All Kinds of Blackness with Lydia Diamond

Leticia Ridley: Welcome to Daughters of Lorraine, a podcast from your friendly neighborhood Black feminists, exploring the legacies, present, and futures of Black theatre. We are your hosts, Leticia Ridley.

Jordan Ealey: And Jordan Ealey. This is a podcast produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. And on it we discuss Black theatre history; conduct interviews with local, national and international Black theatre artists, scholars and practitioners; and discuss plays by Black playwrights that have our minds buzzing.

Leticia: Lydia R. Diamond is an award-winning playwright whose works include Toni Stone, Smart People, Stick Fly, Harriet Jacobs, The Bluest Eye,The Gift Horse, The Inside, and Stage Black. Her work has premiered on Broadway, off Broadway, and nationally at theatres such as American Conservatory Theater Company, the Huntington Theatre, Goodman Theatre, Congo Square, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, the Alliance Theatre, Arena Stage, Company One, Writers Theatre, McCarter Theatre Center, among many others. She was a consulting producer and a writer for Showtime's fourth season of The Affair, and nominated for a Writers Guild Award for Best Drama Episode. She's also written for NBC, HBO, HBO Max, and Hulu.

Jordan: Diamond has been a WEB Du Bois Institute, Non-Resident fellow at Harvard, a Sundance Playwright Lab Creative Advisor, a Radcliffe Institute Fellow, and a National Endowment for the Arts/TCG Playwright in Residence. Some of her awards include the Horton Foote Playwriting Award, an Audelco nomination, the Kilroy's List, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize Finalist, LA Critics Circle Award, and National Art Club's Kesselring Prize for Playwriting. She sits on the Dramatist Guild Legal Defense Fund Board and the Dramatist Guild Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Access Committee. Diamond was on faculty at Boston University for eleven years and now is an Associate Professor of Playwriting at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In today's episode, we interview Lydia Diamond to learn more about her craft, how she defines Black theatre and her hopes for our collective future.

Hello and welcome back to Daughters of Lorraine. Leticia and I are here with a very, very special guest. As you know, every episode and every guest is special to us, but this one is very, very special. We're so pleased to welcome Lydia Diamond to our podcast. Thanks for joining us here today.

Lydia Diamond: Oh, thank you so much for inviting me. Thank you so much.

Leticia: I will just add to Jordan's introduction. I think it's always really nice to have a Black woman playwright, writing currently who has done so much for Black theatre in our presence. And I was sharing with you offline that you had an ATHE keynote that I attended when I was a master's student and we took a little picture, so it's so nice to have you on the podcast.

Lydia: Yes. Life goes fast because that feels like both a very long time ago and not so long ago. And it was a moment, and I'm sure organically wrap around back to it, but it was a moment that defined my perspective in a way later. So I had a touch point, so I love that you were part of that moment.

Leticia: Yeah, I remember sitting, I was eagerly waiting. I was like, “Oh, Lydia Diamond speaking?” I think I was second row or something. I was like an eager graduate student like, “This is the moment I'll never be able to capture again.” And look, now you're on Daughters of Lorraine, the podcast that Jordan and I started when we were in graduate school, which is just like...

Lydia: I love the title of your podcast, by the way.

Leticia: Thank you.

Lydia: Lorraine is beautiful.

Jordan: Oh yeah. And the Chicago connection with you guys as well.

Leticia: A Raisin in the Sun is my favorite play. I always say that. I guess I'm a typical Black theatre lover, but I just feel like every time—

Lydia: It sets the bar.

Leticia: I feel like it's so good. Every time I read it, no matter where I'm at, I'm just like, “This is such a good play.”

Lydia: Such a beautiful play. And yeah, it is. And I think how lucky for us, when I was coming up, it really was it, that you were presenting with in terms of the canon Black theatre. So I was under the impression for many decades that it was the only Black play in existence. Not really, but kind of. And it has been nice that now I've been teaching for decades and I always go back to it because it is really a beautifully made play.

Leticia: Agreed, agreed.

Lydia: Did you ever read, You Can't Do This in Theatre [You Can’t Do That on Broadway]? The book that the producer wrote about producing Raisin in the Sun?

Leticia: No, no.

Lydia: It's called, You Can't Do This in Theatre. It talks about the whole process of getting A Raisin in the Sun up, and it seems like—

Leticia: Wow, I'm going to check that out.

Jordan: Oh my God.

Leticia: I didn't know this existed because I teach it every time I get a chance to teach Black theatre. I'm currently in Canada, so I teach African-American theatre history.

