The Education of Dael Orlandersmith

At a turning point in her career, a poet-turned-playwright is still learning from her past

By Stuart Miller

The interview is winding down and playwright Dael Orlandersmith starts talking about her love of rock music and vinyl records. Realizing the interviewer is a sonic soul mate, Orlandersmith—whose new play Yellowman was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and will be seen in no fewer than five productions this season—impulsively decides that her next appointment can be delayed. She just has to show off one of her favorite East Village haunts, a tiny but comprehensive record store called Finyl Vinyl.

Striding into the store, Orlandersmith greets the owner with typical ebullience. (She even calls people she just met "dude" and "love.") There’s one other customer, but within a minute the gregarious Orlandersmith engages him in conversation, too. Given Orlandersmith’s penchant for expressing herself passionately, the idle chatter doesn’t last long, though. Almost immediately, the exchange metamorphoses into a debate. Was Jimi Hendrix a great guitarist but inconsistent songwriter who toyed around with too many styles, as Orlandersmith cheerfully contends? Or was he a masterful composer through and through, as this stranger argues with increasing agitation? 

Orlandersmith isn’t looking for a battle royale—she simply loves the give-and-take of ideas, especially when it gives her the chance to challenge someone’s preconceived notions and peel back their outer masks, revealing a more genuine emotional self.

Her theatrical collaborators will vouch for Orlandersmith’s straightforwardness and personal magnetism. "Dael is a unique and rare bird," says Emily Mann, artistic director at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, which commissioned Yellowman as well as Orlandersmith’s previous play, The Gimmick. "She doesn’t pull her punches."

"I’m in awe of her," comments Yellowman co-star Howard Overshown. "She is a very fierce, very strong woman, but at the same time she is so warm and has a lot of joy. She’ll cook big meals and sit and talk about art and music and poetry."

The 42-year-old Orlandersmith’s commanding personality comes across clearly in her plays. In the 1990s, her vigorous and visceral solo works Monster, Beauty’s Daughter and The Gimmick, written in lyrical yet occasionally brutal poetry and packed with piercingly vivid characters—all of whom she portrayed herself—garnered her a following in New York’s downtown theatre world. But Yellowmanhas elevated the artist to a new position. The work shares many of the concerns of the solo pieces—hurts suffered in childhood, being an outsider within one’s own race, mothers and daughters, poverty, the quest to escape one’s roots, the problem of men mistreating women—but, in a significant departure, it is written for two actors. Before even being produced, it garnered an AT&T:OnStage grant, the Kennedy Center’s Roger Stevens Playwriting Award and a Kesselring Honorable Mention, while lining up productions at the McCarter, Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater, New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre and Seattle’s ACT. Three Off-Broadway theatres vied for it, with the prestigious Manhattan Theatre Club landing it as its 2002-2003 season opener. "Yellowman will take Dael to the next level as an artist," says Mann.

If Yellowman is Orlandersmith’s first multi-actor piece, it is not the first time she has made a stylistic "crossover," as Philip Himberg, artistic director of the Sundance Theatre Program (where Orlandersmith spent two summers working on this play) points out: In 1995, she transformed herself from a poet performing with the Nuyorican Poets Café in downtown Manhattan into a writer of solo shows. Having started writing poetry in her teens—a time when, she says, she envisioned herself as "an actor, not a writer"—she learned to bring a theatrical flair to her readings during her four years with the Nuyoricans. But she was always "careful not to surpass what’s on the page," she says, and she speaks disdainfully of some of the Nuyorican’s pop stars of poetry, "kick-ass performers who were not great writers."

Orlandersmith’s own poetry is usually narrative in style, so it was not so much of a giant step to modify the structure and storytelling, initiate conflict and resolution, and end up with material in essentially dramatic form. The transformation began when she enrolled in acting classes, after dropping out of Hunter College. When she created characters for acting exercises and auditions, she was surprised to find that people inevitably asked who had written such strong pieces. "I was writing drama and wasn’t even aware of it," she says.

Orlandersmith continued to act, appearing in everything from Hal Hartley’s film Amateur to Romeo and Juliet at the Williamstown Theatre Festival to a Spin City episode. But she soon realized there were few worthy parts for large black women, so she began writing parts for herself, producing her Monster, Beauty’s Daughter and The Gimmick between 1995 and 1998. Though they filled an acting need, the three solo shows were more ambitious projects that, in some ways, synthesized all of Orlandersmith’s creative urges. A frustrated painter and rock guitarist, she strove "to write like a guitar lick or a slash of paint," she says. For her, early Sam Shepard works like Buried Child captured the vibe she was aiming at: "I wanted the shows to feel like a rock-and-roll concert."

