America’s first black serial killer. A not-quite love song to a favorite purple and mercurial fruit that doubles as a touching and insightful narrative of family relations. A series of unfolding scenes in Clarkston, Washington.
Seemingly worlds apart though they may be, these themes — and the insightful young authors who wrote them into being — will be united on the Long Wharf Theatre stage this Saturday and Sunday, when the theatre presents its inaugural Contemporary American Voices Festival. Partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the festival is “part of a continued effort to honor the past and look towards the future during the theatre’s 50th anniversary season.”
“The lifeblood of the American theatre is the creation of new work. New plays hold up the proverbial mirror to our times, offering us the opportunity to experience fresh perspectives and powerful new stories to enlighten and entertain audiences,” wrote LWT Marketing and Communications Director Steve Scarpa in a press release for the event.
The festival, he added, “revives a longtime tradition of public readings, once run by Gordon Edelstein during his tenure as associate artistic director.”
What that means for audiences is a sneak peek into the work of playwrights Julia Cho, Janine Nabers, and Samuel D. Hunter. Over two days, their current versions of Serial Black Face (Nabers), Aubergine (Cho) and Clarkston (Hunter) will come alive through oral tradition and talkback, a format endeared to LWT’s Associate Artistic Director Eric Ting through Edelstein’s artistic vision.
Nabers.
“Until a play lives in a production, you’re just hearing it. So this will be great. With every reading, you’re just … it’s not like a book. With a play, every actor will bring their own experience to that part. And then you learn more about the play. Plays are always kind of in flux, you’re still figuring out the play through the voice of the actors,” said LA-based Nabers, whose Serial Black Face folds the Atlanta child murders of the late 1970s into a what she calls a “a black Lolita story” that she’s always wanted to write.
The festival is also as much for the playwrights as it is for audience members and theater buffs. For Cho, who has written at Berkeley, New York University, and Julliard among other places, Aubergine was a much-needed opportunity to get back into playwriting. So too, she says, will the festival be a chance to immerse herself in process.
Cho.
“It’s the first full-length play I’ve written in a while and I feel out of practice and out of sorts. So it’s wonderful to be able to work with artists and friends I trust so much. The play was years in the making … I went through a fallow period punctuated by deaths and births. I didn’t write for a long time. But then Berkeley Rep asked me to join the Food Project, where they commissioned a bunch of different playwrights to write short plays about food. I said yes as a way to force myself to write again. That twenty-minute play about food was the beginning of Aubergine. And of course it ended up being about so much more than food. More importantly, it was the start of a journey that brought me back to writing again. And I couldn’t be happier that the journey’s now bringing me back to Long Wharf.”
That journey is important and deeply personal to Hunter too: in April 2016, LWT’s Stage II will put on the world premiere of his play Lewiston. That’s the twin to the one that will be performed this weekend: as pendant plays, Clarkston and Lewiston explore American towns built on the (sometimes misled) legacy of two known American explorers. In preparing for the festival, he is hoping to grow as both a playwright, a figure on the threshold of the contemporary American theatrical landscape, and a member of the New Haven theater scene.
“I think for me it’s a couple things.” he said in an interview with the Independent. “I started this ambitious project … It’s exciting for me to present it. A great way for audiences to get introduced to me, and for me to get introduced to them. It’s a great introduction to the theater itself … I’ve known Eric [Ting] for a long time, looking forward to getting to know the theater and the staff.
“I’m not sure exactly how I fit into the larger tapestry … but Long Wharf has had such a commitment to the life of the American play. I’ve always thought that the it has a huge impact on the landscape. In a broader sense, it’s great to be part of that tradition.”“
Ting added something with which all of the playwrights can identify, his enthusiasm crackling through the receiver in a recent interview with the Independent.
“From our perspective, the big thing is that were really excited to introduce these writers, and reintroduce Julia, to audiences. In the case of Janine and Sam, they’re two writers we’ve been excited about for a while. It’s going to be such an honor and a pleasure to share their work in New Haven. Gordon puts it best when he says ‘the value of contemporary voices writing in response to our time is the value of any writer writing in response to their time … They’re reporters and interpreters of a kind of zeitgeist of the moment. Each of them speak to where we are in very specific ways. People ask ‘why new writers.’ We’re hoping to answer that.”
Find out more about the Contemporary American Voices Festival here. Tickets are free.