Tales of Iron and Water

I am often asked why August Wilson? Why did I decide to direct the American Century Cycle? I am producing the America's greatest playwright's seminal work in its entirety. I will be the first director to do so in chronological order of the 100 hundred years covered in what is often referred to as the Century Cycle. The answer to the why of it for me is both mystical and practical. Wilson's work is a part of the progression of my artistic arc and because when the student is ready the teacher appears be the teacher living or dead.

Having intentionally placed an arts practice in a gentrifying community with a long history of being informed by art; as an artist who is also an activist I addressed the cyclical issues plaguing that community by the production and creation of art. I eventually moved intentionally into West Oakland after having lived there for periods in the past and after my arts practice found a place to live in community.

After adapting Shakespeare to make him relevant in a dissolving urban community and adapting James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry to make them matter in the current moment in Oakland; I saw a play set in the early 1900's in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania that helped me give voice to why I had come to West Oakland on purpose with  the purpose of holding an artistic dialog that I hoped might inform change making. This work required no adaptation to make it relevant. No change in site, not need to update it by including current issues, the work resonated across the country and the century.

The play was Gem of the Ocean by August Wilson. The angel who bought the ticket also  built the 100 seat outdoor theater in which my theater company enjoyed residence. He had an affinity for Shakespeare and Wilson. It would be years before I would make the personal connection. It was not a leap Wilson is America's Shakespeare. His work, like Shakespeare's, will continue to gain momentum and patronage as long as it is performed which I hope is a good long time. As Shakespeare painted a picture of the  European times in which he lived Wilson has painted a vivid portrait of the 20th Century in North America.

His chronicle of the 20th Century captures and synthesizes the North American African experience in America from emancipation through the current national wave of gentrification of urban centers.  All the plays save Ma Rainey's Black Bottom are set in Wilson's  home town community the Hill District in Pittsburgh, PA. The sole exception hints at something I knew when I chose West Oakland.  All urban spaces have similar challenges and the narratives of these places is carried in the lives of ordinary people struggling to make home in the shadow of institutional and embodied racism, economic inequity,  fear of personal safety under the spell of  the American Dream in hot pursuit of "freedom and dignity".  West Oakland is emblematic of all North American "red-lined communities" as is Wilson's Hill District.

They are distinct geographical places but if communities are viewed as more than land mass, if they are viewed as the collection of people who enliven the notion of  community, then the Hill District  and Oakland are very much the same place. When a people have a tenuous relationship with land ownership and are forced by circumstance to re-imagine what constitutes communal connection,  the concept of Diaspora makes the thought that a community is a collection of people  hold  greater resonance than the thought that a community is contained in a mere land mass. The concept of Diaspora is a necessary lens for a people that have had no resting place since the days of cotton and ocean voyages in the holds of ships.

These North American land masses and others with similar history are the sites North American Africans came to rest in after  fleeing oppression and in desperate search for opportunity. They are the geographical spaces where the American Dream failed us and we built in the face of that failure. They were home and places of containment in the same breath,  places where wounds inflicted by the public sphere wrapped in the authority of  law  festered. The resultant trauma does not become a  part of the permaculture it is transient, it is carried in the Diaspora, in racial memory predating birth, in communal consciousness, in the people.

America is two places. Its twoness is acknowledged most directly inside the nation in the nation. There is America writ large the home of the brave, with freedom, and justice for all. And there is the America of sundown towns, the America that dropped bombs on Black Wall Street in Oklahoma, the same America that burned and leveled the black section of Roseville Florida. These two geographical points stand out in a collection of black communities in North America that were destroyed by violent racist. The stories of some of those communities have died with the former residents. I am unsure how to synthesize these facts with the myth of America. I am most familiar with the nation that exist inside the nation the one that moves at the pleasure of America writ large in its presence and removed from that presence out of necessity keeps its own rhythm and itself. My America is the one that exist behind the veil. It is this America that is the topic of Wilson's American Century Cycle.

In Wilson's most important work he has digested the twentieth century and given it back to us in a way that makes the current moment very clear. He wants us to overstand how it is we are in these geographical places and how we might imagine embodying the truth of being"born free with dignity and everything." Place, family, dignity, love, trust, honor and pragmatic hope are recurrent themes in Wilson's work. In his attention to these themes we are also lead to explore their antithesis in North American reality. Wilson's work is aimed at the diaphanous veil that divides the two Americas bringing them into dialog though the eyes of those who have become proficient in moving though the world Janus faced. In my opinion Wilson is the most important American playwright of the 20th century.  His work, The American Century Cycle is the most expansive chronicle of American life in the history of American theater. His tale of America told from a view off center is the contextualization of my American song. It is the view from behind the veil. Wilson's America is the nation in the nation.  His view from off center affords a different vantage than the vantage afforded from the center of the public sphere. Wilson and I start from the same place. I have been walking in his shadow all along trying to understand and give voice to what he clearly overstands. My desire to help us understand how our now is at once a bitter travesty and a reason for hope and celebration is met in Wilson's epic voyage through  the 20th  century.

The Importance of August Wilson in American Theater

DuBois speaks of the duality of Negritude in North America and those of us who are conscious behind the veil know that our twoness has followed us through the twentieth century into the new millennium. We are caught in a facade within a facade even in this dubiously titled post-race era, in possession of a President with African blood, and a North American African wife. Even his historic presidency is fraught with duality; the highest office in the land has never been the recipient of such odious disrespect, yet those the most disrespectful also claim to be the most American. It seems race is still a major issue in this "post-race" era. It seems we can't language our race problem away. It remains onstage be it center or hovering in the wings it is a part of the story. Enter Wilson.

With a sweeping mastery of language he tells us a story laced with music, history, and folk wisdom as we travel though the history of America from the point of view of housekeepers, brick layers, musicians, soul washers, cooks, and impaired prophets. Wilson dances us through a century a decade at a time sampling the music, the dialect, the issues d'jour and the unending longing for honey in the land of milk and honey. Wilson shows us poverty along side wealth, hunger in souls to rival hunger in belly, the wealth in a song of self and other essential elements of our glorious humanity. He dresses our struggle in its Sunday best and sends it out to preach the gospel of us overcoming, failing, rallying, and soaring in the midst of obstacles and snares. Race travels better here than in our strained lived reality. But make no mistake it is center stage as it has been throughout the North American African experience in North America.

It begins with Aunt Ester, (Gem of the Ocean), washing weary souls who are in search of their songs. Most don't even know they are looking. She told us how to be  in a land where your song can get shook loose, she warns us everything ain't what it seem. We better understand the importance of our song as we search for the shiny man to find him in Herald Loomis, (Joe Turner's Come and Gone), once he is reunited with his song. Herald sends us the powerful message that we will have to learn to bleed for ourselves; we have to find wholeness. Ma Rainey lets women gain a limited access to the conversation that mostly turns around the trials of men yet can any tale of men be told without women, and remember Ester as mother to all. Ma Rainey allows us to consider the old and the new and how they cohabit and feed it other. The present is grown from the past. The future springs from the present. Sometimes the future fights with the past to be born. What becomes clearest is you must remember where you been to get to where you are going. It is important to remember. Wilson is big on memory. Boy Willie, (The Piano Lesson), weights the value of memory/legacy against the value of being able to invest in the present. His struggle illuminates our struggle to progress and to be rooted in memory/legacy. What does progress cost? Is it worth your song? Can you live in the world without your song. In Wilson's cosmology it is unlikely. Your song and your soul weigh the same neither should be for sale. Progress without these elemental pieces of self yield characters like Caesar, (Gem of the Ocean), who lives in a narrow space beneath the contempt white people have for him and the contempt he has for those that look like him. Levee, (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom), loses his mind when he discovers his song has been stolen and all he has is an empty promise. Floyd SchoolBoy Barton, (Seven Guitars), wants to barter his song for some comfort in his life. He does not want to live in a cold world. When all the ways seem blocked he makes his self a way out of no way. He takes a chance.  Although it works out to be his last chance we are encouraged to believe God was pleased by his effort. Floyd, like Herald Loomis, delivers himself.

Sankofa: Go Back to Go Forward

Wilson like Shakespeare is a teacher, a poet, a preacher, and a sooth-sayer. He is the master magician who bends time and memory to his service and invites us to understand the significance and the meaning of the trick. In his skillful movement decade after decade he shows us how time has stood still in the Nation in the Nation only the clothes and music have changed.

Fences is the fifth work in the ten-play cycle, as a work it serves to take us from the recent past into a more recognizable moment within the 100 year cycle. This particular work for me seats the cyclical issues and the baggage explored in each installment firmly in the wheelhouse of my life time. It is in Fences where we see the historical burden of twoness jump into modernity fully dressed dragging its historical context behind it. We come to the place where our separateness is no longer the letter of the law but racism continues as a primary factor of lived reality in the North America we live in, the America your parents and grandparents lived in. We begin to comprehend the narrowness of the gate for black men who seem only able to succeed in entertainment or sports. Wilson points out the pitfalls in music outside of your control in Ma Rainey. In Fences he turns us to the history of sports in this country. Allowing us to view today with a contextualized sense of how our relationship to these industries is made.

In Fences,  Troy Maxton has decided what paths are open and what paths are closed in life, and in his bitter disappointment he guards the boundaries of his son's dreams seeking to keep him safe from the cost of dreams that can't come true in a racist America. The tension between what has happened and what might happen  in an America that seems new to each unconnected generation is underlined. Father and son stand in place of past and future beating each other to make sense of the present. If Wilson's work is memory work he wants to help us understand the cost of reinventing the wheel with each generation. In Fences the idea of Aunt Ester who is the embodiment of African wisdom and our compass though this journey here, is carried in the character of Gabriel who is considered brain damaged (outside prevailing logic). He intercedes with St. Peter to open the gates of heaven for Troy, a man who tried the best he knew how to live and love with dignity and honor, but was found wanting by life. It is the artist son Lyons who remembers when Troy had a song and how tall that song made him. We are left to understand that the silencing of that song and the settling for living without it poisoned Troys spirit leaving him to wrestle with the certainty of death and never having fully lived. Viewing the cycle chronologically as whole cloth one could offer that Fences sets the last brick in the foundation of the cycle creating space for further conversation. Fences is also the production that marked the end of my producing work in West Oakland. At this juncture all funding for this work went away. In the middle of this play which marks the middle of the cycle I had to decide whether to continue.

2013 was a most challenging year. It was the year I discovered and began to consider forced migration in my life. The concepts of honor, duty, family, death,  place and home, were center for me personally.  And in fact where Wilson's work was about to lead me was in keeping with the events of where  I was in time and geographically. I knew West Oakland was gentrifying when I moved my practice here. The process was well under way at that time. It would occur to me later that my exodus from South Berkeley was also a forced migration related to gentrification. The latter half of the Century Cycle concerns has issues related to gentrification as an additional motif. At this point in my journey thorough the production of the cycle my black neighborhood has become a hipster destination. Traditional residents are fleeing in droves as a result of years of disinvestment, crime and horror stories exaggerating the crimes, because black boys are not just being incarcerated they are being murdered by police and each other.

The schools are underfunded and graduate fewer seniors each year. The law is oppressive and there have not been jobs for years and even in the face of gentrification there are still no jobs for those who live here beneath the federal poverty line. I clearly understand that our theater company is caught in this rip-tide I want to keep my practice here but we can't find the traction to stay where we want to be. No appeals to the city, newly enfranchised artsy folk, or the general public seem to be able to keep us in West Oakland.  I independently produced both Fences and the next work in the cycle Two Trains Running while trying to find a place for the oldest North American Theater troupe in Oakland to continue to produce theater. The August Wilson Center in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania is fighting to stay out of receivership and it could just be in my head, my heighten sense of awareness or a fact, that more Wilson is being produced since I committed to the production of the entire cycle in order. As a displaced artist in preparation for Jitney at a new venue in what's now called Uptown (used to be plain old downtown) Wilson continues to mentor me.

Master Wilson and the Willing Pupil

As  the community I tenuously continue to live in after my arts practice has moved uptown transforms I have begun to understand things I have never considered. Things like complex trauma, the lack of resting place for the marginalized, the significance and importance of your song, and above all the importance of memory in a prolonged struggle for equity. Without memory there is no recovery from complex trauma; if you can not remember being well how can you imagine it going forward. If you do not remember being wounded you may be wounded again.  Wilson connects song, memory, melting into the public sphere (if assimilation is even possible) in tension with being complete as is, as touch stones in the journey to reclaiming being "born free with dignity and everything."

Place and the unpacking of what belonging in America means or can mean inside the nation in the nation is big in the second half of the cycle. The work grapples with stratification within the race building on the variety of  past characters which include Caesar (Gem of the Ocean) who becomes a white man's nigger out of the need to survive. The self loathing he experiences as a result of his choice make him kill the savior/spirit of struggle Solly Two Kings who must be reborn in the spirit of Citizen the young wanderer who comes to Aunt Ester the soul washer to find purpose. Two Trains Running hits a new note with Memphis who finds it hard to remember after dropping the ball. It is Aunt Ester born 1619 who tells Memphis in 1969 that to go forward he must do what he has not done. He has to get right with his self. Young Sterling in Two Trains, represents the future, standing alone in the midst of examples of older men who did not run into the end zone, like Young Citizen in Gem he picks up the torch to carry us stumbling forward. In Two Trains the Hill District is being redeveloped in a way that resembles the redevelopment of West Oakland that cleared the space for BART and the Post Office. Thousands of people displaced for progress that took years to come  turning whole sections of a once vibrant community into a shadow of its former self. In Jitney a decade later the process continues as do Wilson's motifs. The old and the young, past and future, grappling to make sense of the current moment. We enter discussions of the passing of torches and the burden we pass to youth as we hobble them with staying inside the lines of what we conceive of as safety zones when in reality no progress can be made if we are only willing to do the things that we have already done. We are drawn to continue to consider how the past can inform the future without being perceived as standing in its way.

Having read the cycle I know whats to come including the death of Aunt Ester. I will stop with the play by play here and deal with the themes and metaphors in play in King Hedley and Radio Golf in the year I produce them and complete my walk with Wilson as my teacher. In truth there are things I can't know about those works until I produce them. I will not know how they correspond with lived reality until I live the process of producing the work. But my eyes and spirit are open I am listening.

By that time maybe I will understand what it means when Wilson decides it time for Ester to finally join the ancestors. I will know if it means she has cleared the path for the men darker than blue that Wilson so concerns his self with to become the redeemers or something less hopeful. As I take stock of the current moment which includes the Ferguson Uprising I know of a certainty the future of young black men is inextricably tied to the future of this country as is the continued forced migration of marginalized people.  I also know my apprenticeship with Wilson is sharpening my overstanding of where we are and helping me to conceive of what is necessary for us to continue to hope, to thrive, to continue forward motion in a battle to be free with dignity.

August Wilson is the American playwright who has harnessed the the twentieth century in a basket for out appreciation. He has divided it by decades so that we may ingest the elephant. It is rich and unusual fare offering a view of America not seen elsewhere on the American stage. It offers a frank view from off center showcasing the driving dream myth of America along side its grounded reality for people who hoed, planted, tended but have yet to harvest the fruit of the dream we have so religiously chased. Wilson offers us a glimpse at a whole served in units each whole unto them selves. If you have not discovered Wilson you have not yet understood what the American theater can offer or how rich and textured the unstoried life of America beyond the pale is and has ever been.

This article is an expansion of the article, The Importance of August Wilson in American Theater, originally published in 2013 on www.anzinga.com

Season 14 for the Lower Bottom Playaz starts with Two Trains Running by August Wilson. Wilson is one of America's finest playwrights, his work The American Century Cycle is his signature writ large on the American theaterscape. His unduplicated accomplishment is being paid homage by The Lower Bottom Playaz Inc., the premiere North American Theater Troupe, in Oakland CA . The Playaz are dedicated to the fully staged production of the entire Cycle in chronological order. No troupe on the planet has ever presented the entire Cycle in order of the decades represented. The Playaz are striving to be the first.

They crossed the half way mark in their 13th season with the production of FENCES. The Playaz production of FENCES played to capacity crowds at the African American Museum and Library at Oakland CA. It closed Thanksgiving weekend to a standing room only crowd.

Next up is the seventh play in the series; Two Trains Running is slated to open in late August.The troupe is the oldest North American Theater Troupe in Oakland and has produced works that range from classical Shakespeare with North American African cast, site specific adaptations of Shakespeare, (Ebony & Johnny: A Star Crossed HoodTale, & Mack, A Gangsta Tale), classical Black Theater (Hansberry, Baldwin),  to the works of  Marvin X Jackmon and Opal Palmer Adisa. Their love affair with Americas Shakespeare August Wilson began half a decade ago and the production of his work has become their driving force.

The journey is more organic than one might imagine and its a testament to doing the work. The troupes willingness to make Shakespeare relevant to modern audiences and to employ  the bard to make a space for their own work in marginalized communities proved to be an auspicious and learning filled beginning. The works of Wilson mark the application of the learning gained on the journey, the maturation in the troupe, and a sharpening of its direction in tune with the director's focus on the perpetuation of the continuum of work that speaks from and to the North American African experience in North America.

If asked the Director will tell you the story of how the willingness to do Shakespeare got the troupe a 100 hundred seat theater in West Oakland. The Sister Thea Bowman Memorial Theater was built for the troupe Director's practice in the Black Arts which is centered in  community engagement through the medium of theater in particular and performance in general. The outdoor theater was the troupe's home for over a decade. That relationship came to an abrupt end when the venue's board of directors fumbled on their commitment to produce the sixth play in the Cycle.

The troupe subsequently produced the work at The African American Museum and Library at Oakland CA to record breaking crowds. The now nomadic troupe continues their march through the Century Cycle with the seventh installment in Wilson's work.

Two Trains running brings us into the sixties in America, a tumultuous time in America, a time of social upheaval, and societal unrest in response to the repressive systemic containment of North American Africans across the country. Southern migrations as a result of overt racism brought droves of North American Africans to the North, East, Mid West and the West Coast of this country, in search of opportunity and the elusive dream of inclusion. Many discovered that racism was by no means confined to the Southern part of the United States. They encountered a world that perhaps moved faster than the bucolic countryside but found that it was equally as reluctant to offer up inclusion.  In response to being excluded from the mainstream they build communities in the space they were allowed to make a life as opposed to the many spaces they were systemically barred from by redlining, and other less than welcoming scenarios.

Two Trains Running is set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh PA, the year is 1969 and gentrification has come calling. The once thriving and self sufficient Hill District is being redeveloped. The historic buildings and the property owned by the self reliant community is being absorbed through the process of eminent domain. There are only a few businesses left in a formerly vibrant community and their demise is certain. The reality of the Hill District is being echoed across the country.

Our business is with the patrons of a small restaurant sandwiched in between a meat market and a funeral home. An apt placement for the character's of Two Trains Running to make a final stand. Please join us as we immerse ourselves in the everyday lives of these everyday people as they find ways to move forward in a world full of obstacles to their thriving.

Two Trains Running opens in Oakland CA in August.

www.lowerbottomplayz.com

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Lower Bottom Playaz, Inc, under the direction of Ayodele Nzinga, MFA, PhD present the 6th of the 10 play cycle on their march to be the first troupe ever to do all ten in chronological order. www.TalesofIronandWater.com

The Lower Bottom Playaz, the oldest North American African theater troupe in Oakland CA is presenting FENCES as a part of its commitment to August Wilson’s Century Cycle. 

FENCES is perhaps the most familiar of the 10-play cycle written by America’s Shakespeare, August Wilson. The play which puts The Lower Bottom Playaz over the half-way mark in their history making march through the Century Cycle in order of decades presented in this historically inspired theatrical Cycle (also known as The Pittsburgh Cycle), also literally crosses the bridge from the first half of the twentieth century to the second half, while in characteristic Wilson style offers us a lens to examine the current moment in the history of North America.

The themes in Wilson’s Fences while focused on the North American African narrative gives voice to universal issues, those of fathers and sons, husbands and wives, and the force of the outside world on our inner lives. Although the play is nuanced through the lens of the North American African the work has universal appeal that is as enduring as the details of the specifics of the North American African experience of Post World War II America.