The connections to art and music are not accidental—both art forms appear as motifs in all three shows, demonstrating, in Orlandersmith’s words, that "all children have an artistic streak, but if it’s not nurtured it can be destroyed." As she writes in the introduction to the Vintage collection of her solo plays: "There is a clarity within a child’s eyes that will be buried as that child goes into adulthood…I suppose this must happen for the sake of survival…. Yet despite all of that, all of us dream. Where do those dreams go?"

Orlandersmith herself has vivid memories of childhood. "As a kid I was aware of being in a kid’s world and of how adults spoke to children. They’d say, ‘You’re so bright for your years,’ but then I’d disagree about something and they’d say, ‘What do you know? You’re only a child.’ Sometimes I sit in Tompkins Square Park watching children play, and I’ll remember the weirdest moments. I can get mad about something that happened 25 years ago and want to kick somebody’s ass."

She grew up an only child and latchkey kid in the volatile environs of Spanish Harlem. "Heroin was at its height then," she says. "I remember people would carry an extra $5, in case a junkie came up to them, so they wouldn’t lose their life." The young girl grew frustrated early on, becoming "really angry" about having to travel below 96th Street for a decent library. "I remember thinking, ‘Why do I have to live like this?’" she says, and she sums up those Harlem years with the statement: "I always wanted to leave."

In her teens, she spent much of her free time in the equally treacherous South Bronx, where her best friend lived. But unlike many kids in her neighborhood, she escaped her world by trekking downtown to see The Who at Madison Square Garden and the Ramones at Max’s Kansas City, or movies like Last Tango in Paris at art houses in the East Village.

Books provided another refuge. Orlandersmith’s high school English teacher, Naomi Marks, nurtured the girl’s love of reading and urged her to try the unexpected, going against the curriculum to teach writers like Nathaniel West. "After listening to her, you wanted to go out and inhale books," says the playwright, who particularly remembers that the teacher "talked to me with respect."

Mrs. Marks’s name found its way into her 1994 work Beauty’s Daughter, which relates the struggles of Diane, daughter of the domineering, alcoholic Beauty, but also daughter of the seething streets of Harlem. Diane’s friend Papo is an aspiring writer whose teacher, Mrs. Marks, has arranged for his provisional acceptance into Bowling Green College. The only obstacle in his way is a final paper, which—undermined by his drunk mother, feelings of inferiority in the white world of a Barnes & Noble bookstore, and his need to get high—he fails to write.

Harlem is still an ominous place in 1996’s Monster—"a game of hopscotch means dodging used syringes"—but, in this play, the characters’ desperation turns violent. In a foreshadowing of Yellowman, the young Theresa is admonished by her grandmother "not to act like a nigger" and to "marry a light-skinned man." But the teen, who writes poetry and stories and listens to rock, is subsequently raped by a boy who clearly feels threatened by such "white" behavior. 

The equally anguished coming-of-age story in 1998’s The Gimmick—a tale of two childhood friends whose innocent relationship is destroyed by the temptations offered by the (white) art world—was suggested by director Peter Askin, who had staged Beauty’s Daughter. The two developed the piece together at Sundance in 1997.

Orlandersmith’s writing grew richer and subtler during the years she spent on the solo shows, but from the beginning she wrote with confidence and certainty. "I automatically know the story I want to tell," she says. Unlike writers who profess that characters have their own lives and surprise them, Orlandersmith says, "I guide them. I know where I want them to go."

For Yellowman, however, Orlandersmith suddenly found that knowing what she wanted her characters to do wasn’t enough. This bold and passionate story pushed Orlandersmith into new territory in several ways. "I make a conscious effort to challenge myself," she says. "This was the toughest piece yet for me."

Though she insists that her solo pieces are plays, with "a beginning, a middle and end," Orlandersmith acknowledges that Yellowman was written so she could shed the label of solo or performance artist. "It’s unfortunate, but people see it that way," she says, adding that the solo genre can easily deteriorate into a "huge confessional thing" better suited to therapy sessions. "A lot of theatres don’t even want to see a solo show," she says. "They won’t touch it."

So while a few theatres have cast other performers in The Gimmick, Orlandersmith knew her next play would have a longer life if she took the next step and wrote a multi-actor play. "She really needed to break out of the monologues because people thought that’s all she could do," says Janice Paran, dramaturg at the McCarter Theatre.

Apart from any artistic or commercial considerations, Paran says, the story in Yellowman demanded a second character. Departing from the home-turf setting of her solo pieces, Yellowman plunges into the Gullah culture of South Carolina, a remote world where descendants of West African slaves maintain a centuries-old dialect—and are scorned by light-skinned ("high yella") blacks for their dark hues and different ways.

