Gettin’ Comfortable With Discomfort

Leticia Ridley: I’ve never realized that. You just blew my mind, and A Raisin in the Sun is my favorite play.

Robert O’Hara: Yeah, it’s true. This is stuff that you learn when you’re directing it. He doesn’t start one scene. It is not his play. He’s the person in the corner sitting somewhere trolling around, while they are living their lives, he’s trying to find a liquor store. You know what I mean? And we always sort of press the button on who’s playing Walter Lee, let’s centralize Walter Lee. Walter Lee wouldn’t be able to exist without these three women, right?

Leticia: Period.

Robert: There wouldn’t be a play. Now, there would be a play without Walter Lee, right? And it’d be a play of survival of these three women in space, but there would not be anything that Walter Lee could do without having someone to fight against. And he fights against all these three women, right? So that’s the muscle of the play. So that’s where I leave you.

Leticia: 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: Robert O’Hara has received the NAACP Best Director Award, the Helen Hayes Award for outstanding new play, two Obie Awards, and the Oppenheimer Award. O’Hara was nominated for a Tony Award for best direction of a play for his work on Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play. He directed world premieres from playwrights such as Nikkole Salter, Danai Gurira, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and many others. He has directed around the country, including Arena Stage, the Alley Theatre, Primary Stages, Yale Rep, Woolly Mammoth, American Conservatory Theater, Magic Theatre, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, the Culture Project, The Flea, OSF, and The Goodman Theatre. He has been an artist in residency at the American Conservatory Theater, New York Shakespeare Festival, Theater Emory, and the Mellon Playwright in Residency at Woolly Mammoth, as well as a visiting professor of DePaul University School of the Arts, and adjunct at NYU Tisch School of Arts.

Jordan: As a playwright, his work is produced all over the country, and Mr. O’Hara has been commissioned by Playwrights Horizons, Steppenwolf, the Public Theater,La Jolla Playhouse, McCarter Theatre,the Mark Taper Forum, and Woolly Mammoth Theatre. He has written screenplays for Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, HBO, ABC, Universal Pictures, Sony Pictures, and more. He received the Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT drama, the Mark Taper Forum’s first Sherwood Award, and the TANNE Award for Exceptional Body of Work.

He recently directed a new musical, UNI-son, inspired by the poetry of August Wilson at OSF, a new musical, Bella: An American Tall Tale by Kirsten Childs, at Playwrights Horizons. He received his directing MFA from Columbia University. In today’s episode, we interview Robert O’Hara and learn all about his extensive career as a theatremaker, the critical role of imagination, and pushing beyond discomfort.

Jordan: All right. Hello everyone. Welcome back to Daughters of Lorraine. As you know, we are always excited about every single episode that we do, but today, today’s really special for the both of us, and this is an artist that both of us admire, both as a playwright, as a director, as a visionary, and we’d like to welcome Robert O’Hara to Daughters of Lorraine. Welcome.

Robert: Thank you very much. I’m happy to be here.

Leticia: Yes, I will just say, when me and Jordan sit down and plan our season of Daughters of Lorraine, we always have our list of dream people we would love to be on the podcast, and you were at the top of the list, so thank you though so much for joining us.

Jordan: Honestly, since we started too, we’re like, “You know who we should interview? Robert O’Hara.”

Leticia: Right, right, right, because I remember Jordan, when you were like, “Have you read Barbecue? Have you read Barbecue before?” You were like, “It’s so funny.” And I was like, “No, I haven’t.” And then I read it, and I was like, “You’re exactly right.”

Robert: Thank you. That’s very kind of you actually. It’s great to...

Leticia: Yeah. So let’s jump right in. We’d like to start with a sort of softball question to paint your journey into the theatre for us. So, how did you get involved with theatre and why did you choose, or perhaps theatre chose you, as the effective mechanism for which you were interested in telling stories?

Robert: Well, my grandmother had twelve kids, and so I have a lot of cousins. And so, we would go to our grandmother’s house, and I don’t know why, but we would always be putting on shows. And I was always, my grandmother would call me the ringleader, only because I think I was the oldest grandchild for the most part.

Because if you have, like, my uncles, their children were with their mother’s grandparents. So it was really the children of the aunties who were at my grandmother’s house. And so I was one of the older ones from the aunties. My mother’s the oldest daughter. And so we were always, and she had this huge house—as a kid, everything is huge—and I would just make up shit. And so, that was sort of a dynamic that has always been in my life and sort of making up stories. And I’ve always gravitated towards stories. And my mother would say that I would daydream a lot. And actually, as I think about it, I think it has something to do with me being queer. I think it has something to do with me imagining myself in another space and knowing that I’m different, even if I did not have access to what that was.