Wilson gives us a picture of America 6 years before Martin’s I have a Dream speech, he offers us a portrait of America on the verge of the Civil Rights era, through the eyes of a people caught between the history and dreams of the past and the yearnings of a present generation straining to write its own page in history. We are given a space to consider the dreams of fathers and sons as we consider the dance of future optimism along side the wisdom of stories of lived realities.    Must the past stand in the way of the future, can the future ignore the past, what does responsibility to self and community look like in spaces of shifting lived realities. What does the path to success in American society look like for North American African men who have had investment in institutions such as the military, organized sports, or entertainment as the paths offered to enfranchisement in the American public sphere? Do these remain the avenues to 21st Century success? In reality none of these institutions or enterprises has allowed more than a few individuals to prosper while the great majority continue to struggle to find equity in the receding shadow of the American Dream. There are examples to be cited that instruct us that investment in these institutions has failed to provide entry into the public sphere and that unsuccessful attempts at assimilation by any means often leads to bitter disappointment in the face of systemic safeguards to successful assimilation into a system has demonstrated the intention by letter of law and repetitive deeds to thwart your thriving.

In FENCES as in the reality of life today in the 21st Century the world is on the precipice of radical change, it is a time of great invention and great inequity, and yet for many the only measurable markers of change are the music and fashion inspired by youth who want to find a way on to a front page of American history from a vantage point of a present day that we could not have conceived of a few decades ago.

The central character in FENCES, Troy Maxson, has been compared to Willie Loman from Death of a Sales Man. Here is another American everyman, responsible to the things and people who shape his life in spite of life’s ups and downs, he is the best man he knows how to be, he is dutiful to life and the debts he created by living, yet he longs for something bigger than the narrow confines allotted him for his song of himself.  His flaws find purchase in his human desire to be the hero in his own life if nowhere else.   Troy is everyman affected by the same things that affect all men – love, honor, beauty, betrayal, and duty.

 A great beauty in Wilson’s work besides his ability to consider the past in a way that consistently illuminates the persistent issues of the present moment, are the ways the simple stories of ordinary people are amplified to lend the way to the creation of space for the consideration of humanness in a universal manner. His work, situated largely in the Hill District of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania holds great significance for urban audiences nation wide as his chronicles of the Hill District intersects with stories of industrialization, modernity, migration, identity formation/reformation and gentrification across 20th “Century America.

West Oakland CA shares some of the circumstances that shaped the creation, lived reality, and eventual gentrification of Wilson’s Hill District. His work offers a wide-angle look at the history inside the history of North America from the lens of the invisible. Troy is a garbage man who settled for what was offered him and attempted to build a life by burying his dreams of something bigger. His struggle to do his duty to his family and especially to his sons is the struggle of the past to clear a path for the future. The imperative to survive along with instructive history has lead us to the dilemma of how one imparts the skills necessary to survive to the next generation when one suffers from systemic containment. That is Troy’s dilemma in FENCES and the problem of the 21st Century inner city parent where we teach the tone test to young black men in order to help them survive inevitable interactions with the police.  We struggle to define what manhood means in a system that has made access to the things we define masculinity by problematized by unequal access to suitable education, disproportionate involvement in the carceral system, and the lack of employment opportunities in the ghettos created by the American way of life. In these respects FENCES and indeed the entire Century Cycle hold a topical relevance for West Oakland CA and other spaces that hosted North American African migrations and experienced the process of gentrification of those spaces.

Related articles

• August Wilson American Century Cycle kicks off Monday, August 26 (anzinga.wordpress.com)
• Fences (anzinga.wordpress.com)
• August Wilson: Steel City Playwright (theculturetrip.wordpress.com)
• Red ink hinders events at financially struggling August Wilson Center (triblive.com)
• Playwright August Wilson In 'Another League' (npr.org)
• Notable African American Figures in Chicago's History (local.answers.com)
• Theatre Thursdays: August Wilson and Colorblind Casting (ladygeekgirl.wordpress.com)
• Phylicia Rashad and More Set for Live Video Webcasts of August Wilson Plays, Beg. 8/26 (broadwayworld.com)
• Keep The Dialogue Going (wnyc.org)
• http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2013/06/22/seven-guitars-…at-the-mundane/ ‎
• Permalink: http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2012/09/29/true-north-me-wilson
• http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2012/09/23/in-search-of-a-song/
• http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2010/12/11/diary-of-a-mad…-which-i-stand/ ‎
• www.lowerbottomplayaz.com
• www.TalesofIronandWater.com

The Cast and Crew of The Lower Bottom Playaz are unlikely magicians. Some have day jobs, some are students, others are teachers and entrepreneurs; we are all entertainers. Some of us are new to the game, others were hooked long ago, some of us are just showing off at this point. Together we are magic.

I have written before about the magic of theater where in all works out in the end. Some how, all things come together and we rise to the occasion. It becomes a pattern. Work. Work. Panic. Work. Panic.WORK. PANIC. PANIC. Work. Magic!! Magic like theater is a craft. All crafts have many dimensions. The theater  Gods are generous; you are allowed to take as much of the magic as you can carry.

When you view theater you are encouraged to slip into the story. You willing suspend belief along with paying the price of admission. You come to hear the story. You walk into the dark and into another world. Good theater transports you; it can be cathartic. We often turn to art for that very effect. In theaters we are free to cry our own tears for someone ele's grief. In the dark we are free to feel, to be wounded by art, to be moved to understanding. Theater holds all that for audience members and actors alike.

We do urban theater. We have for over a decade. Sometimes actors who start productions do not finish. Life happens and it is so much larger than the fictions we breathe air into. People get sick, their loved ones have issues, they have domestic problems, they lack the funds to be present, they have legal problems, and some times they are afraid of their own success.  So they opt out because they can't handel life and the story of it at the same time. It takes all they have to be in their real realties.

And then there are actors. Real actors. The kind who know that in real theater the show goes on. Theater imulates life. It does not stop. The curtain goes up like the sun rises, in a real theater, just like in the real world. We are a real theater and in twelve years we have never gone dark. This is as extraordinary when one knows the drama behind the scenes  often threatens to eclipse what is intended for the stage. But we show up. The show becomes the real reality that we understand, the reality which we have some control over. Unlike real life which sometimes hurts so bad one needs a place to hide and often defies "control".  Actors sometimes hide on stage in plain sight in the middle of some one else's life. This too can be cathartic. The allusion of control allows us the ability to "cry our own tears for someone eles's grief."  In this way actors are magicians able to turn sorrow into light to better illuminate the practice of living for themselves and others.

Theater offers you a chance to solve a character's problem, enjoy his destiny, fight along side  him against his fate -- stride with him to his destiny. Theater gives a performer a place to spend the emotional currency stored in their well  of lived experiences, it gives you a place to go when it is necessary to vacate your own reality temporarily for the sake of being able to carry it when you are forced to return to it. I have used theater as a refuge on a number of occasions. I ran to it when one of my sons was critically injured and nearly died, and when another was shot. I stood in the light of its comfort while embroiled in a prolonged war of the flea with the police department in a city in which I once resided. I sought its expanse when I was smothered in the confines of government housing. Theater has been my rock. I create therefore I am.  It is reminiscent of life but with much more civilized rules. Most North American Africans are skilled at making a way out of no way. As a performer it is stock and trade.

The production of theater in the hood is a procession of miracles. Healthy productions spring from anemic budgets. Costumes and props are manifest from will; you need it and it appears. Hopefully its cheap. Sets come together out of dreams, the logic of functionality, and what you have on hand  to build with. I print scripts on my Epson at home. Advertising is a barter, calling of favors, and word of mouth affair. And because creating is like breathing to us the Gods of such things bless us. We are the work and the work is us. It is difficult at times but that is how life/art is -- things that you work hard for tend to be the most worthwhile. We work hard at the production of theater. We encourage miracles.

The production of Seven Guitars puts The Lower Bottom Playaz at the halfway mark in their march through The Century Cycle by August Wilson. The troupe has weathered a lot  since it undertook the production of the entire series. We have lost friends. We have made new friends. Some people have opted out. Others have become addicted to creating. We have had  sorrows, bad times, and some good times too. Babies have been born. Art has been made. Projects have been conceived and executed. Degrees have been completed. We are sharper than ever, our dedication has deepen, and we have become more tightly focused. We are learning from Wilson as we hone our craft as actors and magicians. We are learning that our stories are nourishment. We have learned that most of what we experience has happened before to other people and their stories stand to inform us of how we might emerge out the other side and that our own stories give us a sublime understanding of life if we allow them into our art. We are learning to appreciate the salt and sugar of life as it continues forward one day after another.

In this sense we resemble the characters in Wilson's Seven Guitars. We are perfecting the ability to see and elevate the gloriousness of the mundane. We see the hunger in Floyd Schoolboy Barton and we are reminded of our own. We understand Louise's caution having been burned by love. Yet we are with Vera when she risk all perhaps foolishly in the belief that her love can unpack her man's trunk. We agonize with Canewell over his love from a distance as it walks out of his life. We hold their lives up next to our own and feel reaffirmed in our realness, comforted by our not so far from normal angst, and we understand our fierce human beauty in our imperfect perfection.

Abracadabara

Seven Guitars opens June 28th in West Oakland CA.

www.lowerbottomplayaz.com

Seven Guitars is a story told in a flashback. It starts and ends at a funeral repast. Between the bookends of funeral ritual we examine a slice of the life lived by Floyd Schoolboy Barton. As with every Wilson work he is talking to us.  What story does the life of Floyd "Schoolboy" Barton offer the living?

The men and women of Seven Guitars are ordinary folks; they are people I know. I know people with fire in their belly willing to take a chance to see where life will take them;  the reckless and brash, wanting the sweetness they have seen life yield up to others. I know men who hunger for a quiet place and a woman who knows how to sit with them in the dark. I know women who want to believe in the men they love. I know women bruised by love and some who bruise with their love. Wilson says the work is inspired by his mother, and the beautiful notion that, everything about her was worthy of sharing. He found wonder in everything connected to his mother; the contents of her medicine chest, her music, the laughter of her and her friends were all of equal fascination to him.