What the play has in common with the solo works is its poetical language and its willingness to tackle rarely discussed subjects, provoking audiences to inspect their most basic assumptions. As the play begins, the protagonist Alma (played by the playwright in productions to date) speaks of men who "like my father…rode on top / always on top / they rode / they entered / they shot their seed / then left them." Orlandersmith has remarked that James Baldwin’s observation about people "who have made peace with defeat" describes many of her characters, and that certainly seems to be the case with Alma, who says, of the men who "shot their seed" and left, "My mother / women like my mother and her mother before her took it / ate it / accepted it as ‘one o’ dem tings dat mens does do to womens.’"

Alma’s counterpart is Eugene (played by Howard Overshown), her childhood playmate and later her lover—her soul mate whose battle with intrafamily, black-on-black racism sends the play hurtling toward its tragic conclusion. "He stood over me / Towering over me in all his blackness," Eugene says of his father, "And said with incredible menace, ‘Do you think I’d be more handsome if I was high yella like you?’"

Yellowman may share many themes with pieces like The Gimmick, but birthing this new work was labored and complicated. Orlandersmith toiled over the script for three years. From the beginning, she knew she wanted to write a Greek tragedy of sorts, a tale in which patricide is nearly inevitable. "She always knew the story she was going to tell, she just didn’t know the form," says director Blanka Zizka, who is also co-artistic director of the Wilma Theater.

Paran explains that at first, Orlandersmith tried avoiding her "stage poetry—the riffs and swoops and oral pictures" that seemed best suited for solo works. "It was a big, big hurdle."

But early attempts at traditional dialogue and scene structure failed and most of Orlandersmith’s initial script, written during a summer at Sundance, was later trashed. "Trying to wrestle her ideas into traditional forms was a really unsuccessful experiment," says Zizka.

It wasn’t until Mann suggested that Orlandersmith read Mann’s own 1979 Still Life—a multicharacter drama told through overlapping narration and monologues—that Orlandersmith found her way. "It showed her that she needed to be the kind of writer she already was, yet could allow another instrument into the ensemble," Paran says.

At that point, the Sundance Theatre Program took the unprecedented step of inviting Orlandersmith back for a second summer on the same play. "No one else had done that, but this is a very important piece," Himberg says.

Orlandersmith confirms that Sundance was crucial to her work on Yellowman, because the program gave her guidance and room to explore without telling her what to do. The first go-round, the playwright adds, was not a waste of time. "It was necessary to go and try it," she says. "I had to learn to say, ‘This is the way I write.’"

Having found her voice, Orlandersmith let loose, producing hundreds and hundreds of pages, which she then trimmed into a three-hour play. Zizka, Paran, Orlandersmith and Overshown then began shaping the piece for a workshop at the McCarter. "It was broad and not focused," Paran says. "There was a lot of cutting back, a lot of rearranging for greater emphasis or fleshing out a moment."

Orlandersmith gives Overshown, Zizka and Paran tremendous credit for their contributions to Yellowman. "Good writers think they saunter and the rest of the world walks," the playwright says. But this was a true collaborative process. "They sculpted this piece."

For his part, Overshown was impressed with how the playwright responded to his concerns. The original version of the final monologue, in his opinion, was too direct—it wrapped the play’s themes up too neatly, talking about hate and how the jailed Eugene was too sensitive for the real world. After discussions with the actor, Orlandersmith created a speech that focuses instead on Eugene’s memory of Alma in a lilac dress, wearing lilac perfume. The image of the girl’s "incredible softness," now lost forever, both haunts and nourishes him: "I said, ‘Alma you look soo good in that dress’… Why’d you have to look so good?" Zizka believes this final image, of the jailed man sustained by memories of love while Alma lives free in New York, sheared from her roots and dead in her soul, gives the play its lasting power.

During the time that the workshop was providing Orlandersmith the author with (in Zizka’s words) a "springboard" for rewriting, the artist was simultaneously trying to rehearse her role as an actor. Everyone was impressed by how she handled the juggling. "Her work ethic is superior," Overshown says. "She’d just say, ‘I need to marinate on that,’ then come back with something."

Even through the full production at the McCarter, Orlandersmith felt she was still getting her role down. It wasn’t until the show reached Philadelphia that she felt she and Overshown had "bone knowledge" of their parts.

After Yellowman, Orlandersmith wants to act in something she hasn’t written—but not, she notes tartly, in "Hollywood eight-inches-off-the-face soft focus" film roles. She also wants Yellowman to continue running after she eventually steps down from the Alma role. And she won’t appear in her next play, Raw Boys, which will feature three actors playing two Irish men and a Puerto Rican woman. (Don’t question why she’d be writing about Irish immigrants—pigeonholing Orlandersmith is the fastest path to incurring her wrath. "If Edward Albee can write The Death of Bessie Smith and Shakespeare can write Othello, why is it so farfetched that I’d write about Irish kids?" she demands, adding that she loves Ireland and has visited several times.) Shouldering the dual roles of writer and actor in Yellowman has just been too much: "Doing both has just kicked my butt."