But I think the queer imagination, I think, starts earlier, even inside of a sort of, there’s something different about me, and I’m looking at the world differently. And so, I think that’s where it came from. And for me, theatre is, you are alive, so the actors know you’re there, the story knows you’re there. In film, when people laugh at a film, the film doesn’t pause, so the laughter to die down, and then you keep on going. In the theatre, you sort of have a pause, especially if it’s raucous laughter. So there’s a communication between the story and the audience, which is different and dynamic in many ways.

Leticia: And did you have a play or a show that got you into theatre?

Robert: Well, I was born and raised in Cincinnati, and so we didn’t really go to plays, but what really sparked my imagination, I know was The Wizard of Oz and also The Wiz. I didn’t know them as plays, and of course there are plays, of them. I knew them as film, and so that would activate my brain and my imagination. So it came on every year. They came on every year. So it was always exciting to see those two and knowing that one was an adaptation of the other, and also finding myself in the story, as I always thought I was in the story. I mean, Dorothy being lost and trying to find her way home and sort of imagining a world in which will get her home. Yeah, so I think that was my first interaction in terms of narrative imagination, actually.

Jordan: I love what you’re saying around daydreaming specifically and imagining yourself into history. We love to talk more about how you do that specifically, but it reminds me of that bell hooks quote where she talks about, queer not just as who you have sex with, but as having a non-normative relationship with the world around you, as being out of sorts, I think is what she says, with the world around you. And I think this podcast, we bill ourselves as the Black feminist, but we are also deeply want to celebrate and talk about also the ways that Black queer artists have shaped also the history of Black theatre. And we’ve been doing that a lot more. I mean, it takes on to know one, right? We’re all queer here, but it’s such a, I don’t know, beautiful way that you’ve put that, just the dreaming aspect of what it means to create. And so, as a playwright in particular, turning to that portion of your theatrical life, how do you find a story? How do you take those dreams and manifest them into these larger-than-life narratives and spectacles that you create in your plays?

Robert: Well, I’m asked that often, and the only way I could answer it is that it’s usually a bunch of shit bumping around up there. I sort of wait until everything sort of boils to a really good bubbling. So if it’s just an idea, it’ll live up there. I always say I rarely write things down or write ideas down, because I’m like, if I can’t remember them, then they’re probably not memorable. And so, I wait until they attach themselves to something else. And then, one of the criticisms that I got as a young writer from people who criticize for a living, was that there was a lot going on in the plays and there was a lot of things happening. My mother, she would see my work and go, “There’s a lot going on there.”

Yeah, there is a lot going on. It’s all that and a bag of chips, as they say. And so, usually is my relationship is something that just fills off from everybody else’s relationship to it. So for instance, I always thought, I guess when I saw Schindler’s List, there was a profound feeling in that he was able to find humor in that story and also to find a relationship, love inside that story, that was not just from the trauma, but there was a love story going on too. But I fully believe between Liam and what’s the guy’s name who played the head guy in the prison, he also played Gandhi, Ben Kingsley, yeah.

Jordan: Oh yes, Ben Kingsley.

Robert: Yeah, I felt that there was a relationship there that was very exciting for me to watch. And so, I started thinking about our Holocaust, slavery. And in order to survive, people fell in love, people laughed, people sang, it could not be all hell or we wouldn’t be here. And so, in order to survive, you had to find something in it that grew out of your own imagination. And so, I began to imagine where is the love story inside slavery? And where is the queer story inside slavery? Could there be a queer love story inside slavery?

And so, that came to one of my first plays. People thought I was out of my fucking mind. And in many ways, the imagining of a space that I don’t have a history with, there are other narratives about queer love on the plantation. And so people thought that it was either going to be a slave play or it should be a queer play, but the two shall never meet, because they had never heard of it. And I was like, one of my mottoes is “I will not be limited by your imagination.” And so, plus you can’t imagine, it doesn’t mean that I can’t and doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. So sometimes you have to imagine yourself into places that you know you were there, that I can’t be here unless someone like me existed before me. I am not an anomaly. You know what I mean?

Jordan: Yeah.

Robert: I’m not a one-off. So that’s sort of the way I approach my work is that George [C.] Wolfe said to me, “To be an artist, you have to have the audacity to believe that what you have to say someone should listen to.” That is a requirement that is deeply difficult at times. You just have to go through the creation of something and knowing that you have the audacity to go, this is what I think, this is what I feel, this is how I live. And it’s worthy to be shared, is worthy to be heard. So that’s what I sort of hold onto when I create.

Jordan: I want to say, Leticia, before you go to the next question is that, that’s something that Leticia and I, we were known as super jokesters in grad school. I mean, obviously we got our work done and everything, but we were kind of jokesters a lot. And one of the things we used to, when we would talk specifically about your play, Insurrection: Holding History, was part of the way that we were able to think about and talk about Black humanity in a larger sense than just like, oh, they have dignity, but it’s also they were jokesters. Maybe they were making all kinds of statements, just like we know Black people. We are Black people.

