EPISODE 4

+ TRANSCRIPT

ALICE CHILDRESS (Working in the Theater panel discussion) The hard part is that in South Carolina, I came through a time of Jim Crow. And we were not allowed to use the law public libraries. We were not allowed to use concert halls. And of course, in my great grandmother's time, it was against the law to read and write. When my play Wedding Band was done on ABC Television produced by Joseph Papp, he had done at first, the New York Shakespeare Festival, it was about South Carolina and interracial relationships. And about the 1916 and 18. It was banned in eight stations out of 168. And one of them was South Carolina, Charleston, where I was born. They said it could be seen after midnight only. So what I'm saying that coming out of the whole Jim Crow experience was what I and many others had to do. And it was very often difficult. But it made me find my writing material in Harlem, and in Charleston and the islands there. And it took me to Africa. I also went to Ghana. I'm saying theater comes from strange places, that it comes from the people. It comes from the earth that I found the scenes they were playing without thinking of it as becoming a writer. So I give this to others as best I can.

DOMINIQUE Hey, everybody, welcome back to the CLASSIX podcast, (re)clamation, an intervention in the current conversation around theatre history, where we recenter and uplift the Black writers and storytellers of the American theatre - both the celebrated and the forgotten. I’m Dominique, your host for this episode, number 4 in our series exploring the life, work, and legacy of Alice Childress. In our last episode we focused on the politics that informed Childress’ as well as the political conditions around her. Today we’re going to be talking to members of the company of Childress’ massive and sprawling play Wedding Band which was recently up at Theatre For a New Audience helmed by Classix founder Awoye Timpo. Awoye is joined by Classix members Arminda Thomas and Brittany Bradford as well as legendary performer director, and our spiritual godmother Elizabeth Van Dyke and scenic designer Jason Ardizzone-West. I am so excited to have all of these amazing thinkers joining us today.

So we're joined today by Awoye Timpo, Arminda Thomas and Jason Ardizzone-West, to continue talking about the design for WEDDING BAND, which has us so excited because Jason’s scenic design was, you know, as everyone knows, definitive! It’s one of one and it's only number one. And so I'm so excited to talk to Jason and Awoye about collaboration, and the thought process behind really helping to create WEDDING BAND and birth what it came, came out to be. I guess my first question for Jason and Awoye is how did the two of you meet? And what was the first moment of collaboration with you?

AWOYE Oh, I want to hear your version of the story, Jason.

JASON How we first met? We first met working on GOOD GRIEF, right? At Vineyard Theater. And that, you know, our first conversation was about theater and art and life and specifically GOOD GRIEF. And I feel like we've been continuing that conversation through various projects and non-projects ever since. What was that, 2018?

AWOYE Yeah, must have been. Yeah. We were looking for scenic designers, and someone from the Vineyard sent over Jason's info and website. And I remember going through the website, And first of all, Jason's website is amazing. Everybody should go there right now. But there's a section called “spatial dramaturgy.” And at the time, I was just thinking about space and design And I just remember seeing that section, which is just images of just pictures of buildings, you know, just things around town, and sometimes walls, sometimes, like floors, sometimes buildings. And I was like, oh, this person is so cool. I love how they're thinking about design and thinking about space. So I was like: oh, I think that's our guy. And then also, Jason had also been collaborating with a designer who we both love named Es Devlin. And so then when we first connected, we were like: oh, we're excited. it was so exciting to talk to him, because we're thinking about similar things. And then, over the course of the past four years, we've just been evolving artistically together. So that's been really cool.

JASON Yeah, totally. I forgot about the “spatial dramaturgy” page, part of our, our origin story. But it reminds me that, what's so important to me is the process of collaboration and creating. And what's so unique about WEDDING BAND and really every project that you lead, Awoye, is is the really deep process. And you know, the uniqueness, for example, of a set designer, director, and dramaturg are getting to kind of kick off the creative process together, so early and in such a deep way. That's so cool.

DOMINIQUE And so we know the two of you had worked together, before in the past. But I'm really curious when you knew that we were going to be able to do WEDDING BAND and how those conversations started.

