Fill My Life... