All Over the Map

“I don’t know a way to write about American experience or American history that is just about white people,” says Naomi Wallace. “Not only does it not interest me, it masks the fact that white identity has been built on violence, on slavery, on racism. To be white in this country is to accept privileges that you have because they have been taken away from others.”

Wallace, who is white, knows that writing across race is politically precarious; however, the acclaimed playwright has consistently taken on the challenge. Her first play, War Boys, included a half-Latino character participating in the “Light Up the Border” campaign that targeted illegal border crossings by Mexican workers. In the Heart of America featured an Arab American who falls in love with a fellow soldier during the first Gulf War. Things of Dry Hours, now receiving its world premiere at the Pittsburgh Public Theater, involves a white steel worker on the run from the law who hides out in the home of an African American man and his daughter in Depression-era Alabama.

“As a playwright, I think you need to take responsibility for the kind of roles you are writing and for whom,” says Wallace. “There’s a history of whites writing black characters for the stage and it’s pretty disgraceful.” However, that does not mean it should not be attempted: “I think we’re so often afraid of failing,” says Wallace in regard to writing about people of other races, “but maybe we need to listen more and to think about how we have become deaf to hearing other stories and other histories.” As in the majority of Wallace’s plays, race and class collide in her latest work; the encounter between the white steel worker and the African Americans who give him refuge is anything but simple. “He puts them in danger just because he’s there,” says Wallace. “Because of the Jim Crow laws at that time, black and white people weren’t supposed to be together.”

Wallace has spent the last five years researching Things of Dry Hours, which was inspired by Professor Robin D.G. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe, a historical study of race, class, and communism in Alabama that focuses specifically on the roles played by African Americans. “What interested me was the courage it took for these folks to dream of and work towards a truly different kind of America,” says Wallace. “I don’t think there’s much written for the theater that looks at the Communist Party in anything but a derogatory light, which is what makes the theater audience — mostly upper middle class — feel most comfortable. But these people really had a different vision of how we could live together and work together, and I wanted to explore what fired their imagination.”

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The devil entered New England through the person of Cotton Mather — at least, according to playwright Amy Freed. “I think he sold his soul,” she says of the 17th-century minister who is best known for his role in the Salem witchcraft trials. “And I hold him responsible for the terrors of the invisible world that have walked on American shores ever since.” Safe in Hell, the playwright’s new comedy now having its world premiere at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, centers around Cotton Mather and his father, the renowned Puritan preacher Increase Mather.

“The essence of the relationship is about having a parent who seems like the real thing and a child who feels like a fraud,” says Freed. “There are huge, complicated rivalries and distresses between father and son. And it’s not my fault if it sounds like the Bushes. It just does.” Freed began writing the play in 1992; she does not avoid connections to contemporary politics but that is not her focus: “The play is a spiritual history of what I think are uniquely American themes that have to do with the diminishing role of conscience in civic life and the ever-present tension between spiritual and secular aspiration.”

Freed is best known for The Beard of Avon, an irreverent speculation on who might have written Shakespeare’s plays if not Shakespeare himself, so it’s not a big surprise to discover that she has taken some liberties with historical sources in writing Safe in Hell. However, the playwright has engaged in meticulous research on the period and the people involved. The incident that sparked her idea for the play was the hanging of a minister accused of witchcraft: “It became a momentous hanging because, on the scaffold, he began to recite the Lord’s Prayer. The crowd started to freak out because he shouldn’t have been able to do that if he was really a wizard. Cotton Mather quieted the crowd and pushed the hanging forward to its conclusion.”

Any play that concerns the Salem witch trials is sure to bring up comparisons to one of Arthur Miller’s greatest works. “In order to follow in the great big wooden shoes of The Crucible, I felt that the play had to be after something quite different,” Freed acknowledges. “For me, the big difference is that I’m upholding the Puritan metaphysical world from the standpoint of believing in it. It’s sort of, ‘What if it were true that there are malevolent and invisible psychic or spiritual forces that use people to do things?’ It’s less of a secular play and more of a metaphysical nightmare fairy tale.”

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“I’m always interested in the faces and some of the stories, whether real or imagined, of black people and also gay, lesbian, bi, and trans people,” says Letta Neely, the poet and playwright whose Last Rites is currently receiving its world premiere in Boston as a co-production of The Theater Offensive and Neely’s own Wildheart Press. “That way of mirroring in the imaginary text was not available to me as a lesbian or as a black individual. I don’t want any children to grow up without having seen some piece of themselves and marked it as valid.”

Neely’s play revolves around a group of friends, all of whom are black lesbians. “They are exploring the terrains of cancer, of substance abuse, of betrayal,” says Neely. One of the central metaphors is basketball: “It figures into the lives of the characters because it’s one of the truer stereotypes of butch dykes — in my experience, at least. One of the places where butch dykes can be freest is when we’re playing sports. This is how we get out some of our aggression, how we get out some of our joy, how we touch each other to show that we care about each other. Any number of things.”

Last Rites is directed by Brian Freeman, a founding member of the cutting-edge black gay performance art group PoMo Afro Homos, whose pioneering work during the 1990s was always subversive and full of humor. “It’s such an honor to be working with him,” says Neely. “He’s very tough and very gentle at the same time. He’s able to cut to the chase in the writing in ways that I can’t always see. As a playwright, you really need someone who’s going to be able to do that for you honestly.”

Neely describes her play as “a darkroom comedy.” She explains: “I grew up in a Black Nationalist household and this whole light/dark dichotomy has always bugged me — that dark means everything is bad and hideous. I wanted to play off the term ‘dark comedy’ but not demonize the characters. The concept came because of what happens in a darkroom with photography. You go into this place, go through an entire process, and come out with a picture. Something becomes evident.”