AWOYE CLASSIX had reached out to Theater For A New Audience and said: hey, we would love to do a reading series of classic Black plays; is that something that you would be interested in hosting, and they were really excited about the idea. And so you know, we were thinking about which play to do, we all knew that we wanted to do Alice Childress. So then the question became, which Alice Childress play to do. I had conversations with every single person on the team to say: which plays are we most excited about? Which ones do we want to share? So actually, Dominique, and Arminda, you can both share too, what your arguments were for, for doing this play?

ARMINDA My argument for WEDDING BAND was really that I had seen a reading of it in 2017, that Elizabeth Van Dyke did with Going To The River Festival. And I was just blown away. I was just blown away, and so, in my heart, in 2017, I wanted to do a production of WEDDING BAND. So for me, when we started talking about what to do, and we wanted to do a full-length play and so it was gonna be TROUBLE IN MIND or WEDDING BAND. And for me TROUBLE IN MIND is a great play, a beautiful play, a wonderful play. And a play that I think appeals to theater people, you know, on a just–kind of, on a gimme level, but WEDDING BAND just felt, um…so deep and like there was so much there. And I just really wanted to do it. So that was the argument I made. It was, “yeah, yeah, please can we do WEDDING BAND?! Please can we do WEDDING BAND?!” I think there was a lot of begging.

DOMINIQUE Yeah, and for me, I think…you know, TROUBLE IN MIND is my favorite play. For a lot of reasons, for what Childress is trying to get at, and I think for some of the really big existential and ontological questions that the play raises. But WEDDING BAND for me, does something a little bit different. And it might sound funny, but, but I think that Black people being able to deal with hate is important. And I think Black people have been able to deal with hate in a way that is not like: oh, we have to overcome hatred, because love does something that it really doesn't do. Um, and I think that WEDDING BAND, and Julia specifically being able to have her hatred, being able to hold her hatred close to her, and to transform it into something else is really important. And also, you know, I think that there is a lot of sort of…less interesting discourse around interracial relationships happening in theater. And I think WEDDING BAND really cuts through in a way that is so important, and so necessary. And so that was the big argument I was making.

AWOYE And I think that one of the reasons that we thought to approach Theater for a New Audience is…the theater is one of the few spaces in New York that really is actually, committed to classical work. And also has a really beautiful space, because you can do so much in that space. It's very flexible. And because so much of their mission is geared toward interpretation and imagination, it really felt like: oh, that feels like a good partnership, or as a playground even just doing the reading in that space was really special, because we could engage with the audience in an interesting way. And then, you know, a week after the reading, the theater called the three of us, we all went to Theater For A New Audience. And they said: hey, we would love to do a production of this play. And then approximately a month later, everything shut down. But I think it was probably eight or nine months before the production, that we found out: yes, we're doing this. And Jason, we had probably a good eight or nine months to start thinking about what the world of the play might be.

DOMINIQUE And I know that there was a trip to the Carolinas. But I'm really curious, Jason what your experience of reading WEDDING BAND was that first time, and linking into conversations with Awoye? And what those sort of things unlocked for you in thinking about how to design the play?

JASON It's such a powerful play. And the designer answer to that is the first thing I thought when I was reading the play was: oh, wow, this is written very…not, not naturalistically, but specifically describing this set in this space. And that…I, I kind of had this gut feeling that Awoye and I were not going to be interested in doing a naturalistic, realistic, you know, cinematic sort of space-making for this, for this piece of theater. And I couldn't picture it at all, which is always a really exciting place for me to start, is when I read a script, and I have no idea what the space is going to be. And that was really my first takeaway from the script. It was like: wow, I have no idea how we're going to do this. And I'm super excited to dive into this process. Because there's so much trust with Awoye and our process of collaborating and figuring out how we're going to find you know, what, how are we going to want to gather people in this room, this particular room to tell the story. And so the decision to travel to Charleston was such a great way to kick off. And that really was the kickoff of the design process, of just…without thinking about the specifics of architecture, necessarily, just kind of going to the…place where the story comes from, and where Alice Childress's history comes from. And trying to commune with that, and let that sort of guide us. That was a great, great place to start.

DOMINIQUE How did the idea for going to Charleston happen?