Robert: Yeah.

Jordan: We can’t take nothing serious. And you think they would be serious even then. So anyways, your play was such a touchstone for us to be like, no, we’re going to make these jokes.

Robert: Yes.

Leticia: Right, right. There was beef. I didn’t like Mary down two rows on the plantation—sociality and relationality.

Robert: Because we’re not a monolith. Because if we allow slavery to define all our behavior, then we will only be through the lens of what White people have created as slaves. You know what I mean? And I always say that slavery didn’t just happen to Black people; it happened to White people. They were also a product of slavery. They sat in a building with four of them looking out at a half-naked, fifty people who could kill them without a thought, but for the fact that those people believed a certain thing about these White people, those White people would be dead.

And the idea of you sipping your fucking tea and knowing deep in your heart that those fifty people out there could slice you up is terrifying, even if you are pretending that it isn’t. And that’s slavery. You know what I mean? It happened to both races, it happened to the entire country. When we talk about slavery, we always want to talk about how difficult it was for the Black people. And I’m like, that’s a false narrative, because we survive. White people didn’t survive slavery. We survived slavery. You know what I mean? We’re the people who have to get laughter in our system for us, for not to kill everything in front of us.

And slavery’s always a very interesting thing. And so, to have the spark of an idea to actually engage with it, and as a thesis, was sort of something that I think always lived inside me, because I wanted to link my own liberation with others and their liberation. Yeah.

Leticia: Right. And I mentioned this to Jordan in the past, but I think the theatre is a great place to have that imagination work. And we’re academics as well, even though we’re also practitioners in the theatre. And a lot of the academic scholarship, you have someone like Saidiya Hartman who points this term called “critical fabulation.” But if we look at Black theatre, critical fabulation has been at the very fabric and threads within Black theatre. And I think you’re describing that, that very thing that’s very core to sort what imagination work can be done here, the necessity of that work being done here and what other perspectives and ways and approaches can we have to think about Black life and its capaciousness and its capacity. And I love that you sort of think about the wholeness of Black life, and one way that you do that, as you are describing, is through the jokes, humor.

Robert: The pain.

Leticia: Yes.

Robert: The beauty and the horror. I have no interest in going to the theatre and watching healthy people. I’m not interested in watching healthy people on stage. I’m interested in watching people who are in conflict. That’s something that needs to be worked out, even if they don’t know it. That excites me. So, when I think of new projects, I think of how much more conflict can there be? Because I am not only Black, I am not only queer, I’m also male, I’m also an American, I’m also an artist. All of those things are part of who I am when I walk outside the door, not just one thing. And so, when I see work that is just about this one thing, it’s not as interesting to me as work that is about that thing and seventeen thousand other things going on.

Leticia: Right. It’s like your brother said, right? Your plays are a lot, because it is a lot to move through this world.

Robert: Yes, exactly. Yeah. But they also thought I was a lot, and I’m like, “Your mother had twelve goddamn kids, that’s a lot.” You know what I mean? That’s...

Leticia: Right.

Robert: Yeah. But it’s so crazy. My mother’s out of her mind. Anyway. That’s cool. That’s not…just yet.

Leticia: Let’s switch a little bit. On the same sort of wavelength of thinking about your plays, can we talk about Bootycandy and Barbecue? And specifically the forms that they take, which are, one, very exciting, and Jordan and I had previously had episodes trying to unpack form within Black theatre, just because specifically I think the public takes up Black theatre simultaneously through its content. This is a play about race, similar to what you’re saying. It only could be about this one thing. And sometimes the way that Black artists are pushing form, are totally ignored and not engaged in the same way as they might say for other theatremakers. Can you talk about why you decided to have the vignette model? And I know that it’s inspired in part by The Colored Museum, but then also this inverse reverse of Barbecue that is when I read the play initially, I was so sort of surprised. I just didn’t see it coming, which was really interesting. So you can talk about form a little bit.

Robert: It’s interesting, because both of those plays came out of a sort of challenge presented to me by two White leaders of two different theatres. One, Bootycandy, I had over a decade, you know how painters will paint a little mini version of their painting before they do the big version of it or sketches or whatever? So I had written several sort of short plays over a decade about various things, because every idea does not blossom into a full two and a half hour with intermission play. Some is just an idea, and some should stay that idea and not be pulled into two and a half hours.