Lydia: Oh, no, I would like to currently be in Canada.

Jordan: Hey, wouldn't we all?

Lydia: How big is your house?

Leticia: Yeah, I get an email like that every other day.

Jordan: Exactly, right.

Leticia: Every other day.

Lydia: Good to know you. You put that down.

Leticia: But to get the questions started, can you talk a bit about your trajectory to theatre? What was the spark that led you into theatre, and to actually take it up as an actual professional thing, a career that you wanted to devote your time to?

Lydia: Funny, I didn't... Well, I think probably the first thing that happened is I did forensics in high school. I lived all over the country in different places and then went to high school in Waco, Texas in the eighties. And that was an experience. But one of the things that saved me is my forever best friend and I did all of the shows, and he was this great big, tall gay White man who didn't know he was gay. We didn't know, we didn't care. Just doing theatre and being theatre geeks and going around and doing dramatic interpretation and whatever, humorous interpretation and monologues and debating at little different schools across the country, but also being in the school plays. I remember we were in the play Ten Little Indians, and it was problematic on so many levels, Agatha Christie's play. And at the end it's like a whodunit. “Did the Butler do it” kind of play?

And at the end, it's just me and my friend Waylon left, and we weren't allowed to kiss because God forbid that the White boy and the Black girl kiss. This is in my lifetime. And we looked back and we're like, how interesting that we were like, “Okay, that's weird choice, but okay...” And so on some level there were theatre teachers who were being, in their own way, under huge constraints, progressive in a way. And I, just this marginalized kid who found some people doing some things that were exciting. And I was also a visual artist, and so it was time to go to college and I wanted to go... My mother's best friend was an opera singer in Germany, and I was like, “What is that?” And there was no word called a gap year, not for regular people like me, but I was like, so I didn't say a gap year, but, “What if I, instead of going to college, I went and I lived with Aunt Joanne in Germany while she's being an opera singer and I can, I don't know, be with her there?”

And my mom was like, “Well, you're going to have to apply somewhere.” So I looked at a bunch of pamphlets and Northwestern University had this theatre major and they said it was the best theatre major in the country. And I was a good student, the Black girl from Waco, Texas. And I got a full ride. And so I majored in theatre. It was going to be theatre or art, and theatre gave me a full ride. And I thought that the way to be a professional theatre artist was to be an actor just because I didn't have a paradigm for being a playwright meant. But while I was there, Charles Smith, who's a wonderful playwright, was teaching there. I saw him walking across the campus toward the school of theatre, and he was the only Black professor I'd seen going into that building. And I was like, “What do you teach?” And he said, “Playwriting.” And I was like, “Sign me up.” And I took playwriting. It was a place for all kinds of reasons.

In my experience being so in the minority, I don't think I was a very good actor. I don't think I knew that. But also, there was nothing for me to be acting in at Northwestern. And the combination of those two things, playwriting was where I felt affirmed and where I could have some autonomy and a voice, and write things that I didn't know might exist already. There were so many, I hadn't been introduced to so many playwrights who really had done some things that I did later, but also they weren't canonized. So I just was underexposed. We didn't have Google. You couldn't Google plays by Black women about things that aren't just us being enslaved. So I could write my own stories, and that was exciting and fulfilling. And I'm still thinking that the way you'd be in theatre is to be an actress. I still thought of myself as a professional actor, so I was writing one woman shows that upon graduating, I started a theatre company, introduced my own shows, writing small plays I would be in with my friends, and then auditioning and doing the actor thing and writing plays.

And at some point, five years into this endeavor, I was like, “I am an actor-playwright.” And then one day, then I was, for another five years I was a playwright-actor. And then one day I was like...I am a playwright. It was so liberating. I guess that's my journey. I think it was good that it was in Chicago because the ecology of the Chicago theatre was so much about doing theatre. And so we weren't looking toward this external affirmation. There weren't Tonys to win. There wasn't Broadway to aspire to. And there was this non-hierarchical way that seasoned professional actors worked everywhere and you apprenticed under. And it was very selfless for the craft. And the whole storefront theatre thing was real and alive, and there wasn't television that way. So now there was all the Chicago Fire shows. So you're doing a show and somebody's like, “I got to go be a corpse this afternoon. I can't come to rehearsal.” There was none of that. There was none of that. So I think it was a good time.

Jordan: And in Chicago, I love bringing up the specificity of Chicago theatre scene, and highlighting somewhere outside of New York as well, and how you can be involved in theatre outside of only that one ecosystem. I'm curious if there were any, your influences as an artist of any theatremakers or artists that motivated your work in some way, or if there was a song, not song, musical or play? I'm thinking of music right now, musicals or plays or theatrical works that were inspiring to you.

