Signature: There were also several historical milestones on your mind as you were writing the play. RT: In knowing when this production would happen and in looking at the different things that are happening this year – we have the second term of an African American president and we’re looking back on the anniversary this year of the March on Washington. Significant changes in this world are happening in terms of technology, but social changes are as well. I’m looking into the future, with Mr. Ames trying to hold on to what he knows and what he’s willing to let go of in order to hold onto that. Knowing that there’s a need to adapt and with all things there is a resistance to change until it is forced on us sometimes. Mr. Ames starts questioning his workers to see who can survive this change. He is also having to question himself in that process as a businessman, a man, a husband, a father, a human being. Everyone is over thirty-five in this company, except for one person, J, who is the janitor. He’s nineteen years old, semi-literate, but very tech savvy, more so than anyone else in the office, which leads Mr. Ames to start looking towards him as a way to solve the problems of his business. The only problem is that Mr. Ames holds onto books, loves books for the way they feel, their weight, their smell, the texture of the page, and its contents – a vessel that holds memory and history. The young man has no interest in history; he is only about the present moment and the future. So Mr. Ames has to try to negotiate how he might embed himself into the future. What we get into ultimately is science fiction, and I find that really fascinating. I love the work of Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane, Wallace Shawn, and I found my experience of that in the world of theatre rare in terms of African American perspectives. I go to Octavia Butler as a prime example when it comes to books, or Samuel Delany or George Schuyler in writing Black No More, even W.E.B. Du Bois in that type of Afrofuturist perspective, and I’m having a wonderful time exploring that with this play. Signature: Tell us more about the people of this world. RT: The people who are in this world reflect the world that we live in and I wanted to make sure that was in my consciousness as I was writing this piece and that you have people from different walks of life, genders, sexuality, nationality. As a writer I’m recording what I’m experiencing in this world and sorting that out through my perspective. With this piece then, who will people my world? And making sure that it was inclusive of what I see. Signature: You talked to people in the publishing industry to research this play. What did you find fascinating or disturbing in those conversations? RT: I think there are in some instances a great deal of fear of change. A fear of being left behind, that one is obsolete. Or a fear that we’ll lose our values, we’ll lose ourselves as human beings. I think that these are things that have been questioned across the ages. When books came to be present, replacing oral tradition, people were saying the same thing - our brains will atrophy being locked up in a room with a book, and we will lose that sense of community, we’ll lose our humanity. I think we’re now in a major trajectory of change in this country, in this world, in talking about identity and place, it’s so wide open. Before, you would stay at a job for thirty-five years until you retire, and have this one home. A generation is coming out of college right now, going “I’m probably going to have twenty-five jobs in thirty-five years.” People look
l to r: John Earl Jelks in Magnolia, 2009; Paul Oakley Stovall, Chester Gregory, and Shané Williams in Drowning Crow, 2002; Karen Aldridge in The Trinity River Plays, 2011.
19