The world in the backyard of Seven Guitars reminds me of my mother and her friends. It reminds me of fish fries, bid whist, bottled beer, and music. I am reminded of how much my mother loved music; she was a Southern transplant, first generation Californian. She got here from Mississippi via Chicago. I imagine she traveled straight up the 61 Highway like so many southern youth before her in search of a life in the land of milk and honey. She ended up in the East Bay in a small town and there she had a family and polished her city ways. Like Wilson I found my mother's world fascinating and perhaps more so in appreciation inspired by hindsight. Wilson easily connects me to the world as it was when my mother was young--thusly offering me a way to understand the shoulders on which I stand and how I might live in my children's memories.

Seven Guitars is a testament to the richness of the everyday. The work elevates the trials and tribulations of this small group of friends to the art that is synonymous with Wilson. The back yard as a meeting place for dreams and life lessons over a card table with a cold beer on a hot summer night is a perfect stage for the philosophy of a race to unfold. Wilson offers a plot as effortless as the dialog in this piece. It almost eludes you in its integration of the rhythm of ordinary life blooming, blossoming, and withering all at the same time in the same place, as is its habit.  Wilson meets us where we live in all our drama and turmoil amidst the mundane backdrop of one day following another despite the brutality of the previous one.

The play is a blues/ jazz symphony orchestrated by seven people whose lives intersect. They are a skillful blend of wisdom, experience, desire, longing and raw joy at being alive to strive. With little more than a song and desire the inhabitants of the yard move forward in their lives despite obstacles and pitfalls. They take a chance on living and if you look closely you may find you see yourself or someone you know in the characters who have come to the game of life with all the gusto they can muster.

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Having declared my intention to stage and direct the entire Pittsburgh Cycle or the Century Cycle by August Wilson I am taking time to take stock of the journey begun in 2010 with my first production of Gem of the Ocean.

The experience of staging and directing Gem of the Ocean had a profound effect on me and my troupe of Playaz. It set us on a path we are still traveling on. It gave us new language. It gave us a clearer lens. It sharpened us in many ways. For some of us, it offered defining moments, we now knew what we knew in contextual ways that allowed us to understand things we had always known. This blessed us with the ability to act. For us its about acting; acting on stage and in real life. The association with Wilson has affected our own art making and made us look at how we move in the world, our neighborhood, and our lived lives. We are connected to our song. We are aware we have a song. We have come home and home is glorious. Wilson has made us rich. So we have become devotees of tales of iron and water. We are walking with Wilson and singing.

As we begin our 12 season of theater in West Oakland Ca. we do so from a point informed by our walk with Wilson. We are contributing to the preservation of the tradition of Black Arts being presented in West Oakland like tales from Wilson keep alive the Hill District of Pennsylvania. We are using our story as scribed by Wilson to open dialogues in public spaces like the stories have opened spaces within us for introspection of the richness of our culture prior to and in North America.

Wilson is a bluesologist and we are blues people. Avotcja Jiltonilro explained to me once that  the blues as we know it actually evolved from praise music not from the angst of the American experience as we have been taught. It is our song. Our ever overstanding of the beauty and majesty inherent in life and our heart's determination to continue beating. The non apologetic shout of our triumphant survival when they thought there was no way we could survive. It is our juba paid freely after rising resurrected from plantations, share cropping, segregation and the perils of integration. It traversed with us from bucolic planted fields with blood at the root to blooming neon flowers springing from concrete. It is the battle cry that sustains us as we beat back the meanness of city streets as we vigilantly search for the path to a better now.

(Pictures from top to bottom: Season 11 Piano Lesson Flyer back designed by Eesuu. Koran   Streets Jenkins as Citizen Barlow from Gem of the Ocean, Seasons 9 & 10, Adimu WolfHawkJaguar Madyun as Solly Two Kings in Gem of the Ocean, Seasons 9 & 10.)

The production of Gem in Season 9 was such a profound experience we repeated the production in the 10th Season. In staging the second production of Gem my love affair with Wilson bloomed as my troupe grew into the work and my commitment to see the entire cycle produced in order in one theater was born.

The experience of doing the work in order has been a high point in my career as a creative. It is perhaps the most conscious I have ever been in the staging and producing of work. It is the work being done here that has allowed me a unique way of integrating my understanding of the movement, driving forces, and shaping context of the North American African experience in North America over the last century.  I am a person who wants the whole story in as much as it can be given. It is the African in me that wants and needs context to make sense of the past and its relationship to the present. Wilson has helped me to understand that my desire is natural, and a necessary skill for a would be griot who wants to use story to instruct and guide. Wilson is the most skillful storyteller I know.

The stories while each dedicated to a decade are the same story told over and over again to different tunes. I contend that artists have one conversation they simply reiterate it in a kaleidoscope of their overstanding of the points they are making.

Wilson wants us to remember to remember. He wants us to have a point of departure for the many paths our North American experience has taken. He wants us to see ourselves as whole and capable of thriving and adept at reinventing ourselves and the most scared elements of our culture wherever we land. He wants us to question, to see, and to rejoice. He draws our attention to geographic place to explore our inner workings and unconscious motivations. As a part of Wilson's song he recalls for us and our part of the song is our response to remembering. In a real sense we are singing with Wilson. In a real sense the song continues and we grow it connected to the wind, the water, the land, and all the things that lie between like the old folks. We plant this song like seed knowing it will be grown. We are blues people.

Gem set us on the path of understanding the past to overstand the present and Joe Turner grew our understanding of how our failure to remember stunted our ability to discern. In Joe Turners Come and Gone it is Herald Loomis's ability to bleed for himself that sets him free to reinvent himself in a new life and to stand on the life he has finally been able to let go. He is able to love, to live, to dream again once he is connected with his song -- his movement in the world becomes smoothed out so that he can continue. Wilson's blues is a song in motion.  Movement is a recurring theme.

In Ma Rainey we see the song on the move and as we move with it along the continuum the cycle offers we come to the place where we examine how much the song is worth. Can we sell it for comfort as we move through this world. What is the cost of selling your song? In Joe Turner we considered the fact that those who were willing to pay for the song were hungry for something they thought we had. Something they perhaps felt they were missing. Joe Turner was ravenous for it and kept collecting folks and holding them to learn the secret of the song. The men that lost their song were broken but Joe Turner remained hungry. Perhaps as Bernice asmonishes Boy Willie in the Piano Lesson about exchanging his soul for money; the song won't go with the buyer.

In Ma Rainey we walk with Levee in the thirties in North America and think about the violence enacted by North American African youth at the dawn of the new millennium. That is another powerful element in the artistry of Wilson, his eriery ability to collapse temporal space, rendering time liquid.  Beginning with Gem and throughout the cycle we are encouraged to see time as a place in which the then, and the now merge, and create a connection; a new viewing platform. This fluid view of time is again a reminder of movement and in this case the lack of movement through the space of time in the face of constant movement in place. The consideration of non-movement is as essential as the consideration of movement in unearthing the context of the present moment.

In Ma Rainey we were allowed a space to consider the modern minstrel  what motivates them and what role they play in our community. The experience of this production inform our discussions of new media offered by the likes of Tyler Perry, and Quentin Tarrentino. Our palates have been educated in a way that dull our appreciation of gas station sushi.

Gem's Caesar, both Seth and Herald in Joe Turner, Ma Rainey's Levee, and Piano Lesson's Boy Willie  lend complexity to conversations about striving, hunger, and ambition connecting them to the ownership, loss, and selling of your song/your soul/your mojo. It connects the song to concepts of wealth and deepens discussions of hunger as well as discussions of becoming what you eat. What does it cost to wear the clothes, speak the language, and think in the logic of the ancestors of those who brought your ancestors across the water and shifted the very ground upon which they stood metaphorically and literally. Wilson makes you want to consider the worth of what your ancestors  brought with them and tended for you.

His sense of the North American African experience in North America as a vehicle to unfold a more contextual autochthonous American story is the reason Wison is aurgeabley the most important American playwright in the last quarter century. His work allows and enables an American narrative of wholeness and thriving in the face of change, and in the face of the lack of it, that is muted elsewhere. In the parlance; Wilson is the truth.

I am more appreciative of Wilson's contention that "our stories are all we need" as I travel on with him into the 12 season. I am  looking forward to becoming immersed in the world of Seven Gutiars. I welcome the things we will come to know as we enter the backyard where this story unfolds in flashbacks. Wilson, stunting, takes us into our own backyard making us understand and continue to explore the function of memory and the evolution of story as it stands steadfast to tell the same tale until you overstand it like a blues song.

(From top to bottom: Top-Scene for Joe Turner's Come and Gone, l to r, Adimu Madyu, Tatiana Monet, James Brooks, She Cat, Alicia Green, and Stanley Hunt. Middle photo Tyler Thompson and Niko Buchanan form The Piano Lesson. Bottom photo: Ma Rainey's Black Bottom cast members Ayodele Nzinga and Loren Churchill. )

More  Wilson & I 

http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2010/09/27/gem-of-the-ocean/

http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2010/09/27/gem-of-the-ocean/

http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2010/09/29/diary-of-a-mad-creative-i-create-therefore-i-am-part-2/

http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/diary-of-a-mad-creative-i-create-therefore-i-am-pt-3/

http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2010/10/01/diary-of-a-mad-creative-i-create-therefore-i-am-pt-4/

http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2010/10/02/dairy-of-a-mad-creative-i-create-therefore-i-am-pt-5/

http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2010/10/03/diary-of-a-mad-creative-i-create-therefore-i-am-pt-6/

http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2010/10/03/diary-of-a-mad-creative-i-create-therefore-i-am-pt-6/http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/diary-of-a-mad-creative-i-create-therefore-i-am-pt-7/

http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2010/10/06/dairy-of-a-mad-creative-i-create-therefore-i-am-part-8/

http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2010/10/07/diary-of-a-mad-creative-i-create-therefore-i-am-pt-9/

http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2010/10/08/diary-of-a-mad-creative-i-create-therefore-i-am-part-10/

http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2010/10/09/diary-of-a-mad-creative-i-create-therefore-i-am-pt-11/

http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2010/10/11/dairy-of-a-mad-creative-i-create-therefore-i-am-pt-12/

http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2010/10/12/diary-of-a-mad-creative-i-create-therefore-i-am-pt-13/

http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/diary-of-a-mad-creative-i-create-therefore-i-am-pt-14/

http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/diary-of-a-mad-creative-i-create-therefore-i-amhttp://anzinga.wordpress.com/2010/11/15/diary-of-a-mad-creative-i-create-therefore-i-am-pt-16/-pt-15/

http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2010/11/15/diary-of-a-mad-creative-i-create-therefore-i-am-pt-16/

http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2010/11/19/diary-of-a-mad-creative-i-create-therefore-i-am-pt-18/

http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2010/12/11/diary-of-a-mad-creative-19-precious-and-the-state-of-the-arts-pt-2-of-the-ground-on-which-i-stand/

http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/gem-again/

http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2011/06/16/full-metal/

http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2011/10/15/a-song-of-august-wilson-or-the-lions-roar-parts-1-2/

When you are on a quest there are some things in your control and others that are left to fate. There are things you can bring to the journey but the more important things are those you take away. One can decide to start a quest, or acknowledge they are on one, they can't decide when it's complete they can only decide when its over. One can always quit. It would then be over. However those who have the heart to quest are rarely quitters. Thus once foot is set to the path less traveled the travler becomes an instrument it is the quest that has life and volition. My foot is on the path and I am an instrument. I travel with August Wilson as a companion because he is my True North.

