Swamp Baby was High Yella

When I started this blog, I was hoping to have discussions about the nuts and bolts of playwriting. I'm still finding my way towards that specificity. I am interested in theory and general principles, but hope to connect those principles to live work.

In that spirit, over the next few days I will detail specific choices I've made as a writer that were consciously influenced by my ethnicity (as generally discussed in yesterday's post). I do this in hopes that other writers might offer their own similar specific instances.

Before I begin, I'd like to be clear on a couple of points.

1) I'm not complaining. Navigating my mixed-race status in relation to my work and in relation to the concept of blackness is just something I have to do. At times I find it frustrating, at times in brings me great joy. So as you read the choices I've navigated, please don't read "forced to make" or "oppressed by."

2) I consider conscious choices in relation to identity, audience and marketing to be part of the artistic process. As I become familiar with other theater blogs, I notice that there seems to be a dichotomy underneath discussions of the artists relationship to the audience: either you're thinking like a marketer, or thinking like an artist. That is, either you're worried about numbers and what the audience likes -and are therefore not an artist. Or you're just working from your gut and putting out there what you want to see -and therefore are an artist. There are echoes of that in this interesting post on Paul Rekk's blog. This subject probably bears addressing in a separate post, but I wanted to make it clear: for me, these choices are part of the artistic process.

Swamp Baby was High Yella

You can read a blurb and brief sample of Swamp Baby here.

Swamp Baby began life as an experiment in adaptation. I was scanning short stories that were in the public domain when I came across Desiree's Baby by Kate Chopin.

The brief story details the courtship of the orphan Desiree and plantation owner Armand, followed immediately by their marriage and birth of their first son. After a time, it becomes clear that the baby is mulatto. It is assumed that Desiree - who never new her parents - carries the taint of African blood. Armand banishes Desiree from the house, and Desiree walks into the bayou to drown. In the final moments of the story, we learn from a letter that it was indeed Armand whose mother was black.

In the library book I was reading from, someone had scrawled "Ooooo .... not!" in the margin at the final revelation. I felt compelled to somehow bring the shock that Chopin intended into the contemporary world.

A brief perusal of college discussion boards set up by English teachers teaching the story supported my initial assumption - that young Americans considered themselves so "post race" that they failed (refused?) to see what all the fuss was about.

At this point, my project jumped the rails of adaptation and became interpretation. I wanted to start where the story left off - I imagined that perhaps the baby had lived through the ordeal in the swamp. Combined with the poem Swamp Baby by Cassie Sparkman, the play became an exploration of the Freak.

So my tactic was to raise questions about the connection between biology and identity, while removing direct reference to miscegenation and race. Rather than try and move through the preconceptions about race and identity, I tried to move around them. This had an interesting effect: Swamp Baby is probably my play that says most about my identity as a black person, but due to its subject matter it is not easily positioned as a "black" play. For example, I won't ever be submitting Swamp Baby to the Theodore Ward Prize.

Is the tactic successful? I don't know. Friend and contributor Shepsu Aakhu contends that I've offered the audience an "out." That by making the play about something so fantastical as green skin, I've allowed the audience to avoid confronting the reality of the situation. In feedback after readings, there are plenty of audience members who see the analogy to race - but curiously their responses feel academic. I've managed to get across that A comments on X, but some of the more disturbing implications of that commentary (the sexual activity in the play) are missed or ignored. It is almost as if once the initial connection to race is made, the audience feels their work is done, and can jump straight to "racism is bad" without considering what obsession with biological identity has done to both the protagonist and antagonist.

So I was drawn to create this play because I had a personal connection to the source material that I wanted to get across, and in the process have managed to obscure the question of racial identity in both the play itself and my ability to position it as a black play.