"Connoisseur of Grief"

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).

[This article is also available on line at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/15/magazine/tarell-alvin-mccraney-beauty-black.html. }

Interviews with Two Theater Pros

from American Theatre

[In the past two months, American Theatre, the Theatre Communications Group’s journal of the non-profit theater which is represents, published interviews with two especially interesting theater figures, one a rising young (he’s about to be 38 on 17 October) playwright  and the other an esteemed actor with a career of nearly 70 years.  Both artists are embarking on new projects, so I thought it would be good to hear from them on Rick On Theater.

[In the September issue, Frank Rizzo, an arts writer and reviewer for the Hartford Courant and Variety, interviews Tarell Alvin McCraney, whose play Choir Boy I saw in Washington, D.C., in 2015 (report posted on 15 January 2015).  Following that, I’ve posted the interview of Joel Grey by Russell M. Dembin, the managing editor of AT whose writing has also appeared in The Drama Review and Theatre Journal.  That conversation appeared in the October issue of AT.]

“TARELL ALVIN MCCRANEY WANTS TO FOSTER NEW PLAYWRIGHTS”

By Frank Rizzo

The Oscar-winning writer behind ‘Moonlight’ looks back on his first year as head of the playwriting program at Yale.

Tarell Alvin McCraney (The Brother Sister Plays, Head of Passes) won an Oscar for the screenplay for Moonlight and now heads Yale’s playwriting program. His play Choir Boy hits Broadway in January, and next spring he’ll star in his play Wig Out! at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where he’s an ensemble member.

FRANK RIZZO: Having been a playwriting student at Yale, graduating in 2007, what’s it like to be now heading the program?

TARELL ALVIN MCCRANEY: I’m not in this because I want to be the professor from Dead Poets Society—to get the praise and all. That is not why I’m doing this.

So why are you here?

Because I want to be watching, listening, and learning as the new shapers of the American theatre unleash the waves that are coming. This year has been wildly rewarding.

How did you choose your first class last year?

There is no shortage of talent in America. It’s a relatively simple process, but at the end of the day what you’re really looking for are community members whom you hope will thrive under the auspices of the program here. But narrowing it down through all these wildly talented people—well, that part for me was awful. This coming year we had 180 applicants, from which we chose three writers. The year before, because the deadline was extended, we had 205.

What did these students most want to know from you?

It depends. The third-year writers who were already in the program when I arrived are much more interested in asking career and professional questions. For the others, it’s somewhat different. Sometimes I’d offer [advice] and they’d look at me like, “We didn’t ask.” That’s okay. They’re finding their own voices, and at that moment they don’t want to hear someone else’s voice. But at some point later on, they’ll remember something that I told them. That happened to me. Now I remember something Nilo Cruz or John Guare or Lynn Nottage said and I think, “Oh, yeah, that’s just the thing they said in class.” But when I was at school, I would think, “Well, that’s her experience, that’s not going to happen to me.” And then you get out there and think, Oh, I’m so glad she said that, because now it’s connecting with what I’m doing. So you learn to take what everyone says from their experiences and you just put that in your pocket.

Richard Nelson, who ran the program when you were there, called you at the time “a significant figure in the theatre.” Do you look for others with a particular new voice?

I don’t have to look for that one special voice. They’re all here. You know, I wasn’t the only one who was unique when I was here. Amy Herzog was in my class. Now she has a play on almost every major stage across the country and is constantly sought out for commissions. The same thing is true of other writers when I was there. The thing about writers—and all artists—is that the maturation, or coming into one’s own voice, or blossoming into a career, is different for everyone. There are many ways and means by which people come into their own. I am not here to look for that “one,” but to experience all of them.

How did these new playwrights affect you?

I’m always excited about what they’re doing, and sometimes I am confused and confounded [by the forms and content of their work]. But as you spend enough time telling writers to just be themselves—well, that rubs off on you too. Telling a kid over and over again not to lose patience usually helps you gain patience.

What did you learn here when you were a student? And do your students get the same rewards?

Yale School of Drama taught me to be multi-faceted. I was already, but it helped me refine those skills. I came here as a playwright, but I had been an actor most of my life, though I had been writing forever. At the school, I had the opportunity to at least work on other things while still focusing [on playwriting].

Look at Taylor Mac, and other extraordinary artists who look to tell their stories in the best way possible—that means sometimes you can’t just write it. You’ve got to sing it, direct it, act in it. We can limit ourselves on what we can tell if we only look at one aspect of the telling. All stories aren’t told the same way. There are communities engaged in telling stories in a way that is completely different from the platforms that we set up for traditional theatre.

