by Carvell Wallace
[On 4 October 2018, I posted an interview with playwright
and screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney, originally published in American Theatre,
as part of a pair of interviews I called “Interviews with Two Theater Pros” (the other figure was Joel Grey). Now comes the New York Times Magazine of 20 January in which Carvell Wallace has a
profile of the young (38) writer who penned the screenplay for Academy
Award-winner (for Best Adapted Screenplay, 2017) Moonlight (2016) and whose 2016 Off-Broadway play, Choir Boy (which premièred at London’s Royal Court in 2012), opened on Broadway on 8 January,
providing McCraney with is Broadway début.
(I saw the play in Washington,
D.C., and posted a report on Rick On Theater on 24 January 2015.)]
HOW TARELL ALVIN MCCRANEY TELLS HIS
STORY THROUGH THE LIVES OF OTHERS.
I was impressed by how long
Tarell Alvin McCraney was willing to sit in silence until I asked him
something. When I first met him, on the campus of Yale University, where he is
chairman of the playwriting program — one of the most exclusive in the country,
admitting only three students each year — it struck me that he was, if not
distant, then at the very least aloof. Small talk was made and pleasantries
exchanged, but I couldn’t help noticing that there was not much eye contact. At
first I attributed this to normal self-consciousness, but as the day progressed
it occurred to me that it might be a kind of honesty: He wouldn’t do me or
himself the disrespect of offering a charm performance. He simply said it was nice
to meet me and suggested we get a bite at a nearby Cuban restaurant. Once
there, he looked over the menu for not long at all before ordering the eggplant
steak and then, as if on impulse, an empanada de guayaba and
a cafe con leche. He would drink the coffee but would have the
empanada boxed up to share, he said, with his students.
Then came the
silence. It seemed that he might have sat there all day had I let him, quietly
content, thinking about various plays, or current events, or music, or film.
Instead, I started to explain how much the film “Moonlight” — based on a script
McCraney wrote in his early 20s, for which he would ultimately win an Oscar —
meant to me. I told him that I grew up in circumstances that allowed me to
relate to its central character. And it was here that McCraney began asking the
questions, leaning slightly forward over the table, regarding me with patient
but curious eyes: Where were my people from, what was their world like, how did
my father fit in if at all, which plays did I perform in during high school,
what did my mother think of my performances? He was a near balance of observer
and observed, 60 percent admirer, 40 percent work of art.
There were details he
would recall and bring up long after this meeting. Three weeks later, he would
make a joke that showed he remembered my birthday. This is normally the stuff
of politicians — a parlor trick of remembering details, of making others feel
as if they have your care and attention. But with McCraney it does not feel
performative. He has a way of understanding and respecting the stories of
anyone he chooses: my story, the stories of the characters in his scripts and
plays, the stories of the graduate students he spends his days teaching. He
asks questions that draw you into relief against your background and show you
not only your own beauty but also his. This, it seems, is one of the ways he
has learned to navigate a treacherous world and stay intact, or as intact as a
queer black man can be in America.
The McCraney Literary
Universe is a large one: He is 38 and has seen eight plays produced, written
two screenplays, won a MacArthur genius grant and adapted Shakespeare for the
Royal Shakespeare Company in London. (When I asked what made him like theater
when he first encountered it, he replied: “I don’t necessarily know if I like
it now” — but “the drive to do it is innate.”) If you want to write
about this universe, you must be comfortable using the word “beautiful.” In
McCraney’s work, the beauty of blackness is a praxis unto itself, the method by
which larger theories about life are made manifest. The full, original title of
the screenplay that became “Moonlight” was “In the Moonlight Black Boys Look
Blue.” The film, which won the Best Picture Oscar in 2017, wasn’t just about
the beauty of its characters but about the way they fight a losing battle
against that beauty — how they try to beat it out of themselves and one
another. The central conflict is that of a character trying to find harmony
between who he is and who he is expected to be, a struggle that is, for many
black men, not a theoretical matter but a violent, corporeal one.
The same ideas recur
in “Choir Boy,” the queer coming-of-age tale that marked McCraney’s Broadway
debut when it opened at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater in early January. This
story, too, sits amid one of the primary contradictions of black American
maleness: To be black and fully realized is to be beautiful. But to be
beautiful is to be wanted, which, in America, is to be unsafe.
McCraney was raised
in a working-class family in Liberty City, a five-square-mile section of
northwest Miami that is home to one of the largest black populations in
Florida. His mother struggled with drug addiction for the entirety of his
upbringing, ultimately succumbing to AIDS-related conditions when McCraney was
22. His future collaborator Barry Jenkins, who directed “Moonlight,” was just a
year older, raised just a few miles away, also by a mother struggling with
addiction.