So they were just short plays. Right? And then, at one point I did an evening of my short plays and it was called Bootycandy. It was just an evening of putting together a bunch of my plays and I called it Bootycandy. And then Howard Shalwitz from Woolly Mammoth called and he said, “Hey, I read your series of short plays and I think there’s something in there. I think there’s a full-length play.” And I’m like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And he said, “Well, I think that there may be a narrative in there.” These were the various different subjects or whatever. And I’m like, “Really?” And he’s like, “Yeah.” So he said, “So look, I’m going to hold a slot at the end of our next season for you if you want to try and find a narrative inside these various plays.” And no one had ever asked me that. No one ever said that to me, given me a slot before a play was there.

Jordan: Yeah, wow.

Robert: So I was like, oh, that’s interesting. So basically I started reading the plays and I got to the fifth play, and I was like, “Okay, this is interesting.” And then I started reading the rest and, well, I can’t see it. And so, I took the last five plays and sort of threw them out, because most of the plays had characters of A, B, C, D, him, whatever, whatever. So I sort of began to give a name to characters and I felt this narrative of this character named Sutter. And I realized that there was a lot of me in the plays, of course, because they were like journals, basically. At certain points in my life, I wrote about this, whatever. And then, at the end of changing the names, I had five plays that was a narrative. And I was like, okay, so now what do I do? And then I realized, oh, this was written by five different playwrights at five different stages of their life, basically.

And all of those playwrights live inside me. And so, then I said, okay, then we’re going to have a playwriting conference. So in the middle of the play, we have a playwriting conference and we acknowledge that these were written by five different playwrights. And that’s when Bootycandy became a play for me. And then, I knew where to go afterwards. So that was a challenge.

For Barbecue, I had been doing some work with the Steppenwolf Theatre Company and Martha Levy, who ran Steppenwolf before she passed, commissioned me. And Steppenwolf was notorious for having a bunch of White folks in their theatre company and, I think, one or two Black people. And so, she wanted me to write a play for the theatre company. And I was like, “Oh.” And they had sort of starry people in it. And I was like, “Oh, that’s interesting.” So I said, well, I had been obsessed with something that I like to call “watching White people do shit.”

And so, there was a number of reality shows where watch the White man go around the world and eat. And the whole show was this White man going around the world and eating. I’m like, well, Black folks eat. Where’s our TV show about watching Black people go around the world, eating? Watch the White man build a house, watch White men refurbish a car, watch White men do drugs and get an intervention. And I was like, well, where are the Black? Watch the White girl have a baby at sixteen. I’m like, Black people having babies at sixteen. Why are y’all getting TV shows? So there was something about that, that we are comfortable watching White people live the complexity of human lives and we’re more comfortable watching Black people just be Black and suffer. And so I was like, well, what if they shared the narrative?

And so, what if you went back and forth with this one narrative? Could two races share a narrative? And what would the audience think when you saw a Black woman with a red car, as opposed to when you saw a White woman with a red car. Or a Black drug addict, or a White drug addict? And so Intervention was, I loved Intervention, because those people, they would have White people do full drugs in front of the camera and then their entire family would show up and intervene on them. And then they would go running outside and everybody would start chasing them. And then they would go be put into an intervention, into rehab. And usually they would leave. And I was like, Black people own drugs. Where’s all the Black people? I thought that Black people were the people that were supposed to be on drugs, where’s their Intervention show?

And once or twice people have Black people on the show. So that was exciting to me. So that’s where Barbecue came out of. I was writing something for Steppenwolf, and eventually Martha Levy said to me, “I just don’t know how to sell that to my audience.” I think that she thought I was making fun of the people at Steppenwolf, but what I was doing is I was sort of going, why is it that we accept certain behavior from White people and we think that’s valid, but certain behavior from Black people are not in need to be shared. We don’t see Black people refurbishing houses. We don’t need to see Black people going around the world and eating food. And so, that’s where those two plays came from, actually, that was a long-winded answer, but that’s the answer.

Jordan: No, no, that was a great insight. And it’s so funny, because I always say my favorite subgenre of television show is White people being terrible to each other. So, Succession.

Leticia: Gossip Girl.

Robert: Right.

Jordan: Gossip Girl. Just White people being absolutely horrendous to each other is a genre of TV that I love.

Robert: Love it.

Jordan: And also that was part of the draw also to something like Barbecue, because it also kind of challenges, like you said, it does all these things around universality and also just the humanity of those characters is still, that’s what makes it absurd and funny.

I’m just like, how dare you come into a space in which I’ve created a story and expect me to make you comfortable when you could have read or seen where you’re going? You’re going into a building with the word “slave” on the side of it, and you walk into this building and go, “Well, I’m uncomfortable.”

