BWW Interviews: Playwright Dominic Taylor Talks Penumbra, Black Theatre, I WISH YOU LOVE and Nat King Cole

Only moments after meeting Dominic Taylor, the playwright behind Hartford Stage's current SummerStage offering I WISH YOU LOVE, I felt like I was caught in a current.  With only a few moments set aside to get to know him, I found myself jumping in head-first into African American theatre history.   The Associate Artistic Director of St. Paul, MN's Penumbra Theatre, the producing entity behind the touring Nat King Cole drama with music, Taylor is both youthful with chic threads and funky dreadlocks, while seeming like an old soul.  His knowledge of Black Theatre in the United States seems encyclopedic and he easily references names and colleagues that are greats in the field like August Wilson and Ntozake Shange. 

A few times during our half-hour chat, I was in over my head trying to keep up with Taylor's jazz-like flow.  He would riff on one theme during an answer and then glide over to a related tangent, returning to the theme and expanding on it.  In the end, I only asked a few questions and received very rich, complex and lengthy responses.  Passionate about his place and role in culturally-specific theatre at Penumbra, Taylor takes his job seriously.  And although I tried to take my job seriously and transcribe him accurately, I am sure while receiving an education on black drama I've missed a few of the terrific notes he was sounding.  For that, I offer him and you my apologies.  Herewith, I offer you my conversation with I WISH YOU LOVE playwright Dominic Taylor.

TELL ME ABOUT HOW YOU GOT INVOLVED IN PENUMBRA THEATRE?

Originally I knew who Penumbra was when I was living in New York.  I knew who they were.  I knew who Lou Bellamy (Penumbra founder and Artistic Director) was.  Carlyle Brown (the playwright behind The African Company presents Richard III, Buffalo Hair), Marion McClinton.  I would send Lou plays.  I knew Lou when August Wilson made a call at the TCG conference.  August Wilson gathered an illustrious group at Dartmouth, in I think 1995.  All of the playwrights I read were there.  I was living in Chicago and I got a call from Victor Leo Walker, who was organizing this thing for August.  I had been nominated by somebody, Paul Carter Harris, I think.  They wanted me up there to participate as a playwright, as a thinker.  When I got there, they broke up into different groups.  I was put in Aesthetics with August Wilson and Paul.  We were arguing things.  At the end, we presented papers, you know, ideas.  I had an add-on to my paper, like an addenda.  It sounded like my dissent.  I did this and Lou, at that time, said that I thought about a lot of interesting things and we stayed in touch.  We talked about projects.  When Lou came out to direct to New York to direct Two Trains Running for the Signature, he asked me if I knew anyone who would be interested in being Associate Artistic Director.  I gave them a list; my name wasn't on it.  He asked me out to dinner with Managing Director Chris Widdis and they asked me if I wanted the position.  I said I didn't know and I had to think about stuff. I didn't plan on moving to the Midwest, again.  One of the things that is important to me is to work with an African American-specific organization.  Douglas Turner Ward, founder of the Negro Ensemble Company, said since the 70s, there have been so many African-American theatre companies that started and a lot have gone away.  There were 210, 220 African-American theatres and now there's a handful.  Now there might be 10 or 12.

WHAT DO YOU ATTRIBUTE THAT DECLINE TO?

I think there are a lot of things.  It is hindsight for me to talk about these institutions.  When you are making culturally-specific works, you are challenging people and what they know.  A big portion of the theatre world makes work that affirms.  Work that is challenging is an add-on.  When you take a classic like For Colored Girls... and people are like "Is it a play or a poem?" or The Colored Museum by George C. Wolfe, people have their aesthetic challenged.  You go to a funding community that doesn't want to be challenged.  The other sad, problematic thing is that a lot of the theatres were funded by SITA grants or the Ford Foundation.  It was granting to offer jobs, not a WPA thing.  The thinking was that this money was going to continue.  At the start, a lot of these organizations thought the funding was going to continue.  I don't think the funders reneged; they weren't going to fund in perpetuity.  But, I always get back to the making of art.  When I get back to me, I want to help Penumbra have the stability to make art.  I'm going to give you a Picasso quote: "Art isn't the Truth, art is a lie that helps us realize the truth."  How do you make this lie available on multiple levels while keeping the core of the African-American specifity?   It's your gyroscope.  If theater is cultural food, what are the particulars that make this food operate?  They do it in music, whether or not you do it in call and response or in 4/4 rhythm.  James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone they are a culturally-specific thing that manifested itself in music or great art.