If you weren’t a storyteller, what would you be?

I always wanted to be a lawyer. I like the idea of social contracts and justice, but I hear there’s a lot of reading involved, and I read so slowly. But I’d give a great summation to the jury!

*  *  *  *

“JOEL GREY’S YIDDISH ‘FIDDLER’ TELLS A STORY THAT’S STILL GOING ON”

by Russell M. Dembin

He once dreamt of starring as Tevye, but directing the show’s U.S. premiere in Yiddish will do just fine for the son of Mickey Katz.

Joel Grey, best known for his Tony- and Oscar-winning portrayal of the Emcee in Cabaret, has had a storied career in theatre and film, including Tony nominations for his performances in George M!, Goodtime Charley, The Grand Tour, as well as for his 2011 co-direction of The Normal Heart with George C. Wolfe. His staging of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish (Fidler Afn Dakh), produced by National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, runs through Nov. 18.

RUSSELL M. DEMBIN: You’ve said that you decided to direct Fidler Afn Dakh to honor your father, Mickey Katz, who was probably best known for his Yiddish parodies of American popular songs. What do you think he’d say about this staging of  Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Joseph Stein’s classic musical?

JOEL GREY: I know my dad would be very pleased because there are so many people—non-Yiddish speakers and non-Jews—who are responding to this Yiddish Fiddler. He’d be pleased that it is opening a dialogue, because the more you open the dialogue, the more understanding comes right along with it. We had many actors who auditioned who never spoke Yiddish, and yet they knew there was something in this that would speak to everyone, and which would ultimately be universal, which I’m pleased it turned out to be.

What’s the most important lesson you learned from your dad?

Having respect for the audience. When we would go to parties he would be the last one there until everyone was off the dance floor.  He really thought that you had to respect the audience and the people around you.

Like many who’ve seen it, I found your production very moving. Could you talk about what makes a Yiddish Fiddler relevant in 2018?

The Yiddish Fiddler is like any other story, and unfortunately the world has too many of those stories. How can any of us turn our heads away from those tragedies? And yet we are still doing it—it’s in The New York Times every morning.

Last summer I watched Human Flow, a film directed by Ai Weiwei about immigrants all over the world getting put out of their homes. It was stunning and deeply sad that all these years later, human nature doesn’t seem to have changed enough.

With a majority of the cast new to the Yiddish language, the rehearsal process must have been unique. Could you talk a bit about your approach?

Half of our cast were not Jewish, and there were a few Yiddish speakers among the group, but most of them needed to work on the language the way that opera singers learn Italian in order to perform at the Met. I personally worked with everyone first in English. We did that first, and later on they learned the Yiddish version (they were coached daily by a specialist at Folksbiene, associate artistic director Motl Didner). But we worked in English first, because they needed to know the truth of the emotional scenes.

You’ve mentioned that you once wanted to play Tevye. What attracted you to that role?

I think it is one of the greatest roles in musical theatre. When I saw Zero Mostel play the part, his portrayal captivated me, and I had an immediate feeling for the entire story. I had the feelings for the story for many years, always thinking about playing Tevye, being a father and having to face all those challenges. I think I was up for the part at some point, but it never happened. Directing the show is a wonderful way of fulfilling the dream.

What’s an especially useful Yiddish expression?

Genug iz genug, which means, “Enough is enough.”

In 2016 you published your memoir, Master of Ceremonies. What advice would you give to someone writing a memoir?

Have compassion for yourself.

What’s the funniest joke you’ve ever heard?

What’s funny to me might be tragic to someone else.

If you weren’t an actor or director, how would you spend your time?

I might be a painter. I am a photographer, and that is how I spend a lot of my time, and that’s my other passion.

If you could visit any time period, which would it be?

Maybe my first 20 years, to go back and relive them, what I know now might be interesting, and then again…

If God exists and you could ask God one question, what would it be?

How did you make this life so beautiful?

[The Manhattan Theatre Club production of McCraney’s Choir Boy is scheduled to open at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on West 47th Street under the direction of Trip Cullman on 10 January 2019.  Grey’s Yiddish-language Fiddler opened at the Edmond J. Safra Hall in the Museum of Jewish Heritage on Battery Place in lower Manhattan on 16 July 2018 and closes on 25 October.  The presentation was produced by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, on which I blogged on 23 and 26 August 2012.]

'Choir Boy' (Studio Theatre, Washington, D.C.)