Robert: Yeah. And the good thing about Barbecue is that when people do Barbecue, I always get this message that the White people think that they’re the normal people and that the Black people are people out of control. And I’m like, no, the White people, you are a memoir from a crackhead, that’s what you are. You are literally a memoir from a crackhead. You are not normal. And neither are the Black people, because they’re the adaptation of a memoir from a crackhead. But you are, you’re not... What do they call them? You do the test and the control. You’re not the control in this test. You are just as batshit crazy as the other people. I don’t like it when we begin to believe that, oh, I’m only picking on this person, or this person is the only person that is being examined. All of you guys can get it. Everybody is welcome, and nobody is safe. You are all welcome coming here, and you will not be safe, because nobody making me safe.

I said, I make you safe. I wake up every morning and feel unsafe, and yet you want me to create theatre for you and which you can come in and be comfortable listening to stories about slavery. Why do you want to be comfortable here? Or a story about assault? It’s not comfortable. I’m not going to make it comfortable, because nobody’s making it comfortable for me. But I think that the theatre, because we charge four thousand dollars to come see a show, then I’m sitting here and I want to entertained, and I want to be comfortable, but I also want to deal with tough subjects. That’s the dilemma, especially when it comes to work by people of color.

Leticia: Right. And I will say, I think I read an interview, I think where you called it the theatre of choke?

Robert: Yes, yes.

Leticia: Which I was like, that is great. And I love that we are meant to feel unsettled when we see one of your shows. I think that’s so important, because there is this way that theatre can sort of lull us to sleep. I think there’s a lot more theatre that’s sort of like, well, we can push it, but we can’t push it too much where the audience gets uncomfortable, because then they’re not going to come back. And I used to work at a theatre back in the day, doing box office, and let me tell you, those subscribers wanted to be comfortable. And if they felt like they weren’t, they’d be like, “I take my money from here.” And what would the theatre often do? The theatre would be like, “Okay, we’re going to make you more comfortable.” So I love that sort of your theatre is in your face. You’re not going to be comfortable here, you know the expectations and we’re going to push you, which I feel like good theatre should do.

Robert: Yes. Well, I’ll just go back to ain’t nobody making me comfortable. You know what I mean? So why am I going to sit here and try and make three hundred random people I’ve never met comfortable with slavery, with homosexuality, with prison?

Jordan: And slavery, yep.

Robert: It’s like going to a roller coaster and say, please don’t go around the curve. Just let me sit on this roller coaster. And so that’s why I began to believe that maybe I’m the trigger. Everybody’s like, “Oh, trigger warning, trigger warning.” Maybe I’m the trigger warning. It should just say Robert O’Hara, trigger warning. I’m the trigger. My entire job.

Jordan: Is that your next play? Maybe.

Robert: But in the theatre, artists are, that’s what we do. We embed triggers into narratives. We want you to laugh, cry, be sad, be angry, be active. We want you to do so. We are embedding these triggers, and it’s become a dirty word, but that’s my entire job in a narrative, is to figure out how to make you feel something, how to trigger you. And so, I’m just like, how dare you come into a space in which I’ve created a story and expect me to make you comfortable when you could have read or seen where you’re going. You’re going into a building with the word “slave” on the side of it, and you walk into this building and go, “Well, I’m uncomfortable.” Well, yes, thank you. That’s what we hope you would be, because I’m uncomfortable as well. So welcome to my life.

Jordan: Oh my goodness. I hope that I can communicate that exactly to my students and say this, right? Is that there’s so much about our, maybe that was the dramaturgical desire in the first place, is that we are supposed to spark, like you said, incite something inside of you. And I think just switching gears a little bit too, is also the work that you direct feels very in line with works that are, like you said, this theatre of choke, right? Or saying something incisive about the Black experience either within a community or in relationship to other communities.

So you’ve directed Slave Play, you’ve directed BLKS, you’ve directed... And one of my personal favorites that I’m actually writing about and have written about, Bella: An American Tall Tale by Kirsten Childs, and those plays are so irreverent, they’re so incisive and are also not easy. They’re not easy pills to swallow. And I’m curious about how you bring that same energy that you do in creating and writing your own work, but also in your work as a director, how you work with these different texts and collaborate with these playwrights and bring that also that same energy on stage in a different kind of way.

Robert: Well, you’ve mentioned work by three very rather iconic individuals, Kirsten Childs, Jeremy O. Harris, and Aziza Barnes, rest their soul. I think I’m always excited to elevate an interesting voice and an interesting mind. It’s so difficult to sort of walk into a room with a bunch of strangers and go, “Hey, look at me. I’m going to be guiding you through this narrative,” or whatever. And it’s not exciting of a journey. And so, I look for stories and I look for writers who excite me as an artist. When you’re young, you’re sort of like, okay, I need to make a living. So whatever you offer me, I’m probably going to take and do. It changes for me, because I’ve done enough shows like such and such that I am looking now for something that’s a little bit different. And it’s not that a lot of people go, I like to do provocative work. I like to do.