JASON I think that was Awoye’s idea.

AWOYE I can't remember when it first came up. And I was like: we need to go to Charleston. And so I literally just like texted or called Jason and Arminda and I was like: y’all want to go to Charleston? And they were like: uh, yeah. So we just figured out a time in our schedule we could go and we mapped out three days. And, and as Jason said.

JASON Well, the first half of the trip for me I was interested in architecture, I was thinking about the cottages and trying to figure out where this play would have taken place if we were doing a movie version of it. Like, can we find the house or the backyard? Can we find the series of structures? Can we, figure out what this would look like. And then by the end of the trip, really the last day, we went on this amazing bus tour, Black history bus tour of Charleston, and then–was it Johns Island I think we went to? And that trip, I think really unlocked a lot for all of us, particularly for me, design-wise and just kind of moving beyond looking at houses and looking more at the earth, and sweet grass and water. And thinking about layers of history and the world of the play in a much more fundamental, abstract way.

ARMINDA I think it helped that the night before we went on that trip, was the night that we sat down and we read the whole script together out loud. And it just kind of seeded. We didn't read all the stage directions. But you have the descriptive of the house and the structures and how these, how these buildings relate to one another. But when you listen to the language, it's all about dirt, and trees. And you know, it's something that is so, like, grounded in ground, grounded in the earth, that I think it kind of opened up the space…in us, to think about it and in a different way. I mean in it, you know Awoye and Jason are, are prone to that space anyway, but I think that it gave us permission to, to kind of turn our minds that way.

AWOYE I love that. And it's funny, you enter into a new…city or a new world. And there's, things that you can hold on to, right? So we knew that we had street names that are mentioned in the play, we knew that we had, you know, Arminda had done one of her deep dives to find out where the Childress family home was. You know, so we had addresses for things. And that was kind of a guide a first level of engagement with the city. But then I think as we were there, we started to kind of feel the energy and the spirits of the city. But it really just began with us the first day we just got there, we just started walking. We went to the library, we went to an African American cultural center that had a lot of resources, it was really a special time.

DOMINIQUE Just hearing you talk about dirt, I think one of the things that the production, and the set really did for me, aside from like, sort of breaking down, that not every play needs to happen in a home with a sink and a kitchen and a kitchen sink, um, was really being able to think about dirt, right? We get trapped, I think, in American theater, because we make things about homes. And when you make things about homes, at least for me, as an audience member, I'm always trying to figure out how people got this house, right? Like, what, what made it possible for you to get this house in the first place? Because there are a lot of systems that work and make it so some people don't have houses? And what does it mean, right, to even have a house on stolen land? How do these two things work in relation to each other? But by making this about the dirt, by making it about the land, which I think is so deeply entrenched in WEDDING BAND, it felt like, I was able to look at a lot of different things I was able to hear, because I wasn't having to contend with the history of a house, I was able to contend with the history of the land, in a way that is usually being, um, clouded out by the literal structures on stage. And I always thought that was super effective and interesting in a way to tell this story. And so I'm curious what are the models that get built? What are the sort of takes and design concepts that get built in order for you to land on the physical production?

JASON It's such a great question. And it's, it was such an interesting process, in that, I think we pretty early on boldly decided this is not about houses, to your point, Dominique. This is, you know, Childress is really writing about the land, and boundaries–personal, communal boundaries and personal boundaries and not about the specifics of the porch, necessarily. It's about the, you know, the human interactions that happen on a porch versus in a yard versus in a house, but it's not about the porch in the house. and then you have to start working through the play and seeing what you actually need to do the play. And we kept coming back to the bed, the bed, the bed. “Where's the bed going to go?” Because the bed is so important. It kept feeling like it was in our way, at the same time. Like the requirements of…the bed. Awoye, I'm curious what your memory of this is. But I feel like we kept talking about the bed and trying to figure out where the bed should be in the space and what it, what its relationship should be to the human bodies in the room. And it took us a while to kind of discover it. And I think we did discover it in the end. But when you have this initial clarity of abstracting and essentializing and distilling and stripping away. I think it's so baked into the American theater-making process of feeling like you need stuff to tell the story. And it's one of the many, many things I love about working with Awoye is this real kind of rigor, of like: okay, what do we actually need to tell the story and what do we not need? And that was a continual process of figuring that out both kind of through model building and, image making and storyboarding, but then also with the actors in the room. What do the actors need to tell their story in this story? And that's a different level of discovery, as well. And then when we're in the real space, and we have the real architecture of the room, there's another set of discoveries of what's needed. That part was challenging and rigorous and very satisfying to really distill down to the essential objects and spatial relationships.