Once again I made the trip downtown in Washington to see a show at the Studio Theatre here.  This was the matinee performance of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Choir Boy on Sunday, 11 January 2015, presented in the Studio’s 225-seat Metheny Theatre at the company’s Northwest 14th Street home in the Logan Circle neighborhood. 

Directed at Studio by Kent Gash, the founding director of the New Studio on Broadway of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, the 100-minute Choir Boy was commissioned by New York City’s Manhattan Theatre Club.  It premièred at London’s Royal Court Theatre in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs in September 2012 and then had its U.S. début at MTC in July 2013.  McCraney’s play went on to performances at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta (September-October 2013), the Geffen Playhouse in L.A. (September-October 2014), and GableStage in Coral Gables, Florida, in January 2015; Choir Boy will be presented at Mill Valley, California’s Marin Theatre Company in June and the Guthrie Theater of Minneapolis in June and July.  The intermissionless one-act opened at Studio on 7 January and is scheduled to close on 22 February.  [The production was subsequently extended until 1 March 2015.]  

McCraney was born in 1980 in Miami, where he attended the New World School of the Arts High School.  He went on to the Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago where he got a BFA in acting.  He graduated from the Yale School of Drama’s playwriting program in 2007 with the Cole Porter Playwriting Award.  He acted with the Steppenwolf Theater Ensemble in Chicago and the Northlight Theatre in Skokie, Illinois.  McCraney’s also worked with Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Etienne of the Bouffes du Nord in Paris.  For his writing, the 34-year-old artist has received the first Paula Vogel Playwriting Award (2007), London’s Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright (2008), the New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award for The Brothers Size (2009), the Steinberg Playwright Award (2009), the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize  (2013), and the MacArthur Fellowship (the “genius” grant; 2013), among other honors.  From 2009 to 2011, McCraney was the Royal Shakespeare Company’s International Playwright in Residence; he was the Hodder Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University in 2009 and currently holds a seven-year residency at the New Dramatist Center in New York.

Among McCraney’s other plays are The Brother/Sister Plays trilogy: The Brothers Size (Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, New York, 2006), In The Red and Brown Water (Young Vic Theatre, London, 2008), Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet (Public Theater, 2009); The Breach (Southern Rep Theatre, New Orleans, 2007); Wig Out! (Vineyard Theater, New York, 2008); American Trade (Hampstead Theatre, London, 2011); Head of Passes (Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Chicago, 2013).  Studio artistic director David Muse characterizes the “beating heart of” McCraney’s work as “language,”  asserting of the playwright’s prose, “On the page, it looks like verse.  To the ear, it sounds like music,” and Lauren Halvorsen, Studio’s dramaturg, writes, “His work is characterized by rich emotional landscapes and lyrical, character-driven language.”  According to Muse, McCraney’s plays focus on “the recurring theme of fitting in.  Of brotherhood and its challenges,” and Halvorsen observes that Choir Boy explores the “friction between upholding tradition and speaking your truth.” 

A coming-of-age story about responding to human differences and to bullying by multidimensional characters who’re bonded by the Gospel music they sing together and the common humanity we all share, Choir Boy, set in the present, depicts a year in the lives of a group of African-American students at the fictional Charles R. Drew Preparatory School for Boys, a historically black boarding school somewhere in the South, as they struggle with questions of identity and sexuality.  Pharus Jonathan Young is a bright, devoted, and enthusiastic Drew student.  At the end of his junior year, his pride in singing the school anthem at the graduation ceremony on the eve of the school’s 50th anniversary is marred by the anti-gay slurs hissed at him from the auditorium by one of his schoolmates, causing the young student-singer to stop in mid-performance.

Pharus doesn’t speak of his sexuality—the school is essentially in denial that homosexuality might actually exist at Drew—but as the character’s portrayed somewhat effeminately, he’s not really hiding it, either.  (Concerned about the image set by the school’s choir “lead,” Headmaster Marrow warns Pharus about “your wrist.”  The student responds disingenuously that it’s just a wrist, “a joint on my arm!”)  The action begins when he refuses to divulge the name of the boy who taunted him, insisting on behaving “as a Drew man should.”  Even under threat of expulsion, Pharus maintains that this would be a breach of the student’s honor code.