Lydia: Sure. Well, one of the things, since we were talking about Chicago though, I think. So I graduated from college in ’91 and I hadn't seen anything like Stick Fly, for instance on Broadway. I hadn't written Stick Fly yet. But I think that I had room in a certain way, I think because I wasn't in New York, and had been busy. From the time that I identified myself as a theatre artist, I started being full on full-time in this intensive program. So I wasn't terribly exposed to, I wasn't one of the kids who got to go see Rent. I didn't get to be a Rent or Wicked kid. I wasn't a theatre kid that way, like a theatre groupie.

When I was growing up we went to, my mom managed the art center at the University of Massachusetts, and so everything that came through I saw, and it was [A] Chorus Line and Ain'tMisbehavin' and Alvin Ailey. And musicians Jean-Pierre Rampal and Marcus Superman and Itzhak Perlman and a little bit of everything and everybody. But not in a way that looked like I could be in the, I'm going to be a theatre kid, theatre kid, really. And so in terms of my influences, I would say they were probably maybe more grounded in some of my training at Northwestern, though in my mind I was rebelling against it. I look back and I'm very much influenced by that aesthetic and literature and hubris, I'm sure, and egotistical perhaps, thinking I was inventing something.

I think I was really, really fueled by the sense that I haven't seen this kind of story this way, and I haven't seen Black people be able to do this or be able to do that. I, a twenty-three-year-old, must make that to save the world and rid us of racism. So that was my motivation. So I didn't have to go through the stages that I see young writers do, which I think is completely healthy. Which is write other people's plays for a little while before they find their own voice. Because I thought I was making up something. I thought I was doing something. I didn't know for Alice Childress and Adrienne Kennedy.

Leticia: Yeah. I felt like when I was training to get my PhD in theatre and performance studies, I had the very much the same drive of, “I need to do this thing that doesn't exist.” And I think now that I am out of the often competitiveness of education and school that I felt, that I'm very much like, “What does it mean to be in conversation with folks that are turning over a question or an idea multiple times?” Me and Jordan's mentor, Faedra Chatard Carpenter, would tell us all the time, she'd be like, “There's so many books on Shakespeare, and when do Black folks get the opportunity to take an idea or a concept or a person and turn it over thirty million ways and allow that work to exist in the world?” So I think that is important to reframe how we're thinking about what we're offering to the world that you're speaking to.

Lydia: Yeah. Oh, I think that's beautifully said. And I do wonder what that would've meant. In a way, did I have to write a lot of plays to reinvent a wheel that had been invented? What if I had been fed with Adrienne Kennedy, and West, and Alice Childress and who knows? I think probably, liberating for me to have been coming at it from this other place, probably, and still it is interesting.

Leticia: Right. Jordan and I are educators, so I have taught, I've been in Canada for two years. I'm going on my third year teaching at University of Toronto, and every year I get to teach a Black theatre class.

Lydia: I'm going to be calling you and asking you about your syllabus because I think it's time for me to teach one of those. I teach at University of Illinois, Chicago, and we've been reworking our BA major and I'm like, “Well, we're going to have to figure out how to do this.”

Leticia: Yes, please do.

Lydia: It has to be done. It has to be done.

Leticia: Yes, yes, please do. And it's so interesting teaching African-American theatre in Canada. It's just so different. Toronto where I'm based, there's a lot of different folks who have immigrated from different places or they're first generation or second generation Canadian, so they still have a very strong tie to other places. So a lot of the things that I have to explain, like, “Okay, someone's jumping the broom in this play.” They don't have a context for what jumping the broom is.

Lydia: But you know what's so interesting is, I just wonder how much of that makes you a better teacher, but also really actually would've been a good thing to have done in a context where you presume that people know things that sadly we don't know?

Leticia: Right. And I tell my students all the time, I was like, “My conception of Canada as a place has been so influenced by Black theatre history.” The plays that I was reading were telling me that Canada…it was freedom. Canada was freedom. This is the ideal place that we thought.

Jordan: And now look at us now.

Leticia: Still think it's freedom though, right, in a different concept

Lydia: I’m just saying… If you have a basement, it's just me. I have a little golden retriever boyfriend. Maybe my son would come.