From the beginning,
McCraney says, he was obsessed with telling stories. He credits his
grandfather, who was a Baptist minister, for deepening his understanding of the
spiritual power of narrative. Growing up alongside immigrants from Haiti and
Cuba also meant McCraney was exposed to the Orishas, the pantheon of gods in
the Yoruba religion, a West African theology that has found expression in the
Caribbean and across the African diaspora. The stories of the Orishas, like
those of the Greek gods, comprise a veritable soap opera of betrayals,
heartbreaks, love affairs and tragic flaws. Their influence on McCraney was
meaningful enough that he would one day write a trilogy of dramas, “The
Brother/Sister Plays,” based on Orisha stories.
McCraney’s academic
potential was recognized early. In middle school, he found himself tracked into
a magnet program that let him focus on literature and performing arts. Thus
began a long stretch of working in spaces where McCraney was either the only
black person present or one of very few — an experience that strikes him as
something of a doubtful advantage. “You’re told, ‘You’ve got this special gift,
this thing that will cure you of your blackness,’ ” he says. “But then they use
that same information to castigate and diminish your people. So now you’re
alone and can’t relate to nobody. So what do you actually win?”
As a teenager, he
became politically active through street theater, working on community plays
designed to raise awareness of H.I.V. testing and education. He carried this
political view of theater to DePaul University in Chicago. It was in Chicago,
in the early 2000s, that he auditioned for a show by the director and
playwright Tina Landau, of Steppenwolf Theater, who would become his most
frequent collaborator: By her count, they’ve done 12 productions together since
they first met. “He was just this beautiful, startling young man with lots of
depth and mystery,” she says. Years later, when he approached her to direct one
of his plays, she was struck by the power of his writing. His stories, she
says, “on the one hand, have not been told — because the details, the
specifics, are so of his real life and the lives of his characters — and at the
same time they operate on this very fundamental — what’s the word I’m looking
for — on an ur level.”
After DePaul,
McCraney took a year off, during which he traveled to Georgia to bury his
mother and worked briefly in Miami theater. Then he took his talents to Yale,
as a student in the same graduate playwriting program he now oversees. Part of
his application was an early version of the script for “Moonlight,” a largely
autobiographical story written around the time of his mother’s death. It was
the overwhelming intensity of his emotions at the time, he thinks, that created
the heightened poetry of the film. He was unlikely, he told me, to write
anything quite like that in the future. “I was 23 when I wrote that. I don’t
want to be 23 again. I don’t want to be in that much pain ever again.”
If beauty is the
pillar at one end of his work, pain is at the other. McCraney digs
unflinchingly into the suffering that pulses at the center of his character’s
lives. I asked him about the concern some black artists and storytellers have —
that our work may simply boil down to trading in black pain for rent money. “If
the question, for you, about peddling black pain is appropriate,” he replied,
“you also have to think to yourself, well, why am I in so much pain?” It
doesn’t make sense, he suggested, to demand that an artist produce joy when his
or her inner life is still processing grief. He then talked about the rapper
Lil Wayne, who famously suffered a gunshot wound at age 12. For years, he said
the gun had gone off by accident; only last year did he reveal that the
childhood wound was from a suicide attempt. “He talks about the time that he
shot himself because it still haunts him,” McCraney said. “He woke up in a pool
of blood. He’s, like, engaged in that, and going through it. Why is it
important for us to be like, ‘Hey, get over that. Where are the dandelions?’ ”
It was not long after
McCraney’s graduation from Yale that he mounted his first production at
Steppenwolf, became the group’s 43rd member and wrote and directed work for the
Public Theater, Center Theater Group and the Royal Shakespeare Company, where
he directed interpretations of “Hamlet” and “Antony and Cleopatra.” “The only
thing that kept me going,” he told me of that time, thinking of the second
play, “was: I’ve got to bring this play back to the little Haitian girls who
live across the street from me, who have never seen themselves as royalty.”
Around this time, Barry Jenkins came across “Moonlight” and asked McCraney for
permission to rework it into a shooting script, prompting McCraney’s first
foray into feature film. Steven Soderbergh’s film of McCraney’s second feature,
a basketball drama titled “High Flying Bird,” is scheduled for Netflix release
in February — and in addition to the Broadway run of “Choir Boy,” the Oprah-led
OWN network has ordered a season of McCraney’s first television project, the
semi-autobiographical “David Makes Man,” currently filming in Orlando.