But Pharus also knows that he can exact his own private revenge.  Gospel music at Drew is a tradition nearly as old as the school itself—the play, as its title intimates, is larded with gospel singing—and that tradition is embodied in its choir, where Pharus, as Drew’s best singer, can stand out and be different without fear.  And as lead of the choir his senior year, he has the authority to decide who can and cannot sing.  At the choir’s first meeting of the new school year, after a few pointed comments from the boy he believes humiliated him, Robert “Bobby” Marrow III, nephew of the headmaster, Pharus flares into righteous mode and kicks Bobby out of the gospel group.  “Choir Boy isn’t autobiographical,” David Muse observes, “but coming from an exceptionally talented gay writer who grew up in the South, it is clearly a deeply personal work.”

I haven’t really sorted Choir Boy out yet—maybe by the end of this report I’ll have some kind of handle on it—but my initial reaction left me unimpressed.   Studio has presented three other of McCraney’s plays, The Brother/Sister Plays in 2008, 2010, and 2011, and the dramatist has a slew of awards and prizes, but I’m underwhelmed by the dramaturgy I saw here, so I’m either missing something (always a possibility) or he’s not as good as his rep.

Choir Boy’s set in the present, but contends with what I’d say is a retro issue, by now even in the black community: a gay student among the elite.  (My companions thought the play might have been set in an earlier decade to account for this attitude; the program doesn’t state the setting.)  Furthermore, I found the whole thing contrived, set up, and artificial, including, in a rare instance for Studio, the performances. There are two adults in the cast, and they’re damn near caricatures; the headmaster is almost a cartoon and I’m not sure if he’s written as one or if Marty Austin Lamar played him that way (under Kent Gash’s guidance, of course).  McCraney says of Choir Boy, “The play itself is asking us to see that all of these young men are complex, are full human beings, are, as a donor said the other night, ‘as complex as the 13.8 billion years of stardust that make us up.’”  His point, he explains, is that “the moment we look at any individual human as just simple plain what we think or have been told they are, we then stop allowing their humanity” and then Gash echoes this declaration: “There’s a line in the play: ‘We are fearfully and marvelously made.’  Well, that’s true.  And we are many things.  And the play is demanding that we reckon with that, and acknowledge it and embrace it.”  The problem I had, though, is that I didn’t actually see that on the stage. 

I also had the feeling that, first, McCraney’d written the play around the idea of using gospel music as a motif—there’s considerable singing, which doesn’t seem to have much to do with the plot or the themes—so that the music came first and the drama came second, and, further, that Gash had assembled the cast on the basis of their singing voices over their acting abilities—singers who could act, not actors who could sing.  

Now, I should confess that I’m not a fan of gospel music.  I can appreciate the vocal harmonies, but the songs themselves don’t move me.  One reason may be, of course, that they’re Christian religious songs, so I just don’t connect with them.  As little as I feel the music contributes to the drama, there’s a lot of it in Choir Boy, so I was at a distinct disadvantage from the get-go.  I’ll have to work out what any of this—the music in the play and my response or lack of response to it—means in terms of my assessment.  Again, maybe that’ll develop as I write.

The Studio’s production of Choir Boy is staged in what for all intents and purposes is an amphitheater, giving it the kind of atmosphere of an operating theater or an old-time lecture hall.  Jason Sherwood’s set is composed of a circular floor of multi-hued parquet, half-encircled by a dark-paneled wall with five open doorframes.  (In a couple of scenes, the doorways serve as shower stalls, with working spray heads in what one of my grad school teachers would call “Gee-Whizz Realism.”)  Above the doorways is a row of picture frames, but the images in them shift as the scenes change from one school space to another, and some of the wall décor changes as well.  (The pictures in the frames help establish the time as the present: I’m pretty sure, my questionable eyesight notwithstanding, that in several scenes Barak Obama is depicted.  Another set of photos seems to be a display of civil rights heroes, including Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ralph Abernathy.)  Otherwise, the only scenery that’s shifted are set pieces rolled or carried on by the actors—the beds of Pharus and his roommate’s dorm room, the benches of the choir’s practice room; many of the scenes have no other scenery than the constructed unit, as on an Elizabethan stage.  All in all, it was a perfectly serviceable set which evoked a general sense of a traditional prep school trying to hark back to the Eatons and Harrows of legend (and I went to one of those kinds of schools in this country, too) while allowing the spectators enough leeway to add our own details and specifics to make McCraney and Gash’s Drew Prep an “Everyschool” (well, okay—an “Every Prep School”).  Of course, when the boys get to singing, the little circular stage works excellently as a performance space, even if the scene is supposed to be a rehearsal or a class.  (The boys also sing in the showers at one point, putting them each in an alcove up stage, arrayed in a semi-circle like a peculiar kind of choral group.)

