Interview: Dael Orlandersmith Talks NYTW's FOREVER

It's a quiet moment, as a lone performer sits still on a darkening stage. It's also one of the most devastating moments in recent theater, as that performer, Dael Orlandersmith, recounts her rape as an adolescent in her own bedroom.

The moment occurs during Forever, Orlandersmith's memory play about her Harlem upbringing, her mother, her artistic inspirations, and the strands connecting them. The one-woman show, directed by Neel Keller, runs through May 31 at New York Theatre Workshop. It had its world premiere last fall at the Center Theatre Group's (CTG) Kirk Douglas Theatre in L.A. and was also presented at New Haven's Long Wharf Theatre before the New York production.

Forever opens in Paris' Père Lachaise cemetery, where a number of Orlandersmith's personal heroes are buried. Visiting the final resting place of Jim Morrison, Richard Wright, Colette, Chopin, Proust, Oscar Wilde and Edith Piaf, among others, Orlandersmith realizes her appreciation for their art and writing was instilled by her mother, Beula, a needy alcoholic who was physically violent with her daughter and did little to assuage her feelings of awkwardness and alienation. By the end of the play Orlandersmith's at another cemetery--the one in South Carolina where her mother is laid to rest, and where she begins to piece together secrets of Beula's life.

While Orlandersmith's earlier solo plays like Monster, The Gimmick, Beauty's Daughter and Stoop Stories draw from her real life, Forever hews more to memoir than they do. The writer-actor recently spoke with BWW about inspiration for this play and her work in general, and about her beloved cities of New York and Paris.

A note in the Forever program says your play was inspired by a documentary about Père Lachaise called Forever. How'd you discover that film, and what about it made such an impact on you?
A friend of mine who passed, Stewart Stern, the screenwriter--he's best known for Rebel Without a Cause--told me to watch it. And I just fell in love with it. The documentarian's name is Heddy Honigmann, and I did actually get her permission [to use the title] and let her know that I was not trying in any way to use her stuff. As a writer, when I go to Paris, I always go to Père Lachaise. Just going into that place, I'm aware of how my ideas were formed by people who wrote and performed. In this documentary you see people coming to see not just famous people but their loved ones. There was a woman in this documentary that I wanted to play. Her name is Michele. She's from Guadalupe, and she was married to a guy 20 years her junior. She said the first time she got married it was to have kids, but with him it was this passionate thing. They'd been together for four years, and they married, like, April of 2001, then he died that September--he was allergic to mosquito bites. So you see her watering his grave. I was taken with her; she was the one I wanted to play.

And that's the idea you presented to Neel Keller when he commissioned a play from you for CTG?
But Neel said, "No, let's write something else." He said, "Who introduced you to art?" And I said, "Myself"--egomaniac that I am, right? And then I had to go, "You know what? My mother did." And he said, "Why don't we write that story? And we'll have it take place at Père Lachaise." So we wanted to take both those stories and combine them. When you have real life and then the writer's imagination, it comes into something else and forms its own kind of theatrical truth.

The program note also says you "blended fact and fiction" in creating the play. Which parts are fiction?
I'm not going to tell you. It doesn't matter what it is, as long as the show is strong. [At a talkback with the audience] they asked me what was true, what was not. I said it's all true, it's memoir, it's a hodgepodge. It's not that I avoid the question. But if somebody wants to know, "Did the rape really happen? Did the mother really hit?" they're just looking at a point as opposed to looking at the piece as a whole. That's no longer about the play; that becomes perverse voyeurism in a way.
I'm going to talk to you as a character. I said it's semiautobiographical, because I don't want the theatricality to surpass the life stuff, nor the life stuff to surpass the theatricality. Boundary's a great word. Even if I'm not writing directly autobiographically, it is autobiographical in that you get a sense of how someone thinks, and what interests them. So certainly the things I talk about in the play did happen, but it's my take on certain things--the way I feel. If my mother were alive, she'd have a totally different take on this.

You mention many of your idols and influences in the show. Who would you say are the top three for you?
You can't do that to me! Three, that's a hard call.

Well, if you need to go to four or five...
James Baldwin's definitely up there. And I'd say...Toni Morrison. Jim Morrison. And I would say Patti Smith.