Orlandersmith may have felt overwhelmed by putting together Yellowman, but she thrives on work, and her mind is always revving. Even when she’s watching one of countless rented independent and foreign films—she boasts that she has never seen fluff like Friends or Sex in the City—she’s no couch potato: She’s studying the actors and the way stories are told. 

"I’m always observing, always working," she says. "Last night I was hanging out with a friend of mine. I was playing the jukebox and I listened to the same song—‘Take What You Need,’ a Steppenwolf song—three times. My friend said, ‘Not again!’ But I said, ‘I’m not listening to it way you’re listening to it. I’m listening to the conversation the drummer was having with the guitarist.’" For Orlandersmith, the quest is to figure out how that interplay "can manifest itself in my writing."

Although people compare her writing to jazz riffs, she sees connections to rock and the blues: Keith Richards’s playing on the Rolling Stones’ "Stray Cat Blues" inspired parts of Monster, she says, and bluesman Elmore James influenced Yellowman. That musical quality, along with a knife-edge humor, gives Orlandersmith’s writing a snap that offsets her work’s burning intensity and grim worldview.

The same can be said of the artist herself, a vivacious and charming whirlwind with scattershot thoughts that sometimes just tumble out and deep, complex feelings churning beneath the surface. While discussing her Sundance writing sessions, she snarls about insular downtown New Yorkers who never venture beyond 14th Street, then veers into a wickedly funny tangent about "pathetic" single women owning multiple cats; segues into a putdown of people "doing the same work the same way for 40 years"; and emerges by praising innovative rocker Lou Reed. "He can always find something new to write about New York," she concludes.

An acquaintance might think that Orlandersmith would wither without conversation and human contact, but occasionally she spends days alone listening to music and writing. Sometimes it’s because she’s immersed in work, but at other times she just needs to withdraw from the world. Though past articles describing her as morbid are inaccurate, she says, she does have "a darkness" that causes her to turn inward. People who repress feelings—who "grin and bear it"—frighten and frustrate her. "They’re the worst. Human nature doesn’t work that way," she says. "People don’t understand that darkness is just as normal as light. There is creativity that comes from there. And I love that. I deal with darkness through writing. It’s a place where I need to be."

That darkness is at the heart of Yellowman, a roller-coaster ride of a play, which audiences immediately understand is heading toward a violent crash. The artists who have worked on it realize that the play’s inexorably tragic trajectory is likely to leave a certain amount of agitation in its wake. Addressing the damage wreaked by internal racism—and how it is incited by and does damage to all blacks—in frank terms is "going to be extraordinarily controversial within her own community, and Dael knows that," Himberg says, adding that it sparked argument amongst the Sundance Theatre staff. But he found that riskiness appealing, as did Mann. "Dael is fearless that way," she says. "She’s not telling stories to please."

She’s also not telling stories to teach lessons about race, however. "Dael is pretty adamant about thinking of herself as an artist telling a story," Paran says, explaining why Yellowman doesn’t delve extensively into the history of black-on-black racism. "She’s not interested in the educational or expositional."

Orlandersmith herself says she’s politically active in her private life but doesn’t want her work to become political, although her plays clearly condemn the way American society treats outsiders and have-nots.

And while the show does "stir things up" on a topic usually left unspoken, Overshown says the fact that the racism comes from blacks may actually help with mainstream theatre audiences. "It allows whites to look at racism without feeling attacked," he says. "They can absorb it and then think about themselves."

To demonstrate that audiences of all colors are connecting to the play, Zizka quotes an e-mail she received: "I’m left without the right words, but the show touched me so profoundly. I’m from a different background, but it had the same tangible sufferings that twisted my own journey."

This communication might help allay the concerns of Orlandersmith, who had, in fact, worried about whether the universality of the play’s themes would be clear. Every culture has its own internal racism, she asserts, pointing out that German Jews long disdained Eastern European Jews and (as she gives a funny, dead-on impression of an Italian American from Bensonhurst) that some Italians scorn Sicilians.

And she makes no apologies, even at post-play discussions, when audience members ask why the play is so bleak. "People want candy all the time," she says. "But I’m telling a story, not trying to be a positive role model. I’m not here to assuage the world."

She finds beauty in exploring the darker side of human experience, even the hate that—like love—is innate in everyone. "There is humanity within a bleak story," she says. "We find that humanity by exposing the darkness. I use language as a tool. Just the fact that the story itself is told—and hopefully well—is cause for hope."

Stuart Miller, who has written about theatre for the New York Times,Variety and other publications, is co-author of The Other Islands of New York City. He lives in Brooklyn.

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