You have to continue to frame the work, frame the discourse so you can keep the money coming, keep the funders and keep the work significant.  That level of significance resonates past the moment of the play.  I Wish You Love is a play that got developed in that way.  A woman saw it in St. Paul and said she was never going to listen to "Mona Lisa" the same way.  Isn't that what theatre is supposed to do?  The protagonist-antagonist dialectic in most Western theatre doesn't exist in Black Theatre.  When you look at canonical work like Raisin in the Sun, you look at plays and say, "Who's play is it?  Is it mama's play?  Is it Walter Lee's play?"  Why would we do fill-in-the-blank play written by some black author that some white theatre developed?   The question is the aesthetic question.  What is that play trying to do?

DO YOU DEFINE YOUR AUDIENCE AS A BLACK AUDIENCE?

Although we are in the sixth whitest state in America, we make plays that are for a black audience.  But everybody has a point of entry.  James Brown made music for a black audience, but it crossed over to all audiences.  Everyone can sing "I Feel Good."  African American playwrights want to know why their work is not considered or done at Penumbra.  The conversation you are trying to have in your play is for a white audience.  What we are often trying to do is have a conversation in a black world with a black audience.  You will find those plays where you will have a mostly black cast with a white character who has all good qualitites, gets the objects people want, helps people move in the world in a way that for us is less interesting and less challenging.  We do have those conversation, but it is not the same conversation.

WHO HAD THE IDEA FOR I WISH YOU LOVE?

Lou asked me for a project for Dennis Spears.  We have a company of actors and every show has a company member, but it is not a repertory company.  Dennis had done Blue for us.  What Dennis wanted was to become a better actor.  Lou cast him as Whining Boy in The Piano Lesson and shortly after that , Lou was wondering about a play that could combine the singing thing and his acting and deal with the things that we as a theatre company think are important.  Dennis asked me if I knew Nat King Cole.  My father is a huge Nat King Cole fan.  We listened to him every Sunday, so I really knew Nat Cole.  I really was into dealing with the projected image of this black guy and the question of "Was he political or was he apolitical?"  My father told me about this Alabama concert.  I thought about TV and what gets projected and what doesn't get projected.  It was about this image.  I asked Lou if we wanted to use the name Nat King Cole in the title.  I said I almost don't want to use his name in the title, but in 1957 there was only one black man on television - Nat King Cole.  His television show started as a 15-minute show and then all of his friends came on the show and worked for scale - Frankie Laine, Harry Belafonte, Peggy Lee.  In an early version of the script we had those names in there, but we took them out so we didn't have a cast of thousands. 

We decided to use the commercials from the show.  It was surprising how white those commercials were.  The piece started taking shape as we had Nat King Cole's projected image, the commercials and the news of the day.  We had the tension between those three and how they operate.  In the first stage direction, the TV gets turned on.  There is a sound cue that happens when the anchor comes on.  Its one of those things that I've gone back and forth on.  Does it take away the end of the act and the end of the play if the audience anticipates that there is a pop and the TVs frizz out?  Would it be leading or whatever?  It's fine.  The gap between what you envision and what you get onstage is different.  Sometimes you get more.  The video made at the end of each act was made early.  That was a long conversation, too.  I was putting together stuff and I showed Lou.  I asked Lou if we should use still images as the live images are so harrowing.  I played Nat's "Let There Be Love" with the video and he loved it.  I thought it was going to be too harsh, but they thought it was fine.  At the end of the play, it is still images.  It was what was going on in 1957.

Part of what I want to do is juxtapose that song with those things that were going on in the world that he lived in and that those two things existed in the same plane of time.  Young people come to the show and they cannot believe that that could have happened in America.  The noose Nat gets in the box - he got a lot of nooses, feces; he literally received a lot of these things when he was on the air.  He lived through a lot and he smoked a lot.  It's what killed him.  One of the commercials we could not get the rights to was cigarettes ads.  

I Wish You Love runs at Hartford Stage now through July 24.  www.hartfordstage.org

Photo courtesy of Penumbra Theatre

 

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