I’m like, my entire existence is a provocation to somebody. Waking up and standing upright and breathing as a Black queer man in the world is a provocation to somebody. So I’m not going out going, how can I provoke people? Let me wake up. Let me see how I can provoke these White folks. No, me breathing is a provocation for them. So all I have to do is live my life and go by what I find interesting. And then that will be translated, I’m sure, by somebody going, “Oh, he likes to poke this and everything.” But I’m like, no, I’m just talking about the things that I interact with. And I think that right now I’m doing Hamlet and there’s all this talk around, and I’ve adapted it and what have you, and I’ve added my own story to parts of whatever.

And people were like, “Oh, you’re doing this new stuff.” And I’m like, “No, I’ve seen directors all over the world take Hamlet, throw it up in the air, and step on it. And somehow I’m doing something different.” And every director, every time you direct something, you’re interpreting it, you’re adapting it for the stage. Otherwise, it’s just a piece of paper with some words on it. So it is an active adaptation, but sometimes when people of color do it, we’re singled out as for doing something different.

When Ivo gets up and puts Arthur Miller, dumps a bunch of blood on the stage and having people fight with video cameras, we present buckets of awards—that I do it, and oh my God, I’m fucking with the text and I’m provoking something. It’s just we allow White folks to use their imagination much more than we allow Black people. That’s why I rarely get called to do classical work. Because most people go, “Oh, you’re going to fuck with it.” But let a European over here with an accent come over here. They expect you to fuck with it, and they’ll put you up and make all this show about you. But me is like, “Oh, what are you doing with it?” As if I’m doing something other than just directing it under the sort of ideas that come to me based on the narrative. So I don’t even know what the question was, but that’s what my answer is.

Leticia: No, no, I think you answered it. We also had spoken to a now artistic director previously, and in a private conversation, they shared that of a Black director, they expect us to direct certain things and stay away from other work. And at any moment, if we spin it or try to do something that they would deem extra, then somehow we are not worthy of touching those sort of texts that are seen as sacred. And I see it all the time, right? You have Black directors that, “Well, there’s the Black show that you can always direct, but Eugene O’Neill, that’s just not for you.” As we’re training these Black directors to be able to sort of understand and engage with classical texts, but then we don’t give them the opportunity once they’re in the sort of theatre profession, to actually be able to do the work that apparently we train them for. It’s like such a contradiction.

Robert: Yeah. I’d be much more comfortable with having White women direct Black people’s work, than having Black people direct Black people’s work, because there’s this sort of inherent quality that somehow you are going to make it palpable for White audiences, right?

Leticia: Right.

Robert: And that’s not about ego, that’s just about no matter where you think you are in your career, White people will always remind you that you are not there. You know what I mean? That you are not who you think you are, but there’s this control that theatres have. And I noticed it several years ago, I mean almost a decade ago, where there was all these White women directing all these Black plays, and yet I was not being asked to direct White plays. You know what I mean? They could not afford me the same type of opportunities as my White colleagues, and that was just, but that’s where we are.

Leticia: Right. And there’s a reason why August Wilson was like, “I want Black directors to direct my work.” Right? There’s a necessity and still a necessity for playwrights to speak up in that way, because like you said, opportunity is not equal in the same way. And Jordan and I talk all the time about who’s directing what. Interesting. For me, I would argue it matters when there’s a Black director at the helm of a Black play, like the nuances, the rhythms matter. And that’s not saying Blackness is a monolith, but I feel like there’s more also care often taken with Black stories and the way that they’re put on stage.

Robert: And I think that think a director should be able to direct everything, just let those people have an opportunity. You know what I mean?

Leticia: Right, right, exactly.

Jordan: Yes.

Robert: I think that that’s my problem with it. And you’re right. I think women directing the play by a woman has a different relationship to the world. You know what I mean? But I don’t think that you can sit in our face and play. “The field is equal.” It is not equal. And I know it’s not equal. And we also see it’s not equal. And so, it’s exciting to me to have playwrights step up and go, “No, I want to see everybody. I want to see all of them. Let me see. Let me meet with all.” And I think that sometimes playwrights are a little bit reluctant, because they’re so excited to get the opportunity to have their work done.

But I’m a playwright, and that’s what I give to playwrights when you say what it is to work with these playwrights. I sort of want them... A lot of ways, I think New York Theatre Workshop wanted me to somehow sort of rein Jeremy in, and I was like, “Oh, I’m going to give him the springboard to fly up.” You know what I mean? I’m not going to try and make sure that his work fits in a certain way. I want him to be as expressive as his entire brain could go. And I want to test that, which is a different type of direction than let me make this understandable to these other people in this make you safe. There was all this conversation about how we’re going to make people safe. I’m like, the play is called Slave Play. It ain’t going to be safe. It ain’t going to be safe. So stop trying to make it safe.

