RESIDENCY ONE
Suddenly I stopped talking ... and I started listening.
I just looked at him and I could hear very clearly,
“This will be good for you.” Just like when James
Baldwin said, “Have you ever tried writing for the
theatre?” One of those voices. And it cut through...
now it’s kind of on everybody’s Twitter feed. Revisiting this play now felt like, “Wow
this is going to be cool, there’s more to this than I remember. There’s a lot to this.”
It felt very current, it felt like I’d written it a couple of years ago. Because there’s
this part in the play, this thing where the man is talking about how he can’t breathe.
There’s a rope around his neck and he’s dying yet another death, and he says, “I can’t
breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.” And I’m just like, “oh, that sounds familiar...”
(this page) The cast of Father Comes Home from the Wars
(Parts 1, 2 & 3) at The Public Theater, 2014.
The play was at [Brooklyn Arts Center Association Downtown] initially. Then we
did another production at Yale. At BACA Downtown we had actors, we had brilliant
actors, but the learning curve was very steep. These folks were brilliant, classically
trained, downtown working actors – brilliant, brilliant, cool. The language of the play
was very hip-hop, rhythmic, poetry slam language. Not on a lot of stages. Not asking
actors to do this kind of stuff, so the learning curve was steep. Now, we just did auditions last month and got 11 amazing actors. Every actor who came into the room to
audition was down with it! They were like, “Ohh!” We were sitting there going,
“They totally get this!” Like no problem. Everybody came in with a familiarity and
ease with it. It was in their body, it was in their hands, it was in their minds. They
knew how to break it down. And I thought, “Oh wow, it’s like the world caught up in
a way.” And through suggesting that we do The Death of the Last Black Man in the
Whole Entire World, I think Jim wanted me to see that. That’s an incredible gift,
to see that the world caught up – not caught up to you, but caught up to this thing
you heard. You heard this and now we all can hear this. It’s very exciting. n
(opposite) Ruben Santiago-Hudson, James Houghton,
and Suzan-Lori Parks, 2016.
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