Signature Stories Volume 11 11 | Page 16

Spanish, the French, and so multiple languages were spoken on ships because sailors were an international crew. And so when Africans were enslaved they came into contact with numerous European (as well as African) languages, which they ingeniously fashioned to meet their needs; I wanted the play to have a feeling of the hybrid, of exchange, adaptation, appropriation. The docks of Bristol, In a word, the play is about graft: hard work, illicit gains, a nautical interweaving, a hybrid fusing. Rhode Island would have been, like all ports, worldly places, international portals. S: While the background of the play involves the slave trade, it has a number of other layers as well. NW: The play is about the Atlantic world, and the bodies that moved through that tremendously violent, productive, anarchic, experimental and fluid world. It’s really about how disparate people, from vastly different cultures, worked together across lines of demarcation and made these bonds – bonds that are mostly overlooked in mainstream history. The play, S: The Liquid Plain has an international cast of characters, and the dialogue includes several languages. What is the thinking behind that? I hope, also gestures toward early capitalism and resistance to NW: The Atlantic slave trade was an international endeavor, to regiment and exploit labor. I wanted to show the resis- younger cousin perhaps to the multinational corporations tance—whether through sex, alliances, language—to this new of today who ruthlessly pursue the most exploitable, most order from the “many-headed hydra,” the labor that gener- profitable labor, resources, and markets. There was the ated untold wealth. In a word, the play is about graft: hard involvement of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the work, illicit gains, a nautical interweaving, a hybrid fusing. this economic order. The port, the plantation, and the ship of the Atlantic world were the templates and laboratories of how S: In The Liquid Plain, as in all your plays, we see how history is actually built by the masses, rather than by powerful individuals. How does this alternative reading of history inform your work? NW: The best and most democratic institutions, the best and most democratic dreams that we have for ourselves as Americans, were forged by the people who had only partial rights to citizenship. And at the very center of these democratic dreams were former slaves, many only newly freed, who proposed and fought for, during the time of Reconstruction, free schools, libraries, indigent rights, labor rights. Historian Robin D.G. Kelley has written brilliant, critical studies about these histories of resistance, and his work has been a guide for my own for many years now. So in terms of looking at history from the bottom up, the best of what we have, and what we are still defending today, has come from those who had or still have the least. The agency, the creative thinking, the intelligence of ordinary, above: Naomi Wallace at the first rehearsal of And I and Silence. poor, and working people is something that has been and is continually buried, in exchange for the myth that we are powerless and left: Kimberly Scott, Danforth Comins, and June Carryl in The Liquid Plain at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 2013 that we need to look to those with wealth and power for leadership. opposite top: Danforth Comins in The Liquid Plain at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 2013. S: The Liquid Plain takes place during a transformative social and economic period, but the characters all have very individual wants and needs: love, sex, freedom. What role do these small acts of personal desire play in shaping the larger drama of history? opposite bottom: Roslyn Ruff and Delroy Lindo in Things of Dry Hours at New York Theatre Workshop, 2009. NW: Well, I see individual desires or the suppression of desire as inseparable from the social and economic order in which that individual lives. If you are reduced to being “hands” on a ship or, even more miserable, “hands” on a plantation, and that occupation is unimaginably brutal, then any expression of desire – for sex or freedom – is a revolt of sorts. And it is in that expression, however small, that hope lies for radical change. n In terms of looking at history from the bottom up, the best of what we have, and what we are still defending today, has come from those who had or still have the least. 15 16