You see I know where I am trying to go -- I surrender to the fact I have no idea how long it will take to get there or indeed even if I will ever arrive. But out of a hunger present at birth, as constant as a guiding star, I travel due North from deep South. My wording of my quest for understanding is a metaphor translated as my passion drives what I want to learn ; from my heart to my consciousness. So with Wilson as my True North I have set sail. I want my song back. I want other's to sing their songs. I want the songs to heal us, uplift us, fill us with a fighting spirit that will not tire and will of a certainty see us through.

Resistance never sleeps and songs of struggle are passed down . Wilson's song is in his stories. In honoring Wilson I am singing my song. I am singing a song of self and using that song to crystilize a vision of thriving. I make a business of remembering to remember. Some of what I remember cuts like a knife and stings like the whip.  But that is not all I remember. I remember wealth. I remember song. I remember stories. I remember to remember those who have been torch bearers on our way out of no way. I remember triumphs and victories. I remember successes, inventiveness, courage, valor, and a spirit as big as Africa. I remember our joy, and our gladness, our heartfelt love and our braveness. I remember to resist feeling like I am at the bottom of life, or worth less than any man or woman made by the creator. I remember to marvel that I am and I am because we are.

The Piano Lesson opens on October 5. I have made it to the 4th stop in my commitment to direct the entire Century Cycle in order. I have learned something with each production. There never seems to be enough time to spend to know all that Wilson wants to tell me. But I listen as hard as I can and I remember.

In The Piano Lesson Wilson wants me to remember to be Janus eyed. I need to look both backwards and forward to inform the moment I am in. The future is carved from the past. We must hold on to ancestry and we must build for future generations. Wilson is talking about time. Now is when we can act. In a sense now is always all there is however now stands on yesterday and is the door to tomorrow.

I create in West Oakland CA. Art and activism have been joined at the hip here since we been here. Racism and the constraints of segregation are as responsible for West Oakland past and present as is our resilient struggle to keep our song playing. Wilson wants me to remember to be dedicated to our stories he has told me they are enough. I learned long ago that if we don't tell our stories someone else will. I am the lion's historian the hunter is not the hero here.

In West Oakland for me Wilson's conversation of movement, time, and place are perfectly placed. I am watching the march of time of the streets of The Bottoms as urban pioneers or innercity so called hipsters displace traditional residents and families which once gave the space its character and grace.  Yet I knew yesterday today would come. The Lower Bottom Playaz will stay in the Bottoms as long as we are able. Holding space for the story of thriving that was once the reality of a West Oakland composed of people of color who were not allowed to buy elsewhere. There is no longer a Redevelopment Agency in Oakland but the damage has been done. There is no longer a mass concentration of upwardly mobile, well educated, fully employed home owning Black Folk in the Bottoms.

There is a growing swell of new residents who move with the same privilege they move with elsewhere. I am living in the space that Wilson created Radio Golf to define. It is sad and telling to watch people destroy the culture they want to own. It is chilling to be in territory that is being repopulated without conscious or mindfulness.  Is this what the natives felt like watching the pilgrims expand with their fences and endless hunger? I am harshly reminded that all you can really own is your own song even as I hear Boy Willie from The Piano Lesson advising us that, "land is the only thing God ain't making no more of."

Here in West Oakland we sit between the need and desire to hold on to ancestral legacy and the need for opportunity. Once again we are engaged in involuntary migrations moving by force from the urban centers of Oakland and San Francisco to Antioch, Pittsburg, Stockton, and Sacramento looking for the opportunity to mortgage our song for a slice of the American Dream dissolving ourselves and our ability to influence policy or be effective in elections  in the process. Oakland is no longer Chocolate City and The Bottoms, the home of the Panthers has been gentrified like the Fillmore, and Hunters Point, we have been redeveloped,  dispossessed, and dispersed after being stripped in the mortgage melt down which took back generations of accumulated black wealth. If you don't understand watch the process as it unfolds in East Oakland, which happens to be the second place in Oakland Blacks were allowed to purchase land in Oakland outside of West Oakland (thus the large concentration of North American Africans in both places). Our movement is not always at our pleasure but often in response to outward forces or in a nomadic search for opportunity denied in our present circumstance. We are ever questing equality. We are searching a place to set down roots and move easy with life in tune with it and ourselves. We are looking for America. When we find the place where our song and our roots are welcomed, the place where our whole self can thrive, then we will be home.

9 9 2012

Every Wilson play I have directed is about Africans finding their song.  The search for our lost song is a part of a conversation about movement literal and figurative both voluntary and involuntary. We have indeed lost our song and we often live without knowimg that there is a rhythm more fitting our growth that the raucous call of  the material that one associates with spaces of concrete and neon. We have come to the city to trade on our song, we have put down our country ways, and we have lost our souls.

It is an illusion that all movement is progress. Our involuntary move from Africa to America was not a matter of progress for us although somehow we have tried to make the story end that way. Because those who colonize are in essence thieves who profit off the labor, talent, and natural resources of others our involuntary migration stripped us of all visible resources. Our song snugly stored in the soul sustained us through a holocaust.  It allowed us to consider recreating ourselves. That thought is carried forth in our evolving language, our effervescence culture, our stumbling volatility in our continued containment and our song soaring above the heads and understanding of our captors.

In the third work of the Century Cycle, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Wilson spins out the base for the entire cycle. Although the work is third in the cycle it is the first of the ten Wilson wrote. His blues thoughts guide the rest of the cycle's recurring themes and motif.

In Ma Rainey we see our restless quest that moves us in search of opportunity. We come from the south to the the urban centers of the mid-west, the east coast, the west coast, we come looking for a way up out of our no way. We are determined to rise above the meaness of poverty, the lack of opportunity, the mule like existence of constant servitude and lack of ownership. We come with hunger and hope. Some come to sell the song for the chance to build a future. Some have lost their song and are in search of it. Others have no idea they had a song or that it has gone missing. The latter are full of despair and they are dangerous to themselves and others. For them nothing goes right and we are all the blame for their constant and unrelenting misfortune. Young Levee  in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom offers up his song and is crushed when the oppressors steals it from him in front of his face. Unlike young Citizen form Gem of the Ocean hot headed Levee does not recognize the power of the past to light the path to the future.  Citizen is redeemed and follows the path that Solly Two Kings lays his life down to preserve.  But Levee is deaf and blind he can't see the wealth in the room he occupies. So when the white man breaks him he is so broken he kills the first black man that crosses his path. By killing Toledo the future kills the wisdom of the past and as the play ends we are left in disarray as Toledo representing the wisdom of the past lie dead. Levee, representative of the song of youth waiting to be sung, is left without a path to follow. Lost in the wilderness without his song. Like Herald Loomis in Joe Turner's come and gone if he can't recover his song he will wander lost forever.

Then there are those who gave away their song to become something that dosen't exist. They gave up their culture to become the rulers over all they could take. They have accumulated great wealth yet they live in great spiritual poverty. It is these pale shadow people who seek the song of others to make them real. They buy songs but some how the songs wither and die away from the soul of the owner. This doesn't stop their search for a song any song. Have you sold them yours?

Working with Wilson's Century Cycle has helped me to locate my song. I value it more than ever. For me Wilson's work is like finally coming home after being lost for a long time. It is confirmation for me. It makes my dreams of iron and water make sense. They say when the student is ready the teacher will appear. I understand that I am in conversation with ancient things. It is my job to keep the conversation going there are students looking for teachers.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
By August Wilson
Presented by: Prescott Joseph Center For Community Enhancement
Starring: The Lower Bottom Playaz
Directed by: Ayodele Nzinga

The Prescott Joseph Center For Community Enhancement is proud to present August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, starring The Lower Bottom Playaz, under the direction of Ayodele Nzinga. The play will open at The Sister Thea Bowman Memorial Theater, on July 13th and run though the 22nd of July. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is the first of two works by Wilson slated to be directed by Nzinga as a part of Theater in the Yard, Season 11.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is the third of the Pittsburg Cycle by Wilson to be presented at The Sister Thea Bowman Memorial Theater in West Oakland. Although Wilson’s Cycle is set for the most part in the Hill District of Pittsburg PA he sets this work on the South Side of Chicago. This work will not be “relocated” to West Oakland, as is Nzinga’s habit with work for The Lower Bottom Playaz. Audiences should be able to make the leap on their own. Chicago’s correlation to West Oakland as a migration destination along with the history of Chicago’s Black Belt and Oakland’s 7th St. as two of the countries important North American African musical centers is obvious. Both were stops on the “chitlin circuit” and in both the North American African community lived similar lives with identical constraints and motivations.
Wilson’s raw and gritty expose of the American music industry allows us to look at a community developed as a result of the Great Migration. The work is pushed by and pulled out of the music of people in transit on a quest to a life they can imagine but can not touch; it is the music of loss and desire. The music is a story in and of itself. But the people who bring the music are the heart of this piece. The story within the story is always as instructive as the main event in Wilson’s work. In the sorrowful funk and divine fury of the music there is a delicately etched study of humanity for us to consider if we want more than entertainment from our theater.
Wilson celebrates the complex existence of North American African men in North America. The story within the story in Ma Rainey is as timeless as is Wilson’s exploration of the exploitation ever present in the music industry. He looks at power relations, voice, injustice, and manhood in a series of beautifully lucid profiles of the men behind the music. Wilson wants us to have a front row seat, he invites us to walk into the angst, anger, and hunger of the men in Ma Rainey, so we can walk out of the theater knowing something more about what resides in the spirit of men who walk our streets and live amongst us.
Join the Lower Bottom Playaz at The Sister Thea Bowman Memorial Theater in their celebration of America’s Shakespeare as they continue the tradition of Theater in the Yard, Season 11!