Dawn Chiang’s lighting and Kathleen Geldard’s costumes both add to the atmosphere of a tradition-bound institution.  The play’s dress requirements are, needless to say, restricted by the Drew uniform, a blue blazer (the group’s star ball-player wears a Drew letter jacket), chinos, white dress shirt, and orange-and-gold striped tie.  The boys’ shoes and hairdos are the only individualized aspects of their appearances, while the adults might as well be wearing uniforms, too, since they both had on suits—Headmaster Marrow’s was a three-piece, of course.  Like their behavior, individuality and non-conformity in dress is not encouraged among the boys at Drew—though Pharus is the only student whose shoes aren’t black.  He alone wears tan bucks—not showy, but they do stand out.  (Bobby wears black running shoes with blue soles—his self-assertion, I suppose.)

I still don’t know if the complaints I have with the production style are the fault of McCraney’s script or Gash’s direction, but I’ve already said I found Studio’s Choir Boy contrived and artificial.  The formality of the setting may also have encouraged the kind of brittle, almost presentational performance style the cast employed, and since I don’t know either McCraney’s other plays or the previous productions of Choir Boy, I don’t really know if that’s common to the writer’s work or this play, or if it’s a construct of this director and this cast.  Lamar’s headmaster was so bombastic and officious that I hardly believed he was a real person.  He over-enunciated his words as if the vocabulary was all new to him, a man out of his rhetorical depth even though he’d been in his post for at least three years.  Marrow’s described in the Studio casting notice as “Shrewd operator when it comes to school politics.  Man with heart who leads with tough love,” but that’s not the figure I saw Lamar project. 

The other grown-up is Mr. Pendleton, a former history master at Drew who comes out of retirement to teach a special course and oversee the choir.  Pendleton, played by Alan Wade, is white and 60 or 70 years old, but he’s supposed to be a fervent teacher with a surprising passion about the ’60s civil rights movement (he marched with King, Marrow tells the boys) which leads to one shining moment of genuine anger when the boys start tossing the label “Nigger” at one another.  But Wade’s portrayal (and/or McCraney’s writing) makes him a doddering, slightly addled old white man among the young African Americans, trying too hard and failing.  What passes for wisdom and a Socratic attempt to encourage critical, out-of-the-box thinking only sounds like pedagogical pap.  I don’t know Wade’s work (or Lamar’s, either), so I don’t know if this is his usual kind of performance, or if he’s been miscast or misdirected, but if not for that single stand-out moment, I’d have said the character was meant to be a bad comic stereotype.

McCraney was successful, at least, in differentiating the five young students, and the actors did carve out distinct characters for them.  What I can’t say, though, is that the boys were unique or exceptional figures, more than the students in any prep school drama on screen or stage.  The fact that they’re all gospel singers comes off more as an artificial distinction, like the writers and artists at the school in the movie Words and Pictures (about which I wrote on ROT on 25 July and 16 September 2014), though in that case the writing and drawing were central to the plot.  The singing in Choir Boy seems like an add-on—and a justification for the play’s title.  Given that the students were written with so little beyond stock character traits, the actors weren’t especially motivated to rise above clichéd performances.  Even Pharus’s supposed intelligence comes off in Jelani Alladin’s portrayal as adolescent pedantry rather than real smarts.  He’s no Holden Caulfield and the other students—Eric Lockley’s Junior Davis (the naïve sidekick), Jaysen Wright’s Anthony Justin “AJ” James (the open-hearted jock), Keith Antone’s Robert “Bobby” Marrow III (the angry and privileged—and homophobic—alpha male), and Jonathan Burke’s David Heard (the sensitive would-be pastor—and closeted homosexual)—fare no better.  They don’t give dishonest performances by any means, but they never rise above the expected and stereotypical.  Even the big “surprise” at the end isn’t such a surprise—one of my companions said afterwards that she saw it coming early on in the play.  If they weren’t black and gospel singers, they could be the kids in Dead Poets Society or Tea and Sympathy (how’s that for a retro reference!), and the performances don’t rise above the familiar roles McCraney seems to have written. 

