Risky Business

In a severe funding climate, writers Marcus Gardley and Germono T. Byrant keep their options open

By Terry Berliner

In the fall of 2008, I spent a morning talking with Marcus Gardley about his work and the challenges that he and his collaborator, 29-year-old Germono T. Bryant, have faced in seeking funding for their new musical Limitations of Life, based on the inimitable 1959 Douglas Sirk movie and the novel on which that film was based, Fannie Hurst's Imitation of Life.

Funding, the almighty stopgap, has deterred many a project-including this one. Bryant and Gardley, as a result, are now caught up in one of those on-again, off-again "open relationships" that seem inevitable for survival in the unpredictable world of the musical theatre.

That same afternoon I attended a reading of Gardley's remarkable piece the road weeps, the well runs dry at New Dramatists, the new-play-development haven on West 44th Street in New York City. Our discussion earlier that day and what I heard that afternoon reminded me that we, as a nation, still have very real issues to deal with concerning the color of a person's skin—which is why art that deals with racism and its far-reaching consequences continues to ring true in the 21st century.

I was happy I had spoken with Gardley before the reading, because after hearing his words out loud I was so full of music, poetry and drama that I ended up walking 30 blocks before I could adequately register what I had just experienced.

The 31-year-old Gardley will tell you that he writes "musicals" and "plays," but one would be hard-pressed to categorize the road weeps, the well runs dry—or any of his work, for that matter. This piece was labeled a "play," but it sang out with such force that it could as easily be classified as a "play with music," a "story with song," a "sung poem" or a "musical." The road weeps, the well runs dry is about a community of people gone astray, searching for a way to right themselves. The reading, featuring 14 actors under Chay Yew's direction, brought to life Gardley's world of 1850s and 1860s Oklahoma where an African-American girl has been impregnated by a Caucasian boy. The fathers of the couple are great friends—but they become enemies because society held (and still holds) onto its differences based on race. The play is of Greek-tragedy proportions, and in Gardley's imaginative realms—without a piano or a music stand in the room—words gave way to songs, or wails, or those soothing sounds one makes when lost in the cold darkness of night.

Over the past several years, Gardley—who had to leave his hometown of Oakland, Calif., to be taken seriously and garner support for his writing—has received nine commissions from such high-profile theatres as Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Conn.; Arena Stage of Washington, D.C.; South Coast Repertory of Costa Mesa, Calif.; Traveling Jewish Theatre of San Francisco; and Denver Center Theatre Company. Now based in Amherst, Gardley currently teaches a course on contemporary playwrights of color at the University of Massachusetts.

"There are so many avenues that haven't been explored with the form of the American musical," Gardley says. "The challenge for someone like me is to get funding from people who tend toward the traditional musical form. The culture around musical theatre is so Broadway-oriented—even Caroline, or Change was considered a risky musical. If it weren't for Tony Kushner writing it—someone who was already well-established—we would never have seen that musical produced."

Gardley adds his goals: "get people to look at new ways of talking about old things. To get young people in the audience—and to create theatre in ways that are attractive to them."

Of the three musicals in which he's currently involved, one project, three years in the making—a 15-woman a cappella show, This World in a Woman's Hands—has recently moved forward with funding from the Wallace Alexander Gerbode and William and Flora Hewlett Foundations' Emerging Playwright Award, the James Irvine Foundation and the NEA's Access to Artistic Excellence program. Created with Molly Holm and scheduled to be directed by Aaron Davidman, the show relates the plight of the women who worked in the shipyards of Richmond, Calif., building warships during World War II. Gardley's grandmother was one of those Rosie-the-Riveters, but the story is not about her. "It is about these African-American women who joined the labor force during the war and how they were marginalized and oppressed," Gardley allows. This World in a Woman's Hands will be given a workshop by Shotgun Players in Berkeley, Calif., this summer, with a view to a full production in the fall.

Gardley's affinity for the material is due to what he describes as an obsession "with history and myth." In This World in a Woman's Hands, the chorus is accompanied by the percussive sounds of sandpaper and munitions tools. Their music, Gardley says, "is their declaration: Since they created the world, they can build anything they put their minds to." His lyrics show a poet's sensibility, with idiosyncratic capitalization meant to draw out extra shades of meaning:

One seed in the hand of a woman
Can grow a world of men AND trees
Birds TAKE WING, CREEPY crawling things
Fish in THE sea, LAND OF GREEN
EVERYTHING IS HER OFFSPRING

"Because I grew up in the church and my father was a preacher, gospel naturally comes out of me," he notes. "But gospel, at its root, is the blues. Even deeper than that is field-hollers, which is a kind of call-and-response. When certain slaves were traveling up and down the railroad, they could pass code. It's very powerful. I like music that gets to the heart of the story without too much flourish."

Gardley attended Yale School of Drama from 2001 to 2004 (after which Yale Rep commissioned his first play, dance of the holy ghosts: a play on memory). He considers playwright Lynn Nottage, who teaches at Yale, to be his mentor.

"She is the reason I've stayed in the business," he says. "Because I didn't know there were certain things I couldn't do, I just started doing it, and I learned from that. Eventually I backtracked and read some books and talked to a really good friend of mine, the composer Scott Richards (Lloyd Richards's son), who teaches musical-theatre writing at New York University's graduate program. Scott actually sat down with me and taught me the format and craft elements of musical theatre. And now we are writing a musical together as well. It's in the very beginning phases; it's about the fight that took place in Zaire between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman."

Gardley's more immediate project, the aforementioned Limitations of Life, turns Hurst's original story inside out and tells it from the black maid Annie's perspective. Written in collaboration with Bryant, who lives in New York City, this new adaptation is significantly different from a previous, similarly titled version Gardley co-wrote with Richard Gray for Seattle's now defunct Empty Space Theatre. Gardley felt that in his first version, as in the book and the movie, Annie was underwritten. "Like many roles for black actors, hers was subservient and one-dimensional," he contends. "In my new version, Annie has passion, desire, faults and hope—she is written with full dimension."

And though he and Bryant have been working together on the show since 2005, the real work has yet to begin, because they have not been able to secure the funding they need. "Every year there's a roadblock," Gardley says. "Germono takes time off to do the music, and then his savings run out, and he has to go back to work—he survives by doing marketing and office work." Eking out a space for financial survival within the creative process is difficult enough, but for the two men, there's another clock ticking: They own the rights for the show, but the term on those rights is due to expire in a year.

Meanwhile, finding the right collaborators—a simpatico partner like Bryant—is essential. As Gardley says, "Surround yourself with collaborators whom you believe in and trust—and, most important, who have faith in the project. I wouldn't allow other people to give you feedback until you have enough material to warrant it. I find that if people give me feedback too early it will stunt the process. In the beginning stages, it is okay for people to come in and watch what we're working on, but we don't allow them to give feedback because we're still learning. We're still listening to the story."

New Dramatists, where Gardley is in his third year of a seven-year residency, gave him the first opportunity to explore writing a musical. "New Dramatists gives you money for a two-week working session with a composer," he says. From this experience, he learned that the smartest theatrical institutions support and nurture artists rather than single projects (even ones that might be judged to have Broadway potential)—that to invest only in one-off projects is extremely shortsighted.

"I hope there will be more funding for composers, book writers and lyricists to study musical theatre while creating their musical," Gardley muses. "An ideal situation would be that a producer would say—whether he or she wants to produce your work or not—'I see that you are talented. And you have a voice. I want to support that.'" Meanwhile, he's keeping his options open.