Leticia: Yeah. So my students are shocked when I tell them that. They're like, “What?” I was like, “Yes, there's such a strong tradition of this relationship between Canada and the US, and specifically that being a destination of freedom for Black Americans and the way that we understand it.” But yeah, so I just share that to riff off what you were sharing. I want to turn to craft a little bit. You are a playwright. You have written many, many plays that we'll get into in a second. But what is the drive behind your work? Do you have a major question? How do you find a story, and what's the process from idea to draft?

Lydia: You asked me at a really funny time because I'm working right now on a musical, and—

Jordan: Oh my God.

Lydia: As I have gotten older, the process has gotten harder in some ways. And I've always had an excuse. I think I thought it was being a mom and a full-time professor, and that makes me slower. And then there was certainly a period in my life where it really was, mommy-ing was hardcore and I thought, “Oh, my values have kind of shifted.” So going back, I touched on it. Initially, my motivation for writing a play was driven by anger and rebellion. I felt a way during school being so in the minority and institutional racism slammed me in the face in a very specific kind of way that I just think we all get this certain radicalized in college. I think it's healthy, and suddenly we have knowledge to put behind the rage, and it turns into something that gets ugly and angry in a specific kind of way. And for me, it really fed my work.

And I wrote fast and hard and with conviction, and without something that I see younger people have, and I don't know if this is good, but never with a sense of, “This play will be seen by millions of people in the world and I will be a playwright.” No, it was how I know how to express myself, and plays, that's fun working with people and making theatre and then people see it and they say nice things about you in the paper, and that's cool. But I didn't have a sense of myself in a constellation of this as a thing that I can do to further a thing that would be called a career. There was no sense of trajectory. There was just the doing of it. And so that was the first bunch of plays that I wrote. And I look back at that and I would like for something like that to happen again one day, which was, I was not writing any play because someone had commissioned it or asked for it or was expecting it. And I had no expectations about what would happen with it.

I was like, “I'll perform it for somebody, or somebody will perform it one day.” And so that was a really nice way to write, and it was faster than the years later. And then in my middle years, in my thirties I guess, and approaching motherhood, the think shift. So it wasn't, “Let me tell you how to treat us right and how fucked up the country is. And let me tell you what a mess this is.” It turned into questions more, like you were asking, and I really felt like, “What is this? This is madness.” And I think I found it was harder to write from a place of, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. And so it took me like seven, eight years to write Smart People, as opposed to the two years that it took to write Stick Fly, and the two weeks it took to write Stage Black. And just suddenly it was a completely different endeavor.

And then, I guess, the next one was around being commissioned to write a thing that I was asked if I was interested in. I've never taken work for hire, but it was for Toni Stone. The producers, Samantha Barrie and Pam MacKinnon called me and said, “There's this person I think you're going to want to write a play about,” and introduce me to this baseball player. And that's how that happened. But it's still a different thing to fall in love with the thing that's introduced to you as opposed to, sit in cafes, look at the ceiling, be like, “You know what really pisses me off later? I'll write a play. People will be in it. There is a so-and-so and such a such-and-thing. And they're in such a place in this relationship.” I haven't done that in two decades. I would like to do that again one day.

Jordan: Yeah. I remember when I first saw Smart People, I saw the production at True Colors. I'm from Atlanta and I saw that production at True Colors. Danielle Deadwyler was in it, who we actually interviewed this season as well. And Leticia and I, we read... I had already read it and seen it, but then we read it again when we took a graduate seminar together on contemporary African-American drama. And that line in the play, I think it's like Jackson's line where he's talking about, he saw a play, Brother's Got a Song to Sing, or something like that. And Leticia and I, we literally, that's one of our inside jokes. We're like, “Brother's Got a Song to Sing.”

Leticia: When I say?

Jordan: Like we say that all the time.

Lydia: So let me tell you, the experience of having that play in Atlanta was one of the best of my life. Because I had that play, it had a couple of productions other places in Chicago, I think. I don't remember the trajectory. Point being, to have your play performed for over three hundred Black people, you just don't get that in the American theatre very much. And I too think that is a very funny joke. In Boston that wasn't like the Huda Hala line. And so it's a very different laugh.

Leticia: When I say-

Lydia: So glad you saw that.

Leticia: ... from the gut.

Jordan: From the gut laugh.

Leticia: When I say, I think literally two weeks ago we made a joke about it, we consistently return to it.

Jordan: We say it all the time.

Leticia: All the time.

Jordan: And the Brother's Got a Song to Sing. And I think it's something where she's like, “Wait, which one was that?” And he goes, “They're the same play,” or something like that. It was just, I mean, absolute utter brilliance.