The a cappella singing is superb—which is why I feel the actors were cast for their singing talent over their acting talent—even if I never saw the thematic or dramatic purpose in the gospel music.  That shower scene, which Chiang’s lighting makes looks like it’s set in a chapel, is technically marvelous: a lot of people sing in the shower, but these guys do it in five-part harmony!  (The song is “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” and the musical direction for Choir Boy is by Darius Smith.)  But what’s its point?  If gospel music is supposed to have been a thematic underpinning to whatever McCraney wants to say with Choir Boy, it didn’t communicate to me.  Granted, I’m ignorant about this musical tradition, but if the lyrics are supposed to enhance the play’s ideas and points, I didn’t hear it.  There’s a whole scene devoted to a discussion of the Negro spiritual which told me a few factoids of which I wasn’t aware, but it’s part of what I described above as Pharus’s pedantry; it didn’t reveal anything about the boys, the school, or the issues with which they’re dealing.  The cast—even Headmaster Marrow takes a turn vocalizing—executed the gospel singing well, but it never elucidated the stuff of the play for me. 

I may be a minority of one in my opinion about Choir Boy.  In the Washington Post, for instance, Celia Wren declares that “‘Choir Boy’ sings a stirring tune” with gospel songs that “open further windows onto the tangled sweep of American history and civics.”  She calls the Studio production “sturdy and often powerful” that “deals with themes of major social import.”  “Gash and his team have given the work a handsome realization,” asserts Wren.  “From start to finish, this play will have you anticipating what’s next while wondering, ‘Who’s the b[a]d guy?’” asserts Washington Informer’s D. Kevin McNeir.  “If one exists at all.”

“[T]he real power of” Choir Boy, writes Doug Rule in MetroWeekly, “is in McCraney’s subtle, graceful and evocative style of storytelling” for which Gash “has corralled a strong group of young singing actors.”  Thus the play reveals “a few tear-inducing moments” as well as “plenty of gentle laughs, through clever wordplay and a few choice cultural critiques.”  “Choir Boy looks like a big hit, and it deserves to be,” declares Washington City Paper’s Chris Klimek.  In Washington Life Magazine, Chuck Conconi reports, “Kent Gash’s smooth and understated direction allows the intensity and poignancy of McCraney’s complex script” that demonstrates “the pessimistic truth that . . . tradition can uplift, but it can also constrain.”

On MD Theatre Guide, Tina Ghandchilar recommends, “If you’re in the mood to see a play filled with some hearty gospel soulful a cappella music, Choir Boy is the show to see.”  “Director Kent Gash builds a fascinating world dense with thorny intersections of race, class, and sexuality that are sometimes funny, sometimes uncomfortable,” writes Michael Poandl of DCMetroTheaterArts, staging a play that’s “about forgiveness, and to this end there are moments that are extremely moving.”  The DCMTA reviewer found the Studio production “a thought-provoking, entertaining, and cathartic experience.”  On DC Theatre Scene, Jennifer Clements insists that “if you see one show at Studio Theatre in 2015, let it be Choir Boy.”  Having been less than satisfied by McCraney’s earlier offerings at Studio, Clements, the most enthusiastic reviewer among the local web writers, pronounces that “this powerhouse of a show is the type of journey that reverberates long after you leave the theatre,” describing the play as “nothing short of kaleidoscopic” and “a reminder of the intrinsic potency of theatre.”  She declares in the end, “It parts our lips into smiles, it shatters our hearts to dust, and begs us to look more closely at our fellow man.  This daring play should be required theatregoing for anyone who believes in the transformative power of the stage.”

In the New York-based cyber press, Jennifer Perry of Broadway World finds that “a strong ensemble cast brings [Choir Boy] to life . . . in an excellent way,” writing that “McCraney's powerful, plot-driven play is engaging to say the least.^”  Perry characterizes McCraney’s dialogue as “like poetry ‘with a purpose,’” emphasizing that the playwright’s use of language “sets the play apart from other popular offerings that deal with similar subject matter,” though she complains that “Choir Boy treads . . . into after-school special, predictable territory.”  Of the acting, the BWW reviewer says that the cast “uses McCraney’s powerful language to establish an emotional arch worthy of attention no matter whether one identifies with the characters’ plights or not.”  On Talkin’ Broadway, Susan Berlin calls McCraney’s play with music “riveting,” even though she observes that it’s “less a propulsive story than a series of vignettes.”  In the performances, Berlin adds that director Gash “has created an ensemble of performers who work as a unit while each actor manages to maintain his individuality.”  A “taut, well-written play,” writes Barbara Mackay of TheaterMania, which “unfolds through a series of short scenes,” and in which the “most interesting thing about these five men is the way they come together when singing.”  “McCraney's writing,” observes Mackay, “is colorful and often poetic” and “Kent Gash keeps the action flowing quickly and smoothly.”  The TM review-writer concludes, “McCraney is a young playwright to watch.”