Allison Davis, a
writer on “David Makes Man,” remembers walking into the writers’ room with some
nervousness. “He could have thrown his ego around that room, and it would have
been justified,” she told me by phone from Los Angeles. Instead, she was
disarmed when McCraney suggested the staff begin by taking an online quiz to
determine which Harry Potter house each person would belong to. “Then we
started talking about what all the houses represented, and then we started
talking about what in our backgrounds made us answer the way we did, and it
became this very deep discussion about language and trauma and influences, and
we were talking about this for like three hours.”
This ability to merge
the mundane with the profound, to draw complex emotions out of many different
people and sources, is a hallmark of McCraney’s work. “ ‘David Makes Man’ pulls
from so many references,” Davis said. “The Bible is up in there, Yoruba is up
in there, Miami street culture is up in there, ball culture is up in there. He
weaves it into this wonderful tapestry, and he treats them all with equal
reverence.”
“I have never — and I
mean this — never encountered a script for television with
this depth of value,” says Phylicia Rashad, one of the show’s stars. “Because
he is bringing cultural influence that, to my knowledge, has not been seen, but
exists.”
There are not many
people from Liberty City, Miami, directing for the Royal Shakespeare Company,
winning Oscars and administering programs at Yale. McCraney is consistently in
rarefied air. This goes beyond W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of “double
consciousness.” To be a black queer man from poverty and enjoy accolades in
some of the most exclusory spaces in Western theater doesn’t just call for the
maintenance of multiple consciousnesses; it requires a strategy for keeping
them working smoothly together. “When people say, ‘I’m tired,’” McCraney told
me, “it’s not necessarily like, ‘I’ve been working in a cotton field all day.’
There’s tired, like — you just don’t know how much pre-thinking, post-thinking,
anxiousness, anxiety, that one has to toggle in order to deal with the United
States. Not just white people, but the way that the United States is set up.”
His characters
frequently find themselves wrestling with their identities, trying desperately
to keep their bearings in a world that offers them little reliable support.
“Moonlight” tracked a young boy in Liberty City who’s abused for being gay
before he even knows what gay means; he finds temporary solace in a local drug
dealer, the first person who cares more about taking care of him than about
responding to his still-developing orientation. In a second chapter, the boy,
now a teenager, experiences his first love with another boy, after which he
meets with even more bullying and violence. He is forced to defend himself,
which means closing parts of himself forever. In the third chapter, he is a man
— isolated, reticent, guarding his vulnerability with a tool kit composed
largely of push-ups, gold teeth and firearms — when a reunion with his teenage
love forces him to make a decision about whether he will live and love as a
queer man. Part of what makes the film work so exquisitely is the consistent
sense of a character’s trying to find alignment with his deepest self while
surrounded by limitless opportunities to lie.
In McCraney’s 2016
family drama, “Head of Passes,” Phylicia Rashad starred as the matriarch of a
New Orleans family who faces a crisis of faith when a terrible secret is
revealed. As rains pour down, causing destruction in the family home, she must
make peace with a God who would accept such suffering, while her three children
rant and rage toward their own horrifying ends. Comparisons with Shakespeare’s
“King Lear” are easy to make, but for McCraney the plot similarities are not
the point; the characters are. “That’s an underutilized population of actors,” he
says of black women entering late middle age. “There are women her age who
don’t get to Lear.” To “Lear,” as a verb, means to take over a stage in your
later years and expound upon life’s quandaries. It is assumed of esteemed white
male actors that they will age gracefully into such roles, roaring and
speechifying and showing their gravity. But where is that space for actors like
Phylicia Rashad? “It’s annoying,” McCraney says, “because who better to Lear
than these women?”
Perhaps by way of
reparations, McCraney gives the play over to Rashad’s character in the second
act, granting her 20 full minutes alone onstage to rail against an unforgiving
God while the heavens swirl. It is thrilling to see, in part because Rashad is a
master of her craft, matching the force of the nature she confronts with the
force of the nature within — and in part because, as in “Moonlight,” we are
watching a character do everything she can to hold onto a sliver of self amid a
sea of violent forces.
These plays are,
quite possibly, McCraney’s own sliver of self. While “Moonlight,” “Choir Boy”
and “David Makes Man” are more strictly autobiographical, nearly every work he
creates contains elements of his experience. His home and neighborhood were
destroyed by Hurricane Andrew when he was in middle school, and a frequent
aspect of his scripts is use of the pathetic fallacy: The mood of the heavens
insists itself into the plot, manifesting the inner lives of his characters.
His narratives often feel like stories of mortals adrift against a pantheon of
gods who are, if not capricious, deeply flawed and untrustworthy.