Lydia: I just directed it at my school. I teach at the University of Illinois Chicago. But ladies, I have to ask you maybe, I don't know if our particular sensibilities in this moment make it a play that we can do in a college or... No, it was hard. It was really hard. And the young cast did a wonderful job and I was like, “Oh my God. Maybe it has not aged out of relevance, but in a way it is now very much a historical play, but about a history that is too recent necessarily to translate to college students right now, in a way.” It was hard. It was hard.

Jordan: And I think there's something very complex about it. And I think even knowing that you started conceiving of it even during Obama's first presidency, and then it didn't, I don't believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, have its first production until maybe years after that, right?

Lydia: I started conceiving it before the Obama presidency and then that happened. And I—

Jordan: That's what it was, yeah.

Lydia: Writing this play about race and the whole paradigm around race in our country has changed, and I'm writing a play about race. And so the play kept shifting under my feet and other things started pissing me off because I've been asked to do interviews about is... What was the thing—

Jordan: Oh, we post-racial.

Lydia: Racial, I got a bunch of post-racial, could be a panel about post-racial while I'm writing my race play. And I was like, “What's happening?” Yeah.

Jordan: And also, well, I guess to keep on the trajectory of thinking about your plays, some of the other work of yours that I have engaged, I've seen productions of, is your adaptations of The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Harriet Jacobs: [A] Play. And I'm curious about that process of adaptation. You talked about literature earlier and just that process of staging Toni Morrison or staging these canonical works of Black literature and making them performative or theatrical.

Lydia: Well, Toni Morrison is the play in which I realized, both in terms of when I went to publish it, when it had other productions, I think I learned something about this and Harriet Jacobs too, where I realized, “Oh, I really am a product of my education, and that it does have a very performance theatre aesthetic that leans into literature in a very purposeful way.” And I was like, “Oh, I learned that in college.” I said, “I was writing it.” I remember some dramaturgs pushing back against this idea of it sounds like a book. And I was saying, “But it is because it's Toni Morrison. And the book needs to be in everything and I need to get out of the way of it and how to do that.”

And I will say, around the whole idea of adaptation, my ego gets dinged a little in it, but I feel like that's maybe a conversation for your next podcast about ego and art, and what that means. Because not my superpower in the early stages of my career was being egoless, and I got older and realized, “Well, the part of that was that the planets have aligned in such a way that I had the privilege of being egoless because I wasn't hungry.” I wrote and the universe rewarded me for writing, and made opportunities for me to write more. And that is such a privilege, and so it's easy to be like, “Well, I don't get jealous and I don't know for jealousy. And I don't have ambition and I don't know for ambition.” And that is very easy to do when you don't have a paradigm in which, here's the prize, and from the minute I start trying to actualize that, I'm told I can't. I just always knew I couldn't.

So there weren't obstacles. As I have found more success, I think I have had some times, at the back of my mouth, the taste of, “Wait, what is that? Is that jealousy? Wait, what is that? Is that ambition? Am I feeling a certain way about a thing I don't have that other people get? What the...” And what I will say is that I am not wrong, no good comes of it. I don't think it is my Achilles heel in a certain way. And I'm glad that I have the age and the breadth and the vision to be able to look back and say, “A, you've had it pretty good. And B, stop it because you know that voice will kill you.” But I will say that from the minute I had a play on Broadway, that voice got louder and louder, and I just wanted to kill the art. That voice will kill you and the art. Yeah.

Leticia: Yeah. I think you're speaking to the challenges of what does it mean to progress and with more notoriety, the baggage that is attached to it, a lot of people would be like, “Okay, this is great that you did this thing and congratulations, but what have you done for me lately? What's next? Whoa, that's nice.” So I think that there's a way that you're absolutely correct and that it kills the art itself, and the thing and that spark and that initial thing that you got when you were writing plays or you were acting, you're directing or whatever because you are starting to look outwards.

Lydia: Yeah. And I think the little bit of the difference is, I don't mind so much what's next. That just means somebody gives a shit about something I did before and decides to do something good again and maybe even still has a little faith that I will. That's cool. But the other piece of it that you said, the part that for me is wholly unhealthy, and it might also be developmental. It might have to do with I turned fifty-six and something happened. I like clothes, I go shopping a lot, and on the websites when you review the little close and the set was your age group, I just graduated to the fifty-five and up thing. And if you're a clothes horse, something shifted in a way.