People are talking about that plantation that burned down, and they’re like, “Oh, there’s about time that plantation burned down.” I’m like, “There’s ten thousand of plantations around here. They’re going to be burned down. We haven’t done nothing.” And so, we are trying to make these very hard and difficult and dangerous places into a place of safety, but what we’re actually trying to do is make White people comfortable with it. That’s what we’re trying to make them comfortable with these ideas. They don’t even want you to talk about stuff. They don’t want you to teach White kids about slavery anymore because they don’t want kids to feel uncomfortable.

Leticia: Uncomfortable.

Robert: We don’t have the luxury to not be uncomfortable as people of color, whereas women don’t have the luxury to not be uncomfortable and live through the night. So there’s just a lot of, and I think that theatre has taken that on to sort of want to make people comfortable, because they paid some money to see something, which I’m completely against. It’s a very interesting world, especially when it comes to this performative act of, like, we want to make sure everyone feels safe. We want to make sure everyone feels heard and whatever. And then you go and you see fifteen people on stage talking about nothing, and I’m just like...

Jordan: Not a damn thing.

Robert: No. And I’m like, I don’t feel safe or heard. You know what I mean? It’s so amazing that you will see, I mean, I saw this wonderful play last night, AFurlough’s Paradise by A. K. Payne.

Jordan: Yes. Oh my gosh, yes.

Robert: And it’s two Black women on stage, and it’s very theatrical, and the language is lovely, and the acting was tremendous and whatever. The direction was wonderful and whatever. And I just wonder how many productions that’s going to get, opposed to a fifteen person play of White people. Two Black women on stage will probably not get as many productions as the fifteen character play of White people. And that’s the part of the industry that I’m in. So you have to understand that that’s where you are. You can’t both participate and try and up in the entire industry. You know what I mean? At some point, you have to just be an artist and do your work. My job is not to produce theatre. I can’t be a producer of my work as well as the creator of my work. I don’t have that energy. Some people do.

I don’t. And so, I leave it to other people to figure out if they’re going to do my work or not. I have to just do the work that I do actually. And in order for me to do it, I have to recognize what state of the industry I’m in. And so, saying these things is not to be rude or mean against White people or whatever. It’s just to state facts. It’s all to be in the same industry. Because if we’re not, you’ll believe that somehow you’re less than a person, because you don’t have as many productions as the White person sitting next to you writing plays. It requires you to actually be honest about the state of the industry and how that dictates who gets seen and what work is done actually.

Leticia: Right. So we don’t want to keep you too long. So we have a few more questions we want to get to in our time together, but we want to talk about X: The Life and Time of Malcolm X that you did at the Met in 2023. And we did an episode on X.

Robert: Really?

Leticia: Yes. After we seen it with the theatrical release of it. I seen it in Canada. Jordan, did you see it in Rochester?

Jordan: Yep.

Leticia: Yes. And we were, I don’t remember how it came up. I think Jordan, you were like, “Do you know that this thing is happening?” And I was like, “What? It’s going to be released?” So we went to go see, and we’re like, “We’re going to talk about it on the podcast.” And just to give you some context, Jordan and I are neither an opera girl. One would say.

Jordan: No, we know nothing about opera. I think I’d seen one before this. I don’t think Leticia had seen any.

Leticia: No, because I didn’t think about opera and Black people. And then the legacy of opera is they did Black plays for a long time. So I just think I was just not seeking it out. But seeing X in your direction of this blew my mind. And I was like, I think we named the episode, “We’re in Our (Black) Opera Era,” because it was just so impactful. And you do some really interesting work in that, pulling from Afrofuturism when the sort of spaceship descends onto the stage, the sort of way that the ancestors are dressed. We were just so compelled by it.

Jordan: And they’re constantly on stage too. Yeah.

Robert: Yeah.

Leticia: Our minds were blown. Our minds were blown. Can you talk about the sort of transition into directing foreign opera, but also some of those strands you were pulling on for this particular production?

Robert: Well, you saw probably the largest incarnation of that story, because it began with, it was a sort of co-pro production, began in Detroit, and then I think we went to Omaha. And so Detroit had about thirty people. Omaha had about—

Jordan: Oh, wow.

Robert: And we came to the Met, and somehow my assistant said, “Did you know that they added a hundred people to the chorus,” or something like that? And I’m like, “What?” And so, I thought I was directing one opera, and the Met was like, “Oh no, this is the Met, honey, you going to have step it up.” And so, opera is, it is so unique. And so, it was exciting to step into that space.

But just to keep it short and cute, Dede Ayite, the costume designer, and at one point I said, “What am I going to do with these hundred Black people in this narrative?” And we had already had the spaceship. That was already there, whatever. And I’m like, well, I think that they’re the ancestors and the descendants. They’re both. And so, the spaceship came from a very early conversation that I actually don’t believe that this theatre either deserves or has the ability to hold the story of Malcolm X. Right?