In Yoruba lore, one
supreme god is Obatala, who typically dresses in white, can appear as either
male or female and is the default owner of all souls until those souls are
claimed by another Orisha. Obatala is all-powerful, the creator of humankind.
But in one instance the god was drunk on wine and made some mistakes in
creation. As a result, the experiences of people on earth are sometimes difficult,
painful and unfair. For this reason, Obatala looks upon our suffering with
extra care and favor. Unlike the Christian God, whose absolution serves as
evidence of his faultlessness, Obatala does not grant us charity because we are
imperfect. Obatala grants us charity because Obatala is imperfect.
If the playwright is
a creator of worlds, he is every bit as forgiving and loving of his subjects as
Obatala is. There is a kindness in his treatment of character, a clear love. A
major factor in the creation of “Head of Passes,” McCraney told me, his voice
raising a couple of pitches, a smile opening up across his face, was that he
just loves “seeing black women looking at and talking to black women onstage.
There is nothing better.”
On a Saturday morning
in December, I arrived at a Manhattan Theater Club studio in a building on West
43rd Street to watch rehearsals for “Choir Boy.” The play tells the story of an
openly gay teenage boy, Pharus, who is the head of the prestigious choir at a
stalwart all-black boarding academy called the Charles R. Drew Prep School for
Boys. His sexuality, as well as his general boldness and impulsivity, puts his
relationships — and sometimes his body — at risk, and forces his peers to
confront their own loves and insecurities. The music consists entirely of
interpolations of Negro spirituals and folk songs like “Rockin’ Jerusalem” and
“Keep Your Eyes on the Prize,” delivered in multipart harmony by the nine
actors playing students. In the scene I watched the cast work on, the character
of David, played by Caleb Eberhardt, decides to open his heart to another
character, which he does by starting off a song, “Motherless Child.” The lyrics
— “sometimes I feel like a motherless child/a long way from home” — date back
to slavery, and like the words of most spirituals, they have a clear and heavy
range of meanings. You can interpret them as personal, spiritual and political,
all at once.
All those meanings
are at play in the scene. The boys of Drew are, literally, a long way from
home. They share showers, sleep in dorm rooms and can call home only once a
week. They are left to build themselves out of whatever is in the air: tough
but fair headmasters, a dignified but burdensome “black excellence” tradition,
a sky full of forceful and conflicting expectations of black masculinity. It is
too much and boils over.
Tensions are high
among the boys in the locker room, who are still buzzing over a recent
near-fight. David, on the way to the shower, stops to sing the first stanza of
the song alone, then to a classmate. Then the entire group joins in, sending
their voices echoing off unforgiving tile. It is meant to be heart-rending.
The problem, this
morning, was that it wasn’t working. The director, Trip Cullman — he most
recently directed Kenneth Lonergan’s “Lobby Hero,” last year — was gamely
trying different ways of transitioning into this fraught moment. What if
Eberhardt did it from upstage? What if he went halfway off and came back? What
if he started quietly and then built?
The playwright was
present, wearing a cream-colored cardigan, crisp jeans and gleaming, off-white,
all-leather Chuck Taylors, seated at a folding table crowded with script
binders and room-temperature coffees. So far, I had heard him say little. But
now he asked for the floor. The actors took seats. I noticed I was nervous for
him. When the actors are struggling and the director can’t seem to find a
solution, you’re forced to ask: Could the problem be the script?
But when McCraney
talked, he didn’t talk about the play or the dialogue. Instead, he talked about
grief. Casually, as though it were something that just came to his mind. He
explained what it felt like to lose his mother at 22. He did not talk about how
she died, and he hinted only a little at the complexity of their relationship;
this address was not autobiographical. It was to do with emotions. McCraney
described how grief lives in a person’s body, how it settles there. He
explained its half-life, the unreliable nature of its decay. He talked about
the phenomenon, when grieving a loved one, in which you begin to have memories
of times after their death that you think they must have been present
for. Remember when I won an Academy Award for my movie, and you were so
proud? And then he talked about how things like that make you grieve
their absence all over again, and how that grief catches you unawares, taking
over your body when you least expect it. It sits in a small reservoir beneath
your heart. It whispers to you at odd hours and yells at you in quiet ones.
I teared up just a
little bit hearing it. My own mother died in my arms almost exactly 10 years
earlier. My relationship with her was also complicated. My grief also weaves in
and out of being with little explanation or predictability. McCraney was
calling something into the room, I might even say invoking it. All that was
happening was that he was explaining something about grief — something that he,
at age 38, knew, and that the cast, talented black Broadway-level
actors/dancers/singers ranging in age from maybe 20 to 25, may not yet have
known but were capable of understanding.