AWOYE And I'll just add, Jason, because I remember…and Dominique, you remember, because you, you saw a number of different, of different versions of the…

DOMINIQUE Yes, those scenic decks.

AWOYE Yes. And at certain points, we had a platform that was Julia's bedroom because obviously that's an important space that felt like it required some sort of isolation. And I remember–it was pretty deep into the process, Jason, that we were trying to figure out what's the ground? Do we just embrace the ground of the theater? Do we create a new ground, And one day, we were just like: what if the whole thing is just the dirt. And then Jason goes away, in his brilliance, just adds a whole bunch of dirt to the floor and then puts the sweet grass, and then that's the world, is the dirt and the earth and the sweet grass. And I think that really unlocked something for us. That kind of came later, which is what is so beautiful about having a time to really go through all of the iterations of the design process. And that's why it's so exciting also to have Arminda on the team to also be a part of those conversations, so that we're all looking at the design from a lot of different angles.

DOMINIQUE I would be remiss–’cause y’all keep talking about the land, you know–if I didn't talk about one of the greatest moments of my life: when, when the water emerges from underneath the floor, and suddenly, we're in a very different space. But I would just love to hear the three of you–talk about the decision to actually do it, and why it felt important for design, why it felt important dramaturgically, why it felt important to really make the move with the water.

JASON The realization that we had to have water came early I think, and I'm not sure I could fully articulate why until we got a little further into the process. I just felt inherently that we were telling the story spatially through the elements of birch, and sweet grass and water. And that those were this basic building block that we needed to use. And then Awoye and I always talk about ritual, with the theater, just the ritual of people gathering in a space to share a story. And in this play, in particular, there seems to be some ritual built into the script, particularly at the end. And Dominique, I think you mentioned the transformation of Julia, kind of at the end, and the journey, which goes on. And after she helps Hermann die, she has this total transformation, at least that's how I think we interpreted it. And the use of, of real water and allowing her to kind of totally shift her relationship to the elements and…experience this, this pool, was a really important kind of dramaturgical…piece of the space, in order to kind of fulfill that arc of that ritual.

ARMINDA Yeah, I would agree with that. There's something about the process of staking her ground and her right to be in it, and her kind of taking over the space and making the space necessary for them to, see out their vows, but she cements that choice. And in the process, they've built this dream that hinges on water, right? This dream of, of leaving, and the water. And so as she evokes the image of this thing happening that's never going to happen, it also does happen. You know, because it happens for them. It's that speech act of it, right? They are on the boat, they are leaving. That is happening, and it's not just a thing she's saying to comfort him; it is a thing that is freeing him and freeing her. And the response to that water there's just there's something that breaks open for the audience and and for Julia.

JASON Yes, agreed. And I think, it reiterated the point that this is Julia's story, and that the death of Herman is not the end of the play; the end of the play is Julia's transformation, which we all probably agree is in the script, but I could imagine a version of this script being produced where the, kind of, climactic end is Herman's death. But putting this water ritual in really recentered the story around Julia, which I think is really important.

AWOYE
We knew…pretty early on, that after Julia kicks Herman's mother and Annabelle out of her house and out of her space, that she is no longer the person that we met at the beginning of the play. She herself is in the midst of her own transformation. And we knew that we wanted the physical space that we're all in to feel different after that moment. How can the space that we feel like we're in become a brand new space. And so through the scenic design, through the water, through the lighting, through the sound, I think that we discovered along the way how to create that space of transformation. And, to the point you're making Dominique also, we knew that the intention of our ritual is to create a space that Julia could go through her transformation, in order that we also as the audience can go through our own kind of liberated transformation. And so that integration of the water too, even though nobody was in it except for Julia, I think just the presence of that natural element helped energetically connect the audience even more inside of Julia's experience thus leading to hopefully everybody's transformation in the space as well.