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
July 12, 13, 14, 15 & 20,21,22, 2012
Sister Thea Bowman Memorial Theater
Box Office: 510332-1319
920 Peralta St., Rear yard
Oakland CA 94607
Information: wordslanger@gmail.com
www.lowerbottomplayaz.com
5 14 2012

One supposes things get easier the longer you do them. Not necessarily so. Some things don't get easier. Some times the degree of difficulty is a divining feature. It helps to illuminate one's dedication to a task. It helps to codify the reasons for some acts of valor. Creators create out of a necessity. They are called forth to create. They are compelled to create. They are driven. Some folks say that artists must suffer, that their art is a product of that suffering. I don't know that to be a fact. Suffering may deter creation, may block the fount from which it flows, may prevent creation. Sometimes suffering informs creation. But it is perhaps the ability to suffer that should be examined. The source of an artist's angst is often awareness, the ability to see, to feel, to empathize. The ability to sit in "suffering" can be a birthing process. To be informed by suffering is worthwhile if it is an inspiration to move to transform it. I remember a song from my Grandmother's church choir, "Lord don't move that stumblin' block, give me strength to go around it, Lord don't move that mountain, give me the strength to climb it."

And so it is that I am a "Long Distance Runner",  build for distance, not so much for speed. I am water. Not as substantial as the mountain, but in possession of the fluidity to flow around it, the persistence to wear against it, to form the valley in which we flourish in defiance of  dwindling ground on which to stand. Sister Thea Bowman, a personal inspiration, urges me to remember its ok to be tired but beware of becoming weary. I remind myself that all clouds have linings. Difficulty offers opportunities for growth.

I have been in the Valley planting flowers in the stone of mountainsides. I have stayed to ensure they are watered. Their own need is the sun that draws them forth. I am of the Valley. It is my home. That hard spot next to the rock is my reference point. It is from this point I greet the sun and the things that walk in my night. It is from this perspective that I tilt my head to capture the sound of God's voice. It is from this vantage point I strive for justice. It is on this battlefield that I stand behind my art, stand on it, stand for it as it stands for me, and swing creativity like a lance to bring down the forces that would keep the valley unlit and bereft of flowers. Here we use creativity like scalpels to rewound our selves and let the poison flow out as overstanding finds room inside us. We use art like medicine. We heal here. We are the first to be infected with transformation and a symptom of our wellness is our need to share the virus.We want you to get it.  We are a Learning Community in dialogue with our emblematic geographical and metaphorical diaspora wide community.

Cultural is a linga franca in the building of bridges that would enable us to emphasize with kindred communities, enabling us to strive towards the universal in this conversation of saying, and seeing us, working the story of us to explain the now of us to us and others. It is a leavening agent helping us to contexulize our selves as we become the drum we are playing, as we get the message, we become the message, as we move to overstanding, we broadcast the message. We are a smooth coal-black song, complete, seeking diamond sharp conciseness to help us cut through the veil. Through performing we become seers. Those who fail to achieve overstanding remain poor seers. Thus innately they are not good performers. They are bound by the story of self and not ready to stand over it, not ready to own it, to transform it by becoming the author.

Even those who will not perform can be moved. They stand to be wounded by those who do perform. They come to trust or they fall before those who see. If they are lucky they find a source of light they trust,  they can stand in it and come to know what they have failed to overstand; because someone picked up a drum and beat a path to overstanding.

In the Valley I listen to August Wilson's drum. A lion singing lights my path and I overstand. I perform. I walk with waymakers; we perform. Our path is lit. We hear the drum. In the Valley we are learning to be the drum.

Strike here to hear lions roar. We are overstanding Wilson. Standing in the fire being forged. We are not afraid of closing doors or open windows we have seen it all before. We seek overstanding. We will be made whole. We will not be bound. We are becoming the roar of the lion.

10 15 2011
Written the day before The Roar of the Lion*

Woke up this morning and I could breathe again.

I knew it would be like this. Of course there is still a shit load that could go wrong. But that's life. You're crossing the street and a bus hits you. Can't do anything about the random crap that can and often does go wrong. But I have done me proud. I am lighter this morning if sore and bruised. My spirit is light and soul satisfied. The warrior has survived the battle and is here writing about it.

Marvin X talks about Block Man. The world is full of 8RS. Some say if you ain't got a couple you ain't done nothing. An interesting perspective: your success weighed against the people who begrudge it. My grandmother is the first person I can remember talking about folks who would not kill anything nor would they allow it to die. I loathe the presence of a person who insist on complicating the simple. I abhor those who traffic in road blocks. For me that's like a red flag to a bull.

I have reached a point in life where I exercise my option to do what feeds my soul. The universe is so pleased with my decision it has allowed me to make a living doing so. I remember what the Most High told me to do and in every action undertaken I strive to manifest what has been gifted to me; may my ancestor's be pleased.

I am a warrior. Sometimes I find myself bewildered at the spaces that become battlefields. Where one seeks to be the purest and do the most good one often encounters the most vicious resistance. I am always aware of the weight of living in a state of constant war. I meditate to soften my heart as my mind sharpens my resolve to steel. The tension between the two squeezes me like a vise and I long for places where the ground is even but I am extremely proficient at walking uphill.

I travel armed. I am prayed up, walking with the ancestors, standing in the light, and we can still take it to the streets if that's how you want it. I am a general. I got folks. We got standards and rules we live by. We don't care who you are, we do us, and we good at seeing how you do you. At the end of the day we are more than willing to check in with you and see how that's working out for you. You'll find us on the other side of the finish line.

We don't lose, we don't quit, we don't know how to stop- don't know no direction but forward. How you gonna whip folks who refuse to lose. We legion- raising babies who think just like us. We are pouring  foundation - the ancestors want institution; we walking on a path well worn. We know the way in the dark and we know how to make light. What you gonna do with us, Whom Jah done blessed?

Bullets are usually made of lead. If you cover a lead bullet with copper you get a Full Metal Jacket; an armor piercing projectile.

It is our intention to wound you with art. You will leave feeling something. You  will be moved . This is our promise to you. It's a full metal season and it's coming at you full force.  We want you to catch the fever, be a part of our movement, or at the very least, stand still and be wounded.

We are doing it big. So incredibly big we can't do it without your help. So big we can't put it all out right here; but you are an integral part of what's about to go down.

We are bringing you some stock that just keeps getting better and some new work that is already being called tour de force. Look out for visits from Queen, Flowers for the Trashman, a new Wilson piece, the return of Gem of the Ocean, and two brand new pieces by WordSlanger at the San Francisco Theater Festival held at Fort Mason this year. Did I say we were doing it big?

Last year the Playaz turned 10, this year the theater built for WordSlanger turns 10 as well. We are on a collision course with destiny and we invite you to stand in the headlights with us. Be a part of our Full Metal Theater Season.

Stay tuned--- it's about to go down!

Save the dates: August 7, Fort Mason San Francisco, San Franciso Theater Festival

August 19. 2011: Gem of the Ocean opens at The Sister Thea Bowman Memorial Theater, West Oakland, CA

6 16 2011

Since I last wrote about Mr. Wilson, and his contribution to my foundation, some time has passed. Of course a great deal has happened. I have read the entire Pittsburgh Cycle and have dedicated myself to the production of as many of the plays as I can manage.

I have wed Wilson. I proposed. He did not resist, he drew me closer and here we are. He is most generous in his attention to my growth, despite his own death, which of course makes the continuance of his work imperative.   I strive to be worthy of the pairing and the mission to lift up the bard least his great works be hungry for the overstanding they deserve and Wilson intended.

We have the rights to Gem, again. This year we will also do Joe Turner's Come and Gone. Another great pairing I think. We need to revisit Gem. We flew though it last year. It only lasted long enough for me to fall in love. This year we will get to dance with it longer. We have been prepping for it since the music of the last production died. We are seated at a better table this time. Be prepared for a better meal.

'Joe Turner's Come and Gone,' continues Wilson's exploration of place, time, and lost for North American Africans. Like 'Gem', if you listen carefully, you hear the communal present being explained by the telling of the communal past. With 'Joe Turner', we add the dimension of continued captivity to the conversation of the North American African experience in North America.

'Gem' opens August 27th at the Sister Thea Bowman Memorial Theater in West Oakland CA.

You can preview the show for free by attending the August 7th, San Francisco Theater Festival, held at Fort Mason. 'Gem,' will be one of three pieces offered by the Lower Bottom Playaz, under my direction. The work offered will  include two new pieces of work, Big Brother/Little Brother; A one act for two players, and INK: A MultiMedia-Cross Disciplinary Poetic concert.

Stay tuned we are about to blast off on a Full Metal Theater Season!

6 14 2011

"If you do not know, I will tell you that black theatre in America is alive … it is vibrant … it is vital … it just isn’t funded. Black theatre doesn’t share in the economics that would allow it to support its artists and supply them with meaningful avenues to develop their talent and broadcast and disseminate ideas crucial to its growth. The economics are reserved as privilege to the overwhelming abundance of institutions that preserve, promote and perpetuate white culture.

That is not a complaint. That is an advertisement. Since the funding sources, both public and private, do not publicly carry avowed missions of exclusion and segregated support, this is obviously either a glaring case of oversight, or we the proponents of black theatre have not made our presence or needs known." August Wilson

Precious and the State of The Black Arts

Ayodele Nzinga

An important part of black theatre that is often ignored but is seminal to its tradition is its origins on the slave plantations of the South. Summoned to the “big house” to entertain the slave owner and his guests, the slave that reached its pinnacle for whites consisted of whatever the slave imagined or knew that his master wanted to see and hear. This tradition has its present life counterpart in the crossover artists that slant their material for white consumption.[1]

I wanted to write a review of Precious after I saw it; problem was, I didn’t know if I wanted to see it.  Although I am an avid consumer of entertainment media, and an advocate for most, if not all things black, I hesitated to view this film. I was happy that the work of an artist primarily known for poetry had found a path to a bigger venue for her creativity. If one can go; others can follow.  But it is wise to be careful what you wish for and even better advice to be careful of what you make. Creativity is a gift and a burden.

