestic violence and sexual assault higher than any other population in the United States.

Mary Kathryn Nagle:  Part of dehumanizing a people is silencing them. And I think the more women’s stories are told on stage, the more our culture will start to shift. It’s not a coincidence that we face such high rates of domestic violence and sexual assault, and at the same time our voices have not been presented equally.

Jeffrey Brown:  These are just three of the plays and playwrights of the Women’s Voices Theater Festival, a month-long, 24-theater project now under way in Washington, D.C., with all new plays, including 13 world premieres.

It’s the second such festival here, the first held in 2015, and the largest of its kind in the country, taking direct aim at a fact of life in American theater:

the paucity of productions by female writers, around a quarter of plays across the country, according to several studies.

At Arena Stage, one of the originating companies heading the festival, I talked with three women whose work is on display.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings, a professor of theater at American University, took part in the first festival. She’s back with a sequel to her earlier play [Queens Girl in the World at Theatre J], both based on her own life.

The new one is titled “Queens Girl in Africa.” [Performed at the Mosaic Theater Company]

Caleen Sinnette Jennings:  It’s semibiographical, so nobody else could tell the story. But what’s important is the fact that the story is worth telling, and the story is worth seeing.

I think, particularly women of my generation wrestled with that thought. And it’s good to see younger women coming along saying, why was this even a question? Of course your story is worth telling.

Jeffrey Brown:  Are you surprised, though, that it’s still a thing that there would be a need for a festival of women’s voices?

Caleen Sinnette Jennings:  No, because racism is still here, sexism is still here, everything is still here, just wearing different clothes. So, it’s all here.

Jeffrey Brown:  Pulitzer Prize-nominee Theresa Rebeck, a veteran of television and film, as well as the stage, decided to redo an English Restoration era comedy, “The Way of the World,” written by William Congreve.  [Rebeck’s play, presented at the Folger Theatre, uses Congreve’s title.]

Theresa Rebeck:  It’s not like I looked that play and said, I want to do a feminist retelling of the Congreve play. But there is no mistaking that a woman wrote it, that I inhabit the female characters in a completely different way than what Congreve did.

Point of view is one of the tools you have as a writer, and this is the point of view of a woman. It’s not an agenda. It’s the truth. If our agenda is always to tell the truth, the truth out of a woman’s mouth is going to sound different than the truth out of a man’s.

Jeffrey Brown:  Mary Kathryn Nagle, an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, also works full-time on behalf of tribal rights as a lawyer.

Her play “Sovereignty” [at Arena Stage (see “Staging Our Native Nation,” Article 3, posted ROT on 30 March)] presents another window into that world, and is set in the past — Andrew Jackson is one of the characters — and in the present-day Supreme Court.

Mary Kathryn Nagle:  When anyone tells me that some plays are political and some are not, I think it’s all political. We can say it’s just art, but I think we’re political beings. We’re humans, right?

And I don’t see any art in this world as apolitical. And, as a woman, the political is deeply personal. It affects our lives in such profound ways. And getting to see that on stage is exciting.

Jeffrey Brown:  Do you think of yourself as a woman playwright?

Mary Kathryn Nagle:  I do, yes. Yes. I also think of myself as a Cherokee playwright. And I think that combination is terribly exciting and new.

Theresa Rebeck:  Can I answer that as well?

I have to say, when I was just starting out as a playwright, I had a mentor who said very clear to me, you have got to be careful not to let them categorize you as a woman playwright. It was sort of said as a kind — as kindly meant advice.

And I — in my youth, I was like, well, I am a woman and I am a playwright, so it’s unclear to me, like, why that would be something I needed to be careful about.

Jeffrey Brown:  During the recent women’s marches, close to 100 theaters in more than 30 states hosted readings of new works by women. The Washington, D.C., festival was planned well before the explosion of the MeToo movement.

I asked the playwrights if they were surprised by recent events.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings:  We are in an extraordinary time in our history. Something major happened in our last inauguration. And I think this groundswell comes from that. So I think theater has often challenged the norms and sort of — and the artists have stepped up and led the wave of change. But it’s not surprising to me that this is happening now.