And so part of this idea of what I haven't gotten or what didn't happen, or what is happening that isn't what I thought. I do think it's also just part of getting old and curmudgeonly. Partly there is that. Suddenly, “Oh, I've done something for decades. Does anybody notice? Did a tree fall in the forest?” And so that's why this that you asked me to do, this feels so good. Thank you. Where I digressed around the construction of making a thing sound like a book I found to be really, really heavy and thrilling, but heavy lift. And I think that I did it. I pulled it off relatively deftly, and I think that because I did, it doesn't get the kudos of a thing that I might have. So that, and then for Harriet Jacobs-

Jordan: Harriet Jacobs?

Lydia: Yes. That really is an adaptation. But unlike The Bluest Eye was the opposite of, let me make it sound like a book. Everything in it is a word I invented.

Jordan: Right, right.

Lydia: So I've done different kinds of adaptation. And then for Toni Stone, really is an original play, but I was graced with the support of the woman who wrote the definitive biography in the person, in the flesh, and she's wonderful. And the definitive biography. And so that was also a different exercise. I'm sorry I didn't answer your question. Now you were saying...

Jordan: Oh my God. It's great.

Leticia: Great. Like we said, we go everywhere, we jump around. No worries. No worries at all. Onto happier news, Toni Stone. So everyone on the podcast know that I was an athlete in college. I'm a huge sports fan. Love it. I often joke that if Troy Bolton was a Black woman, it'd be me. So sports was just such a big part of my life, still very much is a big part of my life. And we talked about Flex, this play by Candrice Jones, which is a few episodes ago, Jordan? Yes?

Jordan: Yeah.

Leticia: A few episodes ago. And it really made me reflect on how difficult it is to stage sports. For the theatre, that is such a huge challenge. How do you take this monumental sport with all this legacy and try to enact the actual thing on stage and then also use it as the backdrop to explain larger issues or larger questions that you're interested in? Can you talk about that process?

Lydia: What it began with was that my co-collaborators are hard, hardcore sports people. So Samantha Barrie and Pam MacKinnon, the director, and Martha, the writer of Curveball. I don't know why her last name, Martha Ackmann. Oh my God, it's right here. They live and breathe and die hardcore up in it in the baseball. And that helped because when they first came to me, I was like, “Well, guys, in full honesty, I'm not sports person that way.” I played baseball... And what's funny is, now that I've been a part of several productions, I know what it looks like when someone truly isn't a sports person. And I'm so glad I have sports enough in my body. Oh, that's what “throw like a girl” means. Oh, shit. Oh, I see. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I had to find the metaphor of reaching and this thing that was her everything and the passion and what that meant, and as soon as I understood that, and for me, I made it unrequited love and it dropped in.

And the combination of that and having this incredibly interesting, powerful woman exist, that tapped into some of my earlier like, “Oh, we got to write this play because this don't make sense that we don't know who she is.” And so I had also that drive and sense of conviction. And then I had this wonderful producing team who knew that it would take me a long time, and I told them when they hired me, “It's going to be a process,” and it did it. I remember we had just gone into rehearsals in New York. We were walking down the street and Samantha Barrie, the producer, ran into a friend on the street and they were chatting. They were chatting and, “Well, how's your son? And how is he doing?” And this baby she was pregnant with when we started, she was like, “He's going into preschool.” And I was like, “No, that's not possible because truly it's only taken me two years, not four.” So that helped too.

Leticia: Yeah, I love that you talk about the passion and thinking about sports, and specifically for a Black woman in her time to not have a professional league for her to play in, and even the professional league that she did play in was segregated. She was playing in the Negro leagues. It is an unrequited love. The ways that you will go to be reunited with your love in a way that everyone is telling you that it doesn't fit. It reminds me of the... Was it the Amazon Prime show? A League of Their Own.

Jordan: A League of Their Own.

Lydia: Oh no. I don't know that show. No, no, I'm sorry. I didn't see that. I haven't been able to see that yet. There was another one, there was a show where a Black woman was playing—

Leticia: Pitch. Pitch.

Jordan: Oh yeah, our show.

Leticia: Our show from back in the day. Yes.

Lydia: Is that back in the day for you guys?

Leticia: Wait, are we talking about the same thing? Pitch with the one, the San Diego…where she was a pitcher?

Lydia: Yep.

Jordan: Leticia is from San Diego.

Lydia: I loved that show and I was in a writer's room, writing on a show that never happened. We were writing a show that was going to be for Hulu, and it was Sarah Treem who was showrunner for the Affair. Anyway, it was the last day of the writer's room that I found out that this guy who was in the room, who's a political writer, pundit, but also a television writer, was on that show. And I was like, “God, I wish I had known that on the first day of working with him,” because I had all kinds of ideas about who he was, that in one scoop fell away. And I was like, “That show was everything.” I loved that show. Too good, it had only one season. I really liked it.