JASON Yeah, yeah, yeah. Beautifully said. And you, Awoye, just reminded me of something that I love, which is that there was an earlier version of this where we imagined literally transforming the space by actually having like an automated shift of Julia's you know, bedroom to the middle – there was going to be this kind of big scenic moment of Juila's bedroom platform moving to the center of the space and the water surrounding her, and her sort of being a literal Island. And we had kind of a simultaneous conceptual and logistical realization, but the conceptual realization is the more interesting one, of…physically transforming the space is not the right story to tell. What we ended up doing, which I think was much more powerful is that the transformation of the Julia's character changes the rules of the space without anything physically moving, where suddenly what used to be kind of a bedroom yard, you know, shared space, becomes Julia's space. Nobody else can be there, except for Julia and Herman. And so we, we changed the rules of the space, just through how the actor inhabits the space, and how the actor–other actors can't, you know, breach this boundary now. And I thought that was so powerful than having some scenic gesture of, you know, literal transformation. And the water transforming the space was just enough of a kind of literal transformation without anything really moving, that I think it really ended up telling that story that we were trying to tell.

DOMINIQUE The sort of feeling of catharsis, the sort of feeling of transformation, the feeling of liberation is actually always present in the space even when we can't see it. Because it comes from the land, right? It comes from the earth. And I thought that was just so beautiful, that all the things she needed were always beneath our feet the entire time.

JASON I love that. Yeah, I love that.

DOMINIQUE Hey everybody! How y’all doing?

ALL Hi!

DOMINIQUE It’s so good to see your wonderful faces for this interview and conversation about making WEDDING BAND, aka, in my most humble opinion, the hottest show of last season, this season, and then every season thereafter. Awoye, I really want to hear about how you started to think about WEDDING BAND, um, sort of from reading it, from doing that first reading in 2020, and how it grew from that first read to what we saw on stage. AWOYE Something we discovered really early on is that there's four locations that we have to acknowledge: Julia's house, the porches, the yard, and then the world of Charleston. And so in every version, we had to think about: how do we articulate those four worlds, even though from the beginning, we knew that we didn't need to necessarily represent them in a naturalistic way. They just…their energetic presence had to be, had to be present somehow, throughout the course of the process. And we went through also, you know, a couple of different configurations of the space. The first design was a proscenium, and then it was a thrust but the opposite direction of how we ended up. And then we ended up in the long version. And what that allowed us to do is then figure out: okay, where's Julia space in here? How do the other porches and Julia's porch interact with Julia space? Where's the world of the yard? And then where's the world of the outside? And that kind of…inspired this sense that this, you know…we kind of have this idea of like concentric circles. And so that's the thing that really let us live fully in the space is thinking about those four universes.

BRITTANY I think in the doing of it, as an actor personally, I don't really care that much about, like, naturalism on stage. And so when Awoye said that it wasn't going to be necessarily naturalistic, that there would be four walls that were going to, um, you know, show us if that was her home, I was really excited about that. And in–emotionally, what it did was as soon as I entered the playing space, it really did feel like entering a boxing ring, in a way. And I never left it. And that was–I loved that, because it felt like the invasiveness that Julia feels was automatically there, because everybody was coming in and out of that space. But I was staying there the entire time. The challenge, I think, was that when we rehearsed it, we weren’t rehearsing in the space. So I know Awoye can probably also speak to this, but we never really got to practice with how long that space really is, until we got there. And then on top of that, there's dirt and there's a little bit of a rake. And so just just practicing, like the actual biomechanics, of walking around in that space, and how sound bounces off of that space, which is different than a rehearsal room, was a challenge. But it was a challenge I think we were all excited to take, it felt great to be in the dirt, and in that long venue, but you have to also reach the audience. And so that was a unique challenge that we were excited about, I think.

BRITTANY And there's a spirituality in the language. There's so many connections to something other than the world that we're on this plane of existence. So it made sense that it wouldn't be, you know, a kitchen sink kind of situation.

ELIZABETH Actually…it has no structure.

BRITTANY Right.