When he was done
explaining, Eberhadt spoke up. “I have an idea,” he said. “Is it O.K. if I try
something?” To which McCraney replied: “It’s your show, man. Absolutely.”
Back to places. The
boys were at their fake lockers wearing fake towels; Eberhadt stood upstage,
fake shower caddy in hand. Action. He turned downstage, thought about singing
to one boy, decided against it. Caught his breath. Blinked. Called out the
first word of the song with a force that seemed centuries old. Sometimes. It
echoed and landed. There was silence. We felt it in our chests. He
continued. Sometimes I don’t know where to go. My mother, my father
won’t own me. So I try to make heaven my home.
Now the chorus joined
in. It was a youthful mourning, a boyish mourning. A male and adolescent
mourning. A black one. A harmonious one. The song grew, the room was filled
with it, it cascaded outward, upward from their bodies in clouds of spirit
that, if you closed your eyes, you could almost see. When they finished, there
was a moment of quiet in the room before the director said, simply: “Yeah.
That’s it.”
The moment McCraney lit up the most, smiled the widest, was when we began to talk about Spike Lee. “This man can shoot a film,” he said. “Nobody captures us in a cinematic, moving experience like Spike Lee.” One of his favorites, he told me, was Lee’s sophomore feature, “School Daze,” released in 1988. It’s fair to say I was, as a youth, obsessed with this film: I had entire scenes memorized. I bought a copy of the script and read it late at night by flashlight.
McCraney’s excitement caused me to revisit it. It is just as I remembered it: wild, unclean, slapdash, hyperstylized. It’s a comedy about an uber-woke student at a historically black college — played by a very young Laurence Fishburne — and his battles with a black-and-bougie frat-boy nemesis (Giancarlo Esposito) and his girlfriend (Tisha Campbell). “It’s just extraordinary,” McCraney told me. “If you ever wanted to talk about Spike Lee having a black queer aspect, it’s in ‘School Daze.’ Because even in his endeavor to talk about the binary of colorism, he ends up just exploring everything that’s in the middle.”
The scene McCraney told me he most loved was the jazz and R&B legend Phyllis Hyman’s performance at the school’s homecoming dance. Hyman is an undiluted marvel in all black, crowned by a regal headpiece with a shimmering gemstone in the center. Lee stops time in the film to admire her, matching the camera’s movements to her lithe alto and the warm, velvet delivery of her lyrics. It is a meditation, a reminder of all that we as black people possess, our history, our musicality, the art of it and the refinement of it. Hyman, who was 38 when “School Daze” was released, was an extraordinary talent who never experienced the fame reached by contemporaries like Anita Baker or Whitney Houston, despite being, perhaps, the better singer. When she committed suicide with a cocktail of sleeping pills in her Midtown apartment seven years later, she left a note. “I’m tired,” it said. “I’m tired.” Not working-in-a-cotton-field tired, but pre-thinking, post-thinking, anxiety and suffering and grief tired. Rewatching “School Daze” made me want to hug and protect every single black person on the screen; it made me want to keep Phyllis Hyman alive. It made me want to sing along with the choir in the rehearsal studio. It reminded me that I am not alone in feeling, sometimes, like a motherless child, a long, long way from home.
The emotional stakes
for black artists are often so very high. It can be overwhelming to be deeply
sensitive, to love your people so much and still watch daily what is done to
them. The centuries of pain, the unanswered calls for humanity, the depth of
grief sometimes threaten to become too much, too heavy. It is no wonder that there
are those among us who take into their mouths entire bottles of sleeping pills
or put pistols to their 12-year-old chests until there is no more left to feel.
To love black people
immensely, to celebrate our very being as poetry, to lose yourself in our
stories, to search them desperately and perpetually for our beauty — at the
rehearsal for “Choir Boy,” what I witnessed was a man who has made himself a
connoisseur of grief sharing that expertise with a roomful of younger black
artists. His power, sure, is that he’s a playwright and that he has, through
decades of study and training, built, from the ground up, a container for his
mastery of feeling. Understanding and creating stories has been one survival
method. But another has been the development of a keen, patient and nearly
pansophical emotional intelligence. He has, in a sense, cracked the code on how
to remain safe as a beautiful black man, at least for himself. It is, of
course, to focus almost entirely on understanding and showing the beauty of others
like you.
[Carvell Wallace is a contributing writer for the Times Magazine and
a podcaster based in Oakland, California. He’s covered arts and culture
for GQ, the New Yorker, Pitchfork, and MTV News. He last wrote an
on-line profile for the magazine of the actor Riz Ahmed (30 August 2018).
No comments:
Post a Comment