Jordan: I know. Very sad. One of the things, obviously this podcast is a focus for us on Black theatre, and we do it from this Black feminist perspective is... But really thinking about Black theatre in its thing, when you hear that term, when you hear this thing called Black theatre, what does that mean for you? Or what does that signify for you? And I guess, looking if... God, I hate to ask you to look towards the future, but what is it you maybe hope for? Or where do you see us going with this thing called Black theatre?

And we find ourselves in a world where we can define our Blackness and it can be huge and all-encompassing and it can be historical. And it can be stories of people who look like my great-grandparents who were enslaved people. I like to think that maybe one day Harriet Jacobs will get done again, that there will be a world in which we can see enslaved people on stage and not say that that's all we are.

Lydia: That's a beautiful question, and I'm so glad I didn't see your questions beforehand because I am glad I didn't have to really, really think about it and come with a whole thing. It's so loaded in a way that it's so interesting. So do you teach or know Paul Carter Harrison's book Black [Light]?

Jordan: Yes.

Lydia: Yes, yes. Okay. So when I started, the older guard had some ideas about what for was Black theatre, and I wasn't always fitting in to those ideas. And I remember distinctly, it was on a panel with Lou Bellamy and my mentor, Chuck Smith, would direct at his theatre company all the time. And I had been sending my plays to Black theatres all over the country wanting to get productions. And I thought, “Well, surely now I've had this production at the Goodman, maybe now they'll take me,” and getting rejected. And then being on this panel that I'd been put on, probably I was too young, but I'd had this success. And I might've even been smelling myself and thinking I was more successful than I was. I don't think so though, because what I did have always was a healthy respect for our elders.

But I do remember being on this panel, and I think Paul was on the panel too, but they started talking about this new young wave of writers who isn't writing Black theatre because they're coming out of these White schools where they're not coming out Black enough and they're being produced by these White theatre companies where they don't have mentors and the blah, blah, blah. And they're not telling Black stories and they're not writing Black plays and what is a Black play? Basically they were saying that my play wasn't a Black... And I remember going up to him in the hallway and being like, “You're my hero and you little bit killed me there, and I just need you to know that my Black play is my Black experience. And I'm very Black identified.” But it was just before the idea of the notion of the different kinds of Black work was opening up a little bit.

This idea, there were different ways to have our own identity. This was years before Awkward Black Girl. I remember fighting to put into the world an idea of Blackness that could include someone who was like me, and people I know who were all kinds of Blackness just in my family, in my living room. It was all kinds of Black. And then I remember that happening, and then defending to young people this notion that the only thing people wanted was this sanitized version of Blackness that was Stick Fly. And I was like, “No, you’re reversing it…no, no, no, no. What Stick Fly, what I was trying to do...” So I think it's a slippery slope when we start talking about what is for Black, if we subscribe rules or ideas to what that is.

And I think that my play is definitive Black theatre. All of my work motivated that. And with Stick Fly in particular, people would come up after, White people would come say, “That play, that was so good. That could have been anybody. That could be my Jewish family.” And I'd be like, “No, no. No...” Was it Black? And I get that. I would thought like, “Oh...” And then when I was writing for The Affair, I was like, “Am I about to be the Black girl who writes Black people for White people for White shows? And well, what does that mean?” For our whole lives we're always dancing with this question of, how do we prove or who are we? And sadly, all too often it's in relation to whiteness in a certain way. So I guess my dream for Black theatre is that we find more places like being able to have my play at True Colors for an audience that laughs at my jokes the way I write it.

And we find ourselves in a world where we can define our Blackness and it can be huge and all-encompassing and it can be historical. And it can be stories of people who look like my great-grandparents who were enslaved people. I like to think that maybe one day Harriet Jacobs will get done again, that there will be a world in which we can see enslaved people on stage and not say that that's all we are. And there will be a world where I can say nigger on stage and not be traumatizing people, and it doesn't have to come with bigger warnings. All the things that right now we're just finding our footing for, I'm hoping it can be broader. And I think because I'm Black and I'm writing it, if I wrote a play tomorrow that was all White people, it would be Black theatre. I think, Appropriate as Black people is Black theatre, I would argue. I mean, unless Brandon says otherwise, I would. Yeah. So does that answer your question?