Mary Kathryn Nagle:  No, all these women coming forward with stories, it doesn’t surprise me that the stories exist. I knew they existed. I have done work…

Theresa Rebeck:  Yes, we all knew.

Mary Kathryn Nagle:  Right? We all knew.

Theresa Rebeck:  And we’re stunned that people are saying, we didn’t know. I’m like, oh, come on.

Mary Kathryn Nagle:  Right. That’s shocking.

The people who claim they didn’t know, that’s shocking to me. And, in fact, thankfully, I think a lot of men are now coming forward to say, well, I knew, but, you know, how could I take down this man in power, because my career was dependent upon him accepting me?

Theresa Rebeck:  I had a moment where I thought, I wish this felt better. I don’t understand why it doesn’t feel better, you know?

And I think that must be because I don’t believe that real change is coming. My heart doesn’t believe it, somehow.

Jeffrey Brown:  On this issue of how hard it is just to make it as a playwright, how hard is it?

Theresa Rebeck:  It’s really hard. I have been through so many ups and downs that they finally.

The Dramatists Guild, they do a little magazine, and they put me on the cover of the issue about survival.

(LAUGHTER)

Theresa Rebeck:  Right? I was like, I am the poster child for survival. That’s what you know me for.

Jeffrey Brown:  Caleen, what do you hope comes out of this?

Caleen Sinnette Jennings:  Much harder to say, well, I just know any women playwrights. Much harder to say.

And I hope — I hope this model will be replicated all over the country.

Theater is also a very important place, because, yes, we are all the same. Yes, we’re incredibly different. But that difference need not frighten you. That difference need not be a mystery. That difference should be something you walk towards in order to build that empathy.

Jeffrey Brown:  The Women’s Voices Theater Festival runs through February 15.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in Washington, D.C.

“To Be . . . Performed: Hamlet to Haunt Stages in Every Country in the World”

Reported by Jeffrey Brown

[The most famous words of the most famous play of the most famous playwright of the English language will soon be echoed all over the earth.  In honor of William Shakespeare’s 450th birthday (23 April 1564), Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre initiated a project in 2014 to perform Hamlet in every country in the world in the space of two years. Titled Globe to Globe Hamlet (http://globetoglobe.shakespearesglobe.com/), it began its tour on 23 April 2014.  As of yesterday (20 April), the project had performed in 194 different countries and traveled over 193,000 miles.  (The production is performing today (21 April) at Elsinore Castle, the real-life setting of the play, in Denmark.  On 26 July, the tour will arrive in Washington, D.C., where it will perform in the Folger Theatre, a replica of an Elizabethan stage, in the Folger Shakespeare Library on Capitol Hill.)  PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown talked to Globe artistic director Dominic Dromgoole about the ambitious project and the timeless text.]

The Globe Theatre of London

JUDY WOODRUFF: Some four centuries after the death of William Shakespeare, London’s Globe Theatre is launching a plan to take the playwright’s tale of a tormented prince around the world.

Jeff is back with more on that.

KENNETH BRANAGH, Actor: To be or not to be.

JEFFREY BROWN: Famous words, famous play, the most famous playwright in the English language.

William Shakespeare wrote “Hamlet” in the early 17th century, shortly after his acting company, Lord Chamberlain’s Men, moved into the Globe playhouse. In 1997, a reconstructed theater opened on the Thames River as Shakespeare’s Globe.

Now the ambitious plan is to take “Hamlet” to every country on Earth over the next two years, a project that began in London on Wednesday, Shakespeare’s 450th birthday.

I talked earlier today to the Globe’s artistic director, Dominic Dromgoole.

Thanks for joining us.

In announcing this, you yourself said it was a — quote — “lunatic idea.” So the first question, of course, why do it?

DOMINIC DROMGOOLE, Artistic Director, Shakespeare’s Globe: Why not?

All of the best ideas are a little bit mad. Two years ago, we did a very, very crazy idea, a festival where we invited 37 countries from all across the world to come and do the complete works of Shakespeare, all in their own languages, as a six-week festival. That was crazy enough.