ELIZABETH It really has no structure. I did the play in ‘91.

BRITTANY And who did you play?

ELIZABETH I don't know.

BRITTANY (Laughter) Yes.

ELIZABETH But I'm only saying that to say…is style and things born of the times in which we're living? Not to take away from Awoye’s genius…but the play takes place in the backyard. Right?

AWOYE Yeah.

ELIZABETH We do not really go into any of the homes except Julia’s. And if you play it realistically, she is confined to a small space. The yard becomes very, very small. But if you fast forward to 2022, and when I first saw it, I didn't tell anybody in the room, I just said: wow, really? Really? Wow. Oh, grass. What? I didn't say anything. I just kind of, like: okay. Okay. But it blew it open in so many ways on all levels. I think Arminda and I were talking about this: it blew the realities, the various realities, the levels of realities. It allowed for the spiritual, the emotional, the dream state, the future state, the nightmare state. You know, it allowed for all of that. It was just magical…and you just had to go with it. I mean: okay, the bed is in the... Are you looking in the window? Where are you looking? Are you gonna fall in their house? We went totally with it. I just…it just was beautiful. It was definitive. And I, Dominique, I can really say without hesitation that this is probably the most definitive WEDDING BAND for the next 50 years. I can honestly, honestly say that. And I have a little bit of perspective.

DOMINIQUE I'd love to know, Brittany and Elizabeth, what did it mean to have the chance to really embody and to engage with this text?

BRITTANY Elizabeth, do you want to start?

ELIZABETH No, you go.

BRITTANY This was an incredible surprise gift getting to do this play. I don't know how much to go into, like the casting of it. Is that okay?

DOMINIQUE As much as you want, yeah.

BRITTANY Okay. So, because, you know, I’m part of CLASSIX, and so I knew we were doing this play and, they were having a hard time finding Julia and I was over here being like, “what about this person?” And “what about this person,” which in hindsight is hilarious, because it feels so much like something that needed to happen for me at this time in my life artistically. And at some point, I think Awoye, you were the first person to send me a message, because they thought I was busy with another project. And both Awoye and Arminda, I guess, on the same day were like, is Brittany busy? And then asked me and I said, “no, I'm free.” And this time, like, I really sat down and read the play and I thought: oh, this is this is mine. You know, not to claim ownership of it in too much of a, of a graspy way, but I really felt drawn emotionally to Julia but I also felt like it was just slightly out of reach. And for me personally, as an artist, that's the kind of thing that I want to be a part of. Something that I don't quite know how to do or what it is right away. There has to be you know, we have rehearsal for a reason. And I want to be able to have something that is–you have to reach for a little bit. So, going into it, I only–I found that I got cast maybe a week before we started. So it was all, all of the discoveries…. Three? What is that?

ARMINDA Three days. That’s three days.

BRITTANY Again, I’m so generous! [Laughter] Three days before we started. And so all of the learning…I mean, there wasn't…. I love doing prep; there was just not–that wasn’t going to be a lot of it. It was just reading the play over and over. Um, and the best thing that could have happened–other than being able to collaborate with Awoye and Arminda–was that every single actor in that space, I could tell, cared about this play. And we all were like: we have to dive into this. And were bringing themselves fully, and their own experiences. And I just…it was, it was all in the language, but it was just: how were we going to crack it open? So yeah, just, just, just diving into that was an incredible gift. And I feel–I can say definitively that it's the best theatrical experience I've, I've been a part of. I'm trying to think of specifics, just being able to have our Arminda have different drafts of the play, that we got to be able to look at. Being able to trust Awoye because I know her and, whenever I would get scared in certain moments. I remember a couple rehearsals being like: I can't do this. Like: this is just too much; this is not sustainable. And–but trusting her more than I trust myself sometimes. I mean, like I guess if she says I can do it, and I can do it. And having incredible scene partners who are all invested. I can't even speak enough about how important that is and doing a play like this.