Jordan: Yes, yes. Yeah. Honestly, with the success of Purpose, we were actually going back to Stick Fly. I saw it and I was like, “Yes, more plays about Black bougie nonsense.” And I say this as someone who survived that world.

Lydia: Well, what I think is interesting is, it just can't be at the expense of someone else's reality. I think that because, yeah... And sadly, I think that's what people want to do. They want to say that there's this... A producer person was saying, could they do Stick Fly and not... What is it? Nacirema Society?

Jordan: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pearl Cleage.

Lydia: Do them in the same season, and I'm like, “Why? They're very different plays.” But they're plays with well-heeled Black people in well-appointed rooms, and that means a thing.

Leticia: We can hope for the change. Somebody doing all Black theatre season theatres who listen to our podcast. That'd be fire.

Lydia: And it would have some Katori in it, and it would have some Dominique. And I'm not saying the names of the young people... Oh my God, I just saw this great play at the Goodman. Oh, shoot. What's the play where a thing happens when there's violence and somebody disappears?

Leticia: Bust?

Lydia: Yes. It was so good. This young Black woman.

Jordan: Oh, is that Zora Howard?

Lydia: Yeah. Oh my God, that play was so good. Best play I've seen in years. Get her on your podcast.

Leticia: Zora Howard.

Jordan: If you're listening to this. Zora, if you're listening, open invitation.

Leticia: Zora Howard was a graduate student in the acting program at UCSD, where I got my undergrad degree at the same time when I was there. And she was in Suzan-Lori Parks's, Venus. They did a production of it.

Lydia: Oh, wow. Wow. Yeah. She's wonderful. Wonderful. So good. So anyway...

Leticia: Yeah, so you actually got us already started on our final question, which, here at Daughters of Lorraine, we like to offer what we like to call our reading lists for our listeners to engage with any type of medium further. It could be a book, it could be music, it can be film, it can be television shows, just a final offering that you might want to offer to our listeners.

Lydia: I would say Kia Corthron is writing novels and they're amazing. I've always been a fan of Kia's. And then she did this, when I think when I talk about all those awards, whatever, that you notice you didn't get, I think about Kia because she's certainly gotten lauded. I mean, she's Kia Corthron, but I feel like, not like I feel like she is. And then these books now, well, why not a Pulitzer? Okay, so you hopped over to another genre that also isn't giving you either to what's happening. I think she's brilliant. And that play that I just said, Bust, is one of the best, just brilliant. I loved it. And I don't know, I wish to be doing more reading and right now I'm just writing slowly and laboriously.

Leticia: Well, you're doing a musical, which is amazing, and Jordan didn't mention this.

Lydia: I know.

Jordan: I know.

Leticia: But Jordan studies Black women authored musicals. That's her area of research. Jordan is a musical theatre dramaturg, and actually has done a lot of dramaturgical work in musical theatre, actually.

Jordan: Anyway, I would love to hear all about your process and everything.

Lydia: I was one of the many writers on Paradise Square. And once you have been in a room with people who can do that, you're like, “Why would anybody talk, when they could sing and dance? Why even would anybody ever just say words when there could be singing?” And that's partly the problem I'm writing this musical is like, “What am I doing? We just want to hear this person sing.” Stop talking.

Jordan: That is the ultimate challenge. Oh my God, this has been such an amazing conversation. I mean, like I said, you have been someone that we've wanted to talk to. I've been such a huge admirer of your work for so long, and I know Leticia has as well. And so we just thank you so much for talking to us and coming on the podcast, and letting us into looking at your amazing career and your amazing work and being able to also celebrate you on this podcast. So thank you so much for making the time to talk to us today.

Lydia: Thank you for doing this. It's important. Thank you.

Leticia: This has been another episode of Daughters of Lorraine. We're your hosts, Leticia Ridley.

Jordan: And Jordan Ealey. We will see you on our next episode. You definitely won't want to miss it. In the meantime, if you're looking to connect with us, please follow us on Instagram at DOLorraine Pod P-O-D. You can also email us at [email protected] for further contact.

Leticia: Our theme music is composed by Enza Bomba. The Daughters of Lorraine podcast is supported by HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. It's available on iTunes, Spotify, and HowlRound.com. If you're looking for the podcast on iTunes or Spotify, you'll want to search and subscribe to Daughters of Lorraine podcast.

Jordan: If you loved this podcast, post a rating and write review on those platforms. This helps other people find us. You can also find a transcript for this episode along with a lot of other progressive and disruptive content on howlround.com. Have an idea for an exciting podcast, essay or TV event the theatre community needs to hear? Visit howlround.com and submit your ideas to the Commons.