Interview: Jarvis Green of LADY DAY AT EMERSON'S BAR AND GRILL (NCT)

Jarvis Green is the director and music director of North Carolina Theatre's Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill. This play with music explores events in the life of American singer Billie Holiday. Jarvis is the Founding Artistic Director of JAG Productions and a recipient of the New England Theatre Conference Regional Award for Outstanding Achievement in the American Theatre.

How did you first become interested in theatre?

I grew up going to church and, particularly in the Black church, there's a theatricality to it. I started singing in church and then my school librarian, who went to my church, told me about these various performing arts programs that could potentially be a good fit for me. She kind of connected me to some teachers and private studios and that's where I started performing.

How did you decide you wanted to become a director?

I never really decided that. It just kind of happened. I had been working professionally as an actor for about ten to fifteen years and then, in 2012, I ventured out into directing. I'm really interested in process. I kind of naturally transitioned into directing, working with various other companies and doing some admin things. It kind of fell in my lap.

Can you tell me a bit about JAG Productions?

It's a theatre company, based in New York City and White River Junction, Vermont. Our mission is to bring more compassion, empathy, and love into the world by telling stories that challenge hierarchies of race, gender, class, and sexuality. All of our stories are written by and told by and for Black, brown, queer, and trans folks and the people who love them. We are in our fifth season now.

One of the pillars of our organizations' structure is being an incubator for new works. Every year, we have a program called JAG Fest which happens in February. I choose three to five playwrights every year to come to Vermont to develop a new play. They get a week residency with professional actors, directors, and dramaturgs to develop new work.

We also have a musical theatre component to our work where we sort of adapt American musicals through the lens of 21st century Black America. We just did a production of NEXT TO NORMAL and we have some other American musicals that we're going to be adapting as well.

We do world premieres of new works. The last world premiere that we did, ESAI'S TABLE written by Nathan Yunderberg, was a co-production with the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York City. The goal is to be a national festival for Black playwrights and artists where they can come to Vermont to develop things and we sort of incubate it and then move it to the city.

Over the pandemic, we started a project called the Black Joy Project, which is a three-tiered project where for a month artists came and wrote a play and developed a methodology that can be used for classrooms and artists. We are working on editing a film after recording footage of the process of us doing this during the pandemic.

So JAG is my company and I'm very excited and hopeful for things that we're going to be doing in the future.

How familiar were you with Billie Holiday before working on this show?

Like most people, you're familiar with the things that our culture and society feeds us. It was mostly her voice that I was familiar with. I wasn't familiar with her story or her life. I think that also plays a lot into information that we get as a society about Black culture and Blackness, sowe don't have much information about her unless you really kind of dig. I didn't know much about her until diving into this piece.

Have you ever seen Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill before? What did you think of it as an audience member?

I saw the second preview of it on Broadway when Audra [McDonald] played the role. I remember being in high school and very fascinated with Audra and her work. I studied classically but I also did theatre, so I was really excited that there was a Black woman who was classically trained who was also doing theatre. When I saw the show, it was mostly about my curiosity about her being able to sing it because of her classical training.

The first twenty minutes was just me being in awe of the performance and then moving beyond that and really being mystified and saddened by and shocked by various different components of Billie Holiday's life and her story. I was moved by how funny Audra was in the show and how funny Billie Holiday was.

What's it like helping an actress put together a performance that's based on such a recognizable and well-known figure?

I think the biggest challenge with this piece, and any kind of biopic, is not necessarily trying to emulate Billie, but finding moments and things about her that one would want to hold onto for some character development. It's letting go of trying to be like Billie and creating and making our own version of her and staying truthful to that.

At the end of the day, it's a character and a person that we're seeing onstage and that's what people are going to connect to and not the effects or how closely one can sound like or act like Billie Holiday. I think with any sort of storytelling, it's about being truthful to the text and the character and getting underneath what she's trying to say and what it is that she wants the audience to hear. We're trying to find that rhythm and honesty and sincerity throughout the piece, not just mimicking who she was.

What are some of the challenges and benefits of working with such a small cast?

The challenge is that you don't get a break. There's no different scene or new actors or new setting. Normally, if there's a previous scene you've worked on, you can put that away for a while. But it is really just me and Billie and Jimmy that are constructing this.

For the actor that's playing Billie, it's a very vulnerable place to be because she's working through her process and the stage management and I are just sitting there observing. She's the one that doesn't have anyone else to feed off of. That level of vulnerability is difficult and the pacing of it is difficult. It's 90 minutes of her singing and acting and it's emotionally taxing.

Making sure that we find the joy in the text and in who she was is important. But the joy of a small cast is that I get to really learn who these people are. We really do get an opportunity to connect more in a way than you would if there was a bigger cast.

What's it like to be back in a rehearsal space after everything the theatre community has gone through in the past year and a half?

It's a joy! It's exciting. It's scary. I feel out of practice, but I'm super grateful and the energy in the space is lovely. There's something that I'm still seeking from coming out of a pandemic and going back into theatre. It still feels the same and that's great in a way that we're getting back to what we have been doing and what we love.

That break also makes me yearn for something that I haven't seen before. So I'm always challenging myself and the way I run my company. Not only was there a pandemic, but during the pandemic, it was a year of social unrest. I think there's a reckoning in the nation as a whole and in the American theatre and what stories are being told. I'm grateful to be back, but it still needs to be interrogated. New worlds and new systems and ways of working are still needed. We need to not come back like normal.

Do you think this show speaks to today?

I do. Unfortunately, it's the same story of how this country is anti-Black.

Why do you think audiences should come see Lady Day?

It's a really beautiful show. I think that Billie Holiday is an American icon and it's always great to add context to folks' lives and their contributions. I think a lot of people have woken up on a Saturday morning and played Billie Holiday. We get to enjoy that. We get to hear that voice and it does something to us and it gives us pleasure and joy.

It's important for us to honor and learn and know more about people that contribute to our joy, to our country, and our society. I think that folks will be moved, they'll laugh, they'll be hopeful. I think they'll leave the theatre singing her songs and I think they'll leave with questions too.

What advice do you have for aspiring directors?

The advice that I would give to folks that are storytellers is to have some type of practice that taps into their spirit and their soul, either meditating or writing or reading. There's plenty of institutions and academic spaces where folks can learn the business and technique of acting and directing. One needs to really have a deeper sense of self when you are acting and when you're tapping into these characters. Making theatre is collaboration. One does have to be really secure in who they are as a person and their contribution to the field.

Theatre-making shouldn't feel like just a job. Storytelling and theatre-making reflects humanity. It's spirit work. Theatre is like church; it's like really connecting to oneself. Having a practice of tapping into spirit and tapping into all the questions of what it means to be human is really important.

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