Maybe I should have followed my first mind. In the end, the best things I can say is, I brought a bootleg “directors cut,” so none of my money made it to Lionsgate's coffers and this waste of film eventually ended. If I were to elaborate, I would offer that it made me physically ill.  It was comparable to watching “The Birth of a Nation”.

I have included links of critiques of the work by Ishmael Reed, in large, he has covered the travesty that is Precious from a point of view I resonate with. Even better, he has shone a light on how and why such tripe is awarded while North American Africans fight a lukewarm fight to be seen in more realistic ways. The last sentence should focus on, “being seen,” period. The stereotypes that have always fed mainstream media have blurred visions of a “Black Experience” beyond recognition.

When did you last see yourself on stage or screen?  The you reading this, when did you last see yourself on stage, TV, or in a movie?  When did you last see a character that was you, and the you reading this related so strongly, you could see you own story unfolding before you? We have a curious relationship with invisibility that bears further exploration, but I digress. This discussion is about how we are “seen” and ultimately how we see ourselves.

I am always happy when Black actors work.  I remember Robert Townsend’s, Hollywood Hustle, a movie parody of American drama that employed every Black actor that considered him or herself such. It was a satirical spoof on the state of the arts and a payday. I  gotta love it. You can’t undercut the importance of a payday. Artists have to eat and living indoors can become addictive. But what are you willing to do in the name of the mortgage?

The battle to be seen, make a living at art, balanced by or at least tempered with the need to be relevant is not new.  Hattie Mc Daniels often played the maid in her film career. I remember her best for an interview.  She was asked by some forward thinking Black reporter why she always played the maid? Didn’t she know how this demeaned her and her race? Hattie replied with a question f her own, “Would you rather I played the maid for $50 a week or be the maid for $5 dollars a week?”  Hattie’s logic carried her to the Academy Awards. She won an oscar for playing Mammy in, Gone with the Wind.  It’s a hard point. It comes down in the end to the ground on which you choose to stand.

You must choose there is no middle ground. Serving two masters is a hard if not impossible task.

A  second tradition occurred when the African in the confines of the slave quarters sought to invest his spirit with the strength of his ancestors by conceiving in his art, in his song and dance, a world in which he was the spiritual center and his existence was a manifest act of the creator from whom life flowed. He then could create art that was functional and furnished him with a spiritual temperament necessary for his survival as property and the dehumanizing status that was attendant to that.[2]

So with our two masters clearly delineated  and sat before us  which path do we choose to travel? Everything in the universe, cost. You pay a cost for following in the tradition of the Black Arts. You pay a cost for jig-a-booing. There is a cost for trying to balance the cost. You get it; it all cost.

What if, what you see on TV,  at the movies, the books and magazines you read, the music you listened to, and the news you watch were all defining the parameters of your existence; would you be more careful about what you take in? If artists overstood arts power to create and decipher reality, would they be more careful of what they created?

If art reflects life, where in the mirror can we take a real look at the life and times of North American Africans?  One would assume that this would most likely come from the life, talent, experience, hands, and minds of Black creatives. We are a tribe that serves many masters.  Some of us will do most anything in the name of the mortgage. It’s often called success.

Some artists who view art solely as a means of economic remuneration will tell you they made a clear choice.  They chose the “form” of their art that would sell.  They make what pays the rent.  When one measures success by money alone then indeed as a friend of mine once observed: “The most salacious mainstream artist, is a conscious artist; he’s conscious of the fact he needs to eat.”  If money is the ultimate measure of success if your art isn’t making money then you are not a successful artist. If its only entertainment what does it matter; we all know the difference between art and life, right?  Art for arts sake?

How should we perceive Sapphire's treatment of the young North American African males accused of raping a jogger in Central Park? Her vividly brutal depiction of hyper-black male sexuality, black men as beast likened to wolves in a pack, wild things, hot for white girls to the point of falling on a poor innocent and ravishing her, was performed, and awarded. The collection, American Dreams, in which the poem, originally called the Central Park Rapist, and renamed Wild Things, appeared garnered her a lot of attention. So much so that she got a deal for Precious. Here's the thing, the youngsters she vilified were exonerated, they didn't rape the jogger. However Sapphire's rape of the image of North American African men stands unpunished. It in fact was rewarded by a bigger venue, a larger stage, a bigger audience and a payday.

But it's just entertainment right? We are instructed by what sells. We know the difference between fiction and reality. Nobody believes what they see on stage, on TV, in the movies. It doesn't matter because they are just stories. In truth these crooked images are a part of the American parcel we are familiar with them, grew up with versions of them, we know what sells.

Somewhere neatly wrapped in this reasoning is an assumption that no one will pay for the truth, no one wants to hear or see it, and it doesn’t matter, pass the Patron and party on, if it ain’t about money it don’t matter.

For the sake of brevity, we will play the extremes.  It is obvious that straddling the fence gets splinters into interesting places.  Therefore, we will not dwell on folks who play a balancing game of being relevant to all and ending up relevant to none.

I stand myself and my art squarely on the self-defining ground of the slave quarters, and find the ground to be hallowed and made fertile by the blood and bones of the men and woman who can be described as warriors on the cultural battlefield that affirmed their self-worth. As there is no idea that cannot be contained by black life, these men and women found themselves to be sufficient and secure in their art and their instruction.[3]

I have made my choice. The path was laid so clearly I never thought to stray. I have always sought the ground on which I stand, plant me here, I am home. I want to see myself on stage. I want you to see yourself. I want my life to matter. Your life matters to me. There is more than money to consider. The stories have a deeper purpose. They are breadcrumbs, history books, dream catchers, sooth sayers, and they are a method of inter/intra group communication. They form a conversation that is referenced, called upon, should be built upon. I do Black Theater.

We are sufficient. Our stories are sufficient. We have a duty to ourselves and our stories. Who will tell them if we don’t? The answer is simple, any and everybody, or they will not be told. We have paid a cost for being imaged by mainstream media in all its forms since inception in North America. There is a cultural battle being waged by cultural warriors to give us ground on which to stand as Africans, descended of a captured people who heroically survived and prospered in a SorrowLand and we their descendents are alive to tell the tale least it be forgotten. We the seeds of dungeons, alive and well, have a story to tell. We have a duty to that story.

Further, it is that story that holds us. The story matters, and its all a matter of story. A friend from the Middle East stared curiously at all the North American Africans I introduced him to, he was waiting for the chain wearing, gun-toting gangsta’s that Lionsgate has fed him and his countrymen for a hefty profit. He had an image before he came and he was looking for the reflection of that image. The story plays out in fearful white women hiding their purses as young black men walk by and in black elders not feeling safe in the presence of black youth. Even more sadly it serves as a blueprint for youth a one sized suit with a target on the back.  We are marketed and we are marketed to. We consume it all.

If you do not know, I will tell you that black theatre in America is alive … it is vibrant … it is vital … it just isn’t funded. Black theatre doesn’t share in the economics that would allow it to support its artists and supply them with meaningful avenues to develop their talent and broadcast and disseminate ideas crucial to its growth. The economics are reserved as privilege to the overwhelming abundance of institutions that preserve, promote and perpetuate white culture.[4]

I tell stories that lift us up. I tell stories with lessons. I tell stories with messages. I tell Black tales. I practice Black Arts. I practice inversion. I am a student of the Diaspora and a devotee to the Griot tradition of ritual story. I practice Nommo, the ancient art of speaking into being. I am battling debilitating stories that box us in either failure or assimilation into a culture in which we aim to be either invisible or the perpetual coon. I tell stories for and about North American Africans. I talk to and about them. It does not matter to me if others listen. It is a way perhaps for them to gather a different understanding. It is a way for those outside my circle to see beyond the stereotypes if they care to. If they come to listen to the tales I choose to tell they will not be coddled, they will not be pandered to, they will bear witness to reality and its consequences, they will be treated to considerations of how things came to be and how we live as a result. I am talking to family about family. It's an honest conversation dedicated to us seeing ourselves, growing ourselves, celebrating ourselves, praying ourselves up, arming us, feeding us from an overflowing larder of stories big enough to do those things.  That is the center of my artistic world. It is where I begin and where I will end. I tell tales about the complexity of our lives, the layers, the rawness of life behind the veil, the reality of being North American African in these days and times.

We are in dire need of messages of survival, victory and transcendence. I try to supply them in a place where the “story” furnished is inconceivably heavy. I create in a space where real life is compelling enough to inspire art, is worthy of artful rendering. I create in a place where the beauty, determination, and the regal spirit of struggle is often unstoried by mainstream press. I do not see that as an accident. My mentor, Marvin X, reminds me that the other side will not tell you when you are winning. Nor are they likely to announce the form and content of warlike assaults on your well-being. I see the battlefield.  I have made my choice and I have paid for it.

Access to the tools to create remain a problem for artists like me. Money is an issue. It cost to create art. People have a strange relationship with this fact. I have seen folks blow $100.00 a seat to imbibe swill served by Tyler Perry. I have also had to argue with folks for trying to lowball my performers. I point out they need to pay rent and feed their kids too. I get heated when potential producers ask what do my actors do to pay the rent as if they should not expect to live off creating art.  If Perry's tripe can feed him why shouldn't artists who care what you eat be able to live off their art as well? You get what you pay for, so if you willingly pay for shit, then that's all you will be served. If you stopped paying for shit, they would serve something else. If shit is all that's on the menu you should eat elsewhere or consider a fast. It seems fairly simple but it's not. In the dearth of positive offerings and in our love of being told stories we become unwitting co conspirators in our own poisoning. We evidence this when we accept and start to play and get paid off the stereotypes we proclaim to disdain. When we consume a steady diet of pimps and thugs balanced by video ho's and damaged women who are the pitiful and perpetual victims of vicious men grabbing their crotch, rabidly consorting with multiple partners, refusing to raise their kids, as they shoot one another and sell drugs in an endless pursuit of the true American dream, a fly lifestyle, - we become limited in our ability to consider ourselves as anything else. Further, consider it as comfort food for people who want to believe the stereotypes, those who need those images to be consumed as truth in order to justify the conditions in which North American Africans build lives in North America.