ELIZABETH This was undoubtedly one of the best artistic experiences I've ever had. It was a gift given to me. And I appreciate it. It was art at its highest. We were all striving for the highest. We had…Awoye and Arminda had done the work, done the work, had a vision. They were caring, they were knowledgeable. They had a direction. They had a team where we're all together, going for a goal, with love, with respect, with amazing material. It was incredible on every level. You were cared for. You were cared about. And you were caring, and you wanted to give your all. It was just…incredible. You had everything you could possibly need. You had the vocals, you had the movement–Lord help us, Jesus. [Laughter] You had the stairs, God help us. [Laughter] And you know, you had it all. It was just…and the music! It was just stunning. And I had…I didn't realize…. I had originally thought: oh, Fanny's…Fanny’s funny. She’s just funny. Oh Ha ha. But the deeper I got into it…. She’s not–but she has so many levels. That was a pleasant surprise. Exploring all those levels. It was delicious.

BRITTANY I also feel like what you did so well, Awoye, that I really loved was the tradition that we had, of every single play, we said that this is Alice Childress’s WEDDING BAND. You know, we never…it never–yes, it was us coming together. But it was in service of Alice Childress, and I don't think any of us ever forgot that. And we were always constantly saying her name and bringing her to the space, whether it was Arminda bringing writings that she had, or just talking about, you know, her life or the circumstances of like actually doing what this…having done this play before and what the climate was. But we always were aware and honoring Alice Childress and I do feel like when you are doing things and you know, honoring something bigger than yourself, whatever that may be, and that collective we, we all agree on that, it elevates it. Like you want to, you want to step up to that.

AWOYE Thanks, Brittany. And you know, I'll say that ritual is a ritual I borrow from Ruben. I worked with Ruben on actually five different plays, but I think three August Wilson plays that's what we did at the end of every single rehearsal, before every single performance. It was very grounding. It just felt great to connect with everybody every single day, you know? Yeah, it was really beautiful.

BRITTANY It really did feel like a company in that way. In that it wasn't hierarchical, which I think a lot of rehearsal spaces can be, which I don't think is beneficial. Everyone's like: well, you go to a stage manager, if you have an issue, and then you go to like the director for every… you know, it was just this expectation that one person knows everything. As opposed to–I always felt like Awoye did know everything, probably, but that she was still in process, just like all of us were in process. And so maybe all of the time also, she wouldn't be the right person to ask a certain question to. Maybe it's Renee, for movement, or maybe we're talking to Andrew for voice, or Arminda. And that sense of staying in process as long as possible. And that that doesn't end when the show begins is not something that's just inherent in every show. I wish it was but some people are like: okay, opening has happened, this is the thing and this is locked in. But even when we'd circle up and we'd say the name of the play, we also always had, like, a word that was associated with what we were doing that day. And everybody always contributed to that. And I–what I loved was like, when we switched the blocking to me coming out by myself, which I was like: oh, no, because I…you know, we start–started it by myself and that was the right decision but I, I missed having everybody together. Tommy would wait for me, to tell he knew that I was coming on, and we would have a moment by ourselves of saying what do we want to do today? And I do think that that probably helped. And, like, we were always–had something that we were working on, and a goal in mind. And it really did feel a lot deeper, it really did, by the end of it.

BRITTANY I don't know if this is going to sound like it ties, but it makes me think of the concentric circles that you were talking about, Awoye. Because…I've never as an actor thought so much about how to share a piece with an audience. I've just never been a part of a process that…we really did talk about that a lot. And whether that was with you, or with Andrew Wade, who did voice, about how do you stay true to this play, and not try to dumb it down in some way, for the people watching it, but still want to share this play, and have them come into it. But also treating it like a new play, not like a play that has been around for as long as it has, even though it has because this is the first time a lot of people are hearing it. So how do you let the language really soar, while still having the connections to one another? It's just really interesting what this play asked of the audience and the company.

DOMINIQUE Thank you so much to Brittany Bradford, Elizabeth Van Dkye, Jason Adrizzone-West, and Awoye Timpo for joining us this week. And thank you all for listening. Next week we’ll dive into a conversation lead by Arminda with a company of directors to chat about directing Childress plays. Our sound editor is Aubrey Dube. The theme song was composed by Alphonso Horne. For more information on Alice Childress, please visit The Classix– with an x–.org and follow us on Twitter and Instagram. See you next week.