And that you somehow have to earn the right, and this is what I said at the Met, and I said at every incarnation, was like, “You have to earn the right to be telling this story in this space. And so, your theatre is too small to hold Malcolm X’s story. So I think we’re going to break through your theatre with a spaceship.” So that’s why there’s crumbling walls around, because the spaceship landed in here, and we’re going to tell the story from the future. And so we’re going to amalgamate all the stuff that you know, and we’re going to tell this story from the future, because everyone benefits from the story of Malcolm X. And it’s not an easy story. It’s a messy story. He was a messy, messy, messy man, right? In every state there’s a boulevard of Malcolm X. Right?

And so, I wanted to both acknowledge the fact that opera is an incredibly White space and acknowledge the fact that this story is too big to be held inside of space. And so, I really wanted the spaceship to sort of break the proscenium and be half hovering over the audience was like, “No, Robert, it’s going to cost too much money.” So that’s where the descendants and where the Afrofuturism came from, because I wanted us to be telling it, not just from, most times when you see Malcolm X stories as in black and white news reels or print. So if you’re watching Malcolm X, the movie or whatever, it’s set in its period. And it feels like an old story. What I wanted is to bring the story into not just now, but beyond now, and make it a story bigger than we can actually take in. So that’s where all that stuff came from actually.

Jordan: Oh my God. Like we said, we were captivated by it. So our final thing we usually do here at Daughters of Lorraine, because we want people to continue to engage, we want the conversation to keep going, is we provide recommendations for things that people should consult after listening to. So we to ask if you had anything you wanted to lift up or anything you wanted to recommend for our listeners to continue?

Robert: You mean reading material or films, or?

Leticia: It can be film, reading, anything.

Jordan: Film, music.

Leticia: Theatre, whatever.

Jordan: Anything. Yeah.

Robert: I just think that, I mean, I don’t think that people understand. Lorraine Hansberry was a genius, a genius. There is no flaw in A Raisin in the Sun, none. You cannot find it.

Leticia: Speak on it.

Robert: You cannot find it, and you can’t kill it. Right? And there is something about that play, and I’ve directed it I think three times now. It is as big as Hamlet, really. The effort that it takes to do that play is so profoundly internally, devastatingly beautiful. And that she has three women on the stage speaking in their living room for forty to thirty minutes. Walter Lee starts not one scene in that play. Walter Lee walks into every scene he is in this play. This is a story about three women. And the first thing we ask about is Walter Lee. Is a queer woman who’s written a story about three women, and where at the time period, find me another play written in that time period with three women, not even women of color, but three women speaking without a man in sight for a half an hour.

So it is profoundly, incredibly... And also you have this amazing story of a woman who says, “I’m not bringing a child into this world. I’m not bringing a child into this world, and we got to get out.” And she’s saying it to another woman. And the complications of these three generations of women, it’s profound. It is one of a kind, it is a work of sheer genius. So I would just suggest that people read that again, actually, and read it again after that.

Jordan: I might, wait, let me go read it again. Actually with that new context. Yeah.

Robert: Yeah, because he doesn’t start one scene. He’s walking in on every scene.

Leticia: Wow. I’ve never realized that. You just blew my mind. And ARaisin in the Sun is my favorite play.

Robert: Yeah, it’s true. This is stuff that you learn when you’re directing it. He doesn’t start in one. It is not his play. He’s the person in the corner sitting somewhere twirling around, while they are living their lives, he’s trying to find a liquor store. You know what I mean? And we always sort of press the button on who’s playing Walter Lee? Let’s centralize Walter Lee. Walter Lee wouldn’t be able to exist without these three women. Right?

Leticia: Period.

Robert: There wouldn’t be a play. Now, there would be a play without Walter Lee, and it’d be a play of survival of these three women in space, but there would not be anything that Walter Lee could do without having someone to fight against. And he fights against all these three women. Right? So that’s the muscle of the play. So that’s where I leave you.

Leticia: Yes. Thank you so much for that. Thank you for joining us on Daughters of Lorraine. It was a pleasure to speak with you and so many gems that I will be taking with me. Thank you again.

Robert: Thank you. It was wonderful to speak to you. See you soon.

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

Jordan: And Jordan Ealey. Thank you so much for tuning in to this season of Daughters of Lorraine. We are so happy to have you join us, and we are so incredibly grateful for all the support that we’ve received over the years. We’re going to be taking a hiatus as we prepare for our next season. But in the meantime, if you’re still looking to connect with us, please follow us on Instagram at @DOLorrainePod, P-O-D. You can also email us at [email protected] for further contact.

Leticia: Our theme music is composed by Inza Bamba, 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.

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