But we wanted to cap that and we wanted to go a little bit further and to celebrate Shakespeare, celebrate the international reach of Shakespeare, but also to cement a lot of relationships that we had formed when we did that festival and see if we could start a whole lot of new relationships as well.

And when you come up with the idea that, you know, it’s a bold idea, it’s a stupid idea, it’s a happy idea, and they sort of have their own logic, those ideas.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, I think we’re used to the idea of universal themes in Shakespeare, but what specifically in “Hamlet” do you think speaks to everyone? What do you want it to say all over the world?

DOMINIC DROMGOOLE: Well, the great thing about “Hamlet” is that it’s always challenging.

Hamlet says that time is out of joint, and he’s a man who’s got a sensibility that doesn’t fit in his own age. He’s troubled by a sense of modernity in an age that doesn’t particularly understand him. And that makes sense everywhere. That makes sense in England at the moment, where a lot of people, whether they’re young or old or whoever they are, feel a sense of dissatisfaction, a sense of discontent, a sense that they don’t understand the world around them.

This is true in America, I’m sure, and it’s true in a lot of different places that are in a very different historical moment and in a very different political situation.

So “Hamlet” is always challenging, it’s always provoking, it’s always troubling, but it can also inspire, and it can also console. So it’s a sort of gloriously variable, protean play that can cope with a whole collection of different situations. And it’s beautiful and it’s a great story.

JEFFREY BROWN: The themes may be universal, but the language isn’t, the setting of the play isn’t, the politics of these countries are different. Have you thought about how you overcome those challenges?

DOMINIC DROMGOOLE: Yes, it’s challenges that we faced when we did this festival a couple of years ago. We had a lot of hot issues to handle. We had a lot of objections to us bringing a lot of the different countries.

There was one group of people that objected to us bringing Israel. Another group of people objected to us bringing Palestine. And we were determined that we would have both of those countries within our festival.

And it’s that spirit of inclusion, rather than exclusion, that we’re following with this. We don’t want to sort of start saying, you qualify for Shakespeare, you qualify for “Hamlet,” you don’t, because we don’t feel we have the right to do that. I think that every country in the world, every group of people in the world has an equal right to “Hamlet.”

And I think “Hamlet” can be of equal benefit for all of them. So there will be challenges, but, you know, we like challenges. You can’t be put off by those things. You have got to be inspired by those things.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, going to every country means going into some different places, of course, Syria, the Central African Republic, and many others.

What about the physical challenge of performing in such situations?

DOMINIC DROMGOOLE: Well, we have got to be very careful.

We have got to be sensible. And we’re not doing it out of a spirit of recklessness. But I think that, you know, if we can get into every place, if we can find a way, whether it’s through dealing with NGOs, whether it’s through going to refugee camps, or whatever it is, we do want to get in every country, because we want to celebrate the ability of everybody to enjoy this fantastic and beautiful play.

JEFFREY BROWN: I understand you’re going to Ukraine at a particularly important moment. Tell us about that.

DOMINIC DROMGOOLE: Yes.

No, I think we’re going to be in Kiev in four or five weeks’ time, just the night before the election. We will be playing in a theater, and we’re also going to try and do a short show in Maidan Square, where a lot of the protesting was going on. And it will be thrilling. That’s when theater is at its most exciting and best, when it can talk to a people who are in a very current and very live political moment. So it will be a real privilege.

JEFFREY BROWN: So, this is a two-year project.

DOMINIC DROMGOOLE: Two years, yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: You have got the actors, the crew, the money to pull this off?

DOMINIC DROMGOOLE: Yes. No, we have already started. We have done two shows, one at Middle Temple Hall. We have done one at the Globe itself. On Sunday, we get on a boat and we sail off to Holland, which is our first stop.

No, I mean, we could always do with more money. There’s a Kickstarter campaign that we’re running, if anybody wants to help us along the way, but we’re comfortable we’re going to be able to manage it.

JEFFREY BROWN: Dominic Dromgoole is the artistic director of the Globe Theatre in London.

Thanks so much, and good luck.

DOMINIC DROMGOOLE: Pleasure. Thank you very much.

[This report was originally broadcast on PBS NewsHour on 25 April 2014.]