So when you see an institution composed of artists who continue to bring you relevant art, the kind that leaves you feeling taller inside, or uncomfortable with the reality you see, consider the dedication it took to bring it to you.  Consider the cost they pay to bring you something proper to eat. I can bear witness to the dwindling resources, the fear of stepping out of the box of what sells, the limited number of resources that actually exist for those who tell tales designed to rock boats. In an age that so hardily embraces diversity we seem to only be able to fund things that look the same. Our villains and heroes have run together and the end of stories are as predictable as the potential box office for them. I was not surprised to see the negative reviews of Ntozoke's work, Colored Girls, peppered with references to the lack of multi-dimensional characters and the failure to offer a view of growth or transcendence. That's a Perry signature. Tyler Perry has decided where he stands. One day the immense wealth he's acquired may serve us by him backing story tellers with taller visions. Or perhaps he will understand there are other stories, and he by virtue of his access, is capable of putting more than shit on the menu. Colored girls was not a good indicator of my hopes but I will continue to hope he finds his way to art that matters. Meanwhile I work to balance the crap my better financed brother turns out for our consumption and for the comfort, titillation, and affirmation of  a mainstream culture that is heavily invested in the management and marketing of those stereotypes.

That is not a complaint. This is an advertisement. Since the funding sources, both public and private, do not publicly carry avowed missions of exclusion and segregated support, this is obviously either a glaring case of oversight, or we the proponents of black theatre have not made our presence or needs known.[5]

My troupe, The Lower Bottom Playaz, turned 10 this year. Institutions like people have ages and they are expected to become more intelligent, to grow, to stand for something. 2010 has been a year of struggle and triumph. We have grown as artist. We have become more clearly defined. We know who we are. In short, we know the ground on which we stand is a less traveled path. But we know where we are trying to go. We will not settle for making art for the sake of art or because it sells. We are guided by arts own purpose, we are driven to illuminate the breath and complexity of humanity. We have decided to do work that confronts, chronicles, and celebrates the North American African experience. We hope the work is worthy of support by those who want to be entertained and those who wish to be moved. We contribute to diversity by being true to who we are and not trying to blend in the melting pot.  We stand up for us, we want to stand out for that. Rather than comfort food we are most content to be hard to digest, troublesome, provoking and unforgettably relevant in a way that makes you want to come back and ponder with us, overstand with us, as we continue to fight to be who we know we need to be in order to matter. We don't do art for arts sake. We do art that matters.

To paraphrase Sonia Sanchez, Will your story save us?, if not it don't matter.

References and Suggested reading.

http://www.nathanielturner.com/groundonwhichistand.htm

http://anzinga.wordpress.com/2010/09/27/gem-of-the-ocean/

http://www.glbtq.com/literature/sapphire,2.html

Ishmael Reed: The Selling of "Precious"

Ishmael Reed and Sapphire: a Dialogue on "Precious"

Op-Ed Contributor - Fade to White - NYTimes.com

Ishmael Reed vs. Precious -- Vulture

We are respectable negroes: Ishmael Reed on Why Precious is ...

The Indypendent » “Precious” or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and ...

Hattie McDaniel Biography - life, family, children, history ...

What you do regularly is your religion. I don't care what you call yourself. You may be a Muslim, a Methodist, or a member in good standing of the Church of God in Christ but what you do daily is your true religion.

If you only worship on high holy days or the sabbath but the rest of the year you are a money changer then no matter how you label yourself you are at heart a money changer before you are a Jew or a Gentile. If war is your occupation it is also your religion. You die by how you live. Your religion is the way you spend your days.

I  create. I create therefore I am. I make a way. A way to see it, say it, understand it, to bring it to you. I make things. I cause them to be. Theaters, troupes, actors, shows, audiences, applause, epiphanies... I create access. Access to stages, microphones, opportunities to shine, to show em what ya got, to tell em what ya need, to grow yourself, to the gift I was given. I use the talent to increase what is for myself and others. And I make damn good lemonade.

Being a creative gives you room to channel fear. A challenge is an invitation to triumph if you read it correctly. It's true what you've heard; most of the troubled water in life is a matter of perspective, it's an ill wind that blows no good. A creative is open to seeing.

I see. I look at things to see. I look into things. If my gaze catches it; it wants to penetrate it, to understand not just how it is but how it came to be and what it means. I think. I have been told I think too much. What a fine joke. That's meant to be funny right? I thought it was the ability to reason that supposedly separated humans from lower primates. Apparently it can be a flaw; especially if it freezes you like a deer in the head lights but as a prelude to action, I encourage it enthusiastically.

I listen. I do more than hear. I listen to what is said, and what no one  is willing to admit they think, let alone say aloud. I listen to the silence. I listen to the dead. I listen to myself. I am willing to know. Despite the fact it is also true that to know imparts responsibility. Ignorance can feel blissful. Knowing requires you to act. If you do not act, know that your inaction is an action by default. You speak when you refuse to speak; you say it's all good.

I speak. I say what I think. I say what I see. I say things the dead whisper to me in my dreams. I listen to the shadows as they fall in the evening and I speak their thoughts.  I am a talker. I talk to power, to the powerless, to the dreamless and the dreamers. I speak.

I create. That's my religion. I am the builder in my parable of the builder. I have learned to make what I need. I have learned to build for the sake of building. I have discovered that I am increased even when the gardens are for others. I understand the moral in "The Parable of the Talents".

The Parable of the Talents

Again, it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his property to them.  To one he gave five talents of money, to another two talents, and to another one talent, each according to his ability.  Then he went on his journey.  The man who had received the five talents went at once and put his money to work and gained five more.  So also, the one with the two talents gained two more.  But the man who had received the one talent went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money.

After a long time, the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them.  The man who had received the five talents brought the other five.  “Master,” he said, “you entrusted me with five talents.  See, I have gained five more.”

His master replied, “Well done, good and faithful servant!  You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things.  Come and share your master’s happiness!”

The man with the two talents also came.  “Master,” he said, “you entrusted me with two talents; see, I have gained two more.”

His master replied, “Well done, good and faithful servant!  You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things.  Come and share your master’s happiness!”

Then the man who had received the one talent came.  “Master,” he said, “I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed.  So I was afraid and went out and hid your talent in the ground.  See, here is what belongs to you.”

His master replied, “You wicked, lazy servant!  So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed?  Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest.

“Take the talent from him and give it to the one who has the ten talents.  For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance.  Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.  And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

- Matthew 25:14-30 (NIV)

We do not all start in the same place. Some are given more than others. We can all increase ourselves. We can all create another story from the one we are given. We are all in a position to go forward. We are all capable of being more than we are. We are all able to take what we got and make it more than it is, we can create what we need. We can take the most humble circumstance and turn them into the stage we shine on. We are all capable of making lemonade. We are all we need to create the life we want.

Creativity is my religion. The road is uneven but that keeps you alert. Sometimes the things I carry own me but it's good to belong to something. Sometimes the things I stand for scare others into trying to box me in but I am my own razor. Sometimes the sorrow and pain I see weighs me down but the weight of it transforms into the beauty of knowing how many talents are on the table, then we know what the path to being increased looks like. Perspective allows me to hold truth and not explode, it also reminds me that dark clouds are liminal spaces where not knowing is a birth place for knowing. I don't believe in luck as much as I believe in hard work. I value tears as much as smiles. There is a value in despair; it is a motivator. I respect my enemies and work to ensure they remember to fear me.  I would rather be joyful than happy. I am as happy giving as taking. I am a creative.

I create; therefore I am.

Performance is good. Hell, its the payoff right? It's why an artist works; that one moment in front of the crowd with your future in its hands. That's the meat of it. Right?

No. Not really. It's what you get at the end of the road. Possibly after sweat, some tears, lots of yelling and cussing, and hopefully after revelations about what it is you seek to breath life into. Rehearsal is under rated. It gets a bad rep; like the millions of miles you run to stay in that high school outfit. But it is the place where you grow. It's where you sharpen the razor your art should be, must become, if it is to matter.

Rehearsal is like prayer. It is the highest form of artistic meditation. It is where the privilege of presenting is earned. What you do daily is an application of religion it is who you are. An artist should live to work. Work is the reason to be. The devout pray daily.

A body of work should have a progression. It should increase, increase the artist, the consumer, the form, it should make things clearer, it should complexify things, it should undo the contradiction between the two. It should change and affirm; soothe and challenge. A practice in the arts should grow an artist. That growth takes place in the work done between shows.

They say no work is ever completed; artist just quit working on it. If the work is alive the tinkering with it continues. It is reinterpreted. It is honed. It's given music. The music changes. It's done without music. You take away the 4th wall. You give it a fourth wall. You keep breathing into it. It grows as you grow and you grow in it; it is organic.

Maybe I know this because orality is the basis of my art. Orality has in its roots the ability to keep things relevant by interpreting them according to who is telling the tale, where and when it's being performed, why, and for whom as instructive post to delivery and focus and ultimately, meaning. Orality is fluid and organic. It's alive in places like Ebonics; a moving fluid form that is constantly recreated.

It is in preparation when we are most conscious of what it is we wish to render. It is here we commune with form, delivery, nuance, overstanding, effect/affect, and what we wish to leave on the stage. It is where we have the opportunity to consider what we add to the ritual of presentation, and what is it we strive to evoke in those who come to add to the ritual by witnessing.

A sharp knife cuts best. Even improvisation is best when born of artists who hone their craft in anticipation of the moment in which from their unseen hours of labor they will seeming effortlessly create sublimity on demand. Ask a battle rapper or a great free styler how many hours of craft actually go in to those supposedly spontaneous burst of lyricality.

A gift does not mean you don't have to work on increasing your talent. A gift is a seed. Oak trees grow from seeds just like blades of grass. If you are grateful for the gift then why not increase the talent; why not grow an oak tree or a whole damn rain forest?

There are feathers and then there is Mt. Thai.

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