What did you get from each of them?
James Baldwin gave me a sense of possibility. You read something like Giovanni's Room--it's amazing that was written in the '50s. When I read [about him]: "Black writer, black writer..." He's a writer; he's human. He said he had to leave the States in order to be a writer. And I get that. He became a citizen of the world, and that's what I aspire to--that's what I think I am.
Toni Morrison, her use of language is incredible. She's brilliant.
Patti Smith, [it was] realizing you could write about certain things that are deemed "masculine," whatever that means. I could write about anything and do anything. Her sense of androgyny is great. I'm not a conventional woman either, in terms of how I live my life and stuff.
And Jim Morrison, there was an androgyny. It's weird: Even though he was totally sexist in real life, rock & roll is a very androgynous medium. You get these guys: "'Chicks can't play guitar,' 'Give me my eye shadow' in the same breath." For a 27-year-old man to write what he's written...it was good for a 27-year-old.

Have you been on the other side of the equation--the one who's influenced and inspired others?
I've heard people say that I have. I get weird about that. I hope that I do, but I want to speak to people, I don't want to speak for them.

What has been your experience when you've performed overseas?
What's cool is that despite the language, the work is universal. I've had people come up to me and say, "I'm not black, but I relate to this." That's fantastic. Or someone didn't know that this went on, and they are like, "Oh, wow..." I love performing abroad. What I'd love to do is live between the States and Europe.

Where does the universality come from?
I think it's universal because it's the human condition. People know what love is, they know what hate is, they've had good parents, they've had bad parents... You can't be that myopic within your thinking. I don't know what it's like in, say, Nepal. But in a way I can tell because I remember St. Nicholas Avenue in the '70s looking the way it did; I remember the riots of the '60s; I remember the collapse of buildings in Newark. So I may not be in Nepal, but I can understand what they're going through. People are not used to hearing a black woman talk about rock & roll. Somebody was telling me, "I can't believe that you listened to the music you listened to where you came from." And I said, "Well, white people listened to blues." Had it not been for blues, you wouldn't have rock. Lack of integration mean retrogression; retrogression means extinction.

In the 20 or so years you've been working in New York theater, it's gotten a lot more expensive and commercialized--and sanitized. As has all of downtown. But you've remained loyal to "downtown theater," both as a place to work and as an aesthetic.
I'll work anywhere. Having said that, this play totally suits downtown. I have seen great work downtown that would not get done anyplace else. The flip side is: I've seen people so concerned with being quote-unquote avant-garde that they managed to isolate other people, and that's screwed up as well.
Change is good...I'm not one of those people who dwell in the past, 'cause when people look at "back in the day" they tend to romanticize it and make it more than what it was. Having said that, I'm realizing the rich have in fact taken downtown, the Lower East Side. I live in Alphabet City. It's really weird to see nannies on my block. A while back these girls were sitting outside at a bar-restaurant on my block, and Dael was being nosy... Are you aware of a speech pattern where people talk like this [voice goes up] and everything sounds like a question [she does it again]? This speech pattern has developed within the past, I'd say, 20 years. Disgusting, isn't it? What happened was this girl was like, "[Speaking in that speech pattern] Guess what? You guys are going to hate me? But my mom bought me this dress--it's, like, so expensive." And the girls are like: "Tell us. Two hundred dollars?" "No." Actually, they say "No-ah" now. "Three hundred?" "No-ah." I stopped what I was doing and pretended I was looking for something. The girl said, "My mom bought me this Miyake dress, and it was, like, five grand." And I probably looked like a black version of Linda Blair in The Exorcist, the way my head whirled around. Five grand for a dress? As she was saying this, I was aware of a guy that I knew who passed by--who's a painter, and a damn good painter--who was too much behind in his rent. That kind of greed, that lack of looking at other people and their circumstances, that bothers me. That's just vulgarity.

Besides your own work, what arts do you partake of here in New York?
MoMA. Metropolitan Museum. I do yoga. I go to the theater. I don't go to Broadway, because there's nothing on Broadway I particularly want to see, for 200 dollars. I was halfway trying to play guitar when I was younger; I want to get back into it now. And I do wish I could paint...that I was a painter.

Have you done it for fun?
It looks ridiculous!

Do you go to Paris every year?
I haven't been in a couple of years, man! At one point I was going every other year--it was really great. Then I couldn't afford it; I was going through a hard time financially. The next time I go, I want to go to Charleville. That's where Rimbaud was from.

Photos of Dael Orlandersmith in Forever by Joan Marcus