The
of
AN INTERVIEW WITH NAOMI WALLACE
Over the past 25 years, Signature Residency One playwright Naomi Wallace
has established herself as an utterly original, inventive, and essential American
playwright. Her work blends the political with the sexual, the natural with the
otherworldly, the tender with the violent—all while avoiding feeling didactic or
confrontational. Her plays are also mordantly funny, and brimming with hope,
despite tackling thorny issues of race, war, and gender head on. Though she has
won countless awards and been produced by companies like New York Theatre
Workshop and The Public Theater, Wallace’s plays have sometimes remained on
the fringe in America, finding favor with small theatre companies and university
theatre departments eager to challenge their audiences. In Europe, however,
Wallace is a major presence, having been produced at several large theatres
such as the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal National Theatre, and the
Comédie-Française, where she is known for being the only living American
playwright to enter their permanent repertoire.
Between auditions for And I and Silence, the first of her three Signature productions,
Wallace sat down with Literary Director Christie Evangelisto for a chat about untold
histories, the power of language, and the flipside of the American Dream.
Signature: Where did you grow up?
NW: I was born in Kentucky. My mother is Dutch, from a working class family in Amsterdam. My
Dutch family was involved in the resistance against the German occupation. My mother met my
father in north Africa. He was a journalist and she was traveling with some friends. My father
convinced her to live with him and raise a family in Kentucky. But my mother was a city girl,
politically active since she was a teenager, and so she found it hard to sit still in the blue grass
outside Louisville. My mother eventually returned to Holland so I grew up between Amsterdam
and Kentucky, two very different places, though the majority of my childhood was spent on the
family farm in Kentucky, a small farm that used to raise cattle. It now boards horses and hosts
both a petting zoo that my father began and an organic cooperative called La Minga.
Signature: What do you remember most about Kentucky?
left: Naomi Wallace, 2014
above: Mischa Barton
in One Flea Spare at
The Public Theater, 1997.
NW: Our farm was wedged between two working class communities, an African-American community and a white community. My family was more privileged than most, but these people were
my neighbours. These were the kids I ran with. It took me quite some time to realize exactly where
many of the voices that I hear, that I put onstage, come from. They’ve always been part of
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