assesses his goals in a Post-Obama world
Written by Carla Williams
Photographed by George Osodi
“I love writing plays and I will always love writing plays and creating theatre, and I will continue to do that,” says playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, “but every time I turn around it’s like: ‘Well, what’s the next step?’” When we speak, McCraney is in New York conducting auditions for a staging of his trilogy of “Brother/Sister Plays”— “In the Red and Brown Water”; “The Brothers Size,” and “Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet”—at McCarter Theatre in Princeton. McCraney, winner of the 2009 New York Times Outstanding Playwright award, is the most celebrated new voice in theater and has just begun a Hodder Fellowship-in-residence at Princeton University.
“I began as an actor—I was an actor all my life. I went to performing arts high school and I went to conservatory for acting [McCraney graduated from the Yale School of Drama in May 2007], and I kept saying to myself, well, there aren’t enough roles for African American men, especially. Where are these new plays that are exciting and are about people of color or marginalized people—where are those plays? So I was like, well, I’ll go write them.”
Much of the richness of McCraney’s work is the cultural specificity of his multigenerational characters in a fictional Southern town during what McCraney refers to as the “distant present.” The layered authenticity of lived experiences encompassing race, class, gender, and history resonates in the stunningly authentic voices his words bring to life. Given the content of his plays and their representations of black identity, I can’t resist a question foremost in many artists’ minds these days: how has the Barack Obama presidency affected McCraney’s work?
“It’s a question that many people have asked me, and it’s a question I’ve kind of avoided like the plague,” McCraney responds candidly, “because one usually asks about what is the Bush legacy on art and how has it affected you, and I haven’t had an answer for that because I’m twenty-eight, so all I know is the Bush legacy on art. All I know is the world in which we are now.”
McCraney points out that Obama’s Presidency “doesn’t change the nature of the work because overnight what we iconically see as “black” doesn’t change…[his Presidency] doesn’t make a magical pill that makes all the problems go away. Let’s take ‘In the Red And Brown Water’ as an example—for every Michelle Obama, or Sasha, or Malia, there are ten more Oyas,” McCraney says, referring to the play’s young, female lead character. “This is someone who is a black woman living in an urban environment; her chances, her opportunities are not great. She’s fighting for visibility, for a voice, fighting for the basic necessity of love and encouragement and raw materials in order to make a life where she can reach those goals, and dealing all the time with the oppression that has been in line since pre-Obama, pre-Michelle, pre-Reagan. We have to actually do some soul searching in America itself. And I think that’s going to be even more painful than we think. We have to ask those very hard questions and have those tough and complex discussions.”
McCraney’s evocative works, including the drag extravaganza “WigOut!”—part of McCraney’s series “Identity Plays”—seem perfectly poised to spark those discussions; they have met with tremendous success thus far, having been staged in New York, London, Istanbul, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere. It’s exciting to hear these new voices that he’s conjured, and to imagine them branching out to even larger audiences. For all their international attention, however, McCraney’s plays have not yet been staged in his hometown of Miami, Florida, despite the city’s burgeoning arts scene.
“People ask, has your family seen your work, and I [say], no, because my plays aren’t done in Miami,” McCraney explains. “I have this different theory about theatre being able to survive in warm climates—it’s too difficult for someone to say, hey, come off that beach and come in for two hours of the most depressing play,” McCraney laughs. “It’s tough—it’s hard to compare with waves and sunshine.” Still, McCraney remains committed to a vision of theatre in Miami. “I’ve sat down many, many an hour with myself and many other people to conceive some way to create theatre in Miami that would be accessible to the people and stimulate that part of Miami’s artistic life. The city itself is an art project.”
The “Brother/Sister Plays” are set in the fictional town of San Pere, Louisiana. “I wrote two of the plays before Katrina happened. I also wrote a play called ‘The Breach’ about Katrina, as a special commission for the Southern Repertory Theatre in New Orleans. The bayou has always been a mystery to me—we call it the Everglades in Miami—that place where the water and the earth look like one, but aren’t. That in itself is mythic; that in itself causes one to rethink what they think of as firm ground, terra firma.”
“The more I tried to write a play set in Miami proper…I couldn’t not write about the politics that were going on in Miami. It was really important to me to try not to write a polemic piece, which I think I ended up doing, anyway. I couldn’t not talk about the racial, ethnic, social, economic Third-Worldism that goes on in Miami. I’ve lived in the South long enough to know about these places. Plus, I would never set it in an actual town. In the play it was fictionalized so that it could be in this place but it was also made up of all the properties that it needed to be made up of in order to exist on its own. That’s why [I set it in] Louisiana—it was a place pregnant with the similar attributes of Miami and New Orleans, especially. There’s a mixture of African religions and Catholic[ism] that’s still the practice—there are ancient rituals that no one can explain where they came from—in both places.”
McCraney is committed to expanding the audience for his art form. “A friend of mine says ballet and opera and even some of the visual arts have gone the way of the elite, with their special jargon, their special codified language that only a specific amount of people understand and can enjoy. And it’s not that other people can’t learn them or don’t have the ability to learn them, it’s just that if you’re not taught them early, you don’t know what you’re looking for. So by the time you’re twenty-two and you wander into a ballet, you sit there and say, ‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ or ‘I’m bored.’ More than likely the language of the ballet hasn’t been taught to you. You haven’t been taught what to look for.”
“So it’s about getting into the community and training up an audience for the theatre, teaching them what the rules are and what they aren’t, what to look for and not to look for. It’s also bending some of those rules and breaking them, making plays that are done on street corners, doing site-specific work and doing all of the things that help encompass a community into the world of theatre.”
“Theatre is the foremost art that I work in because it’s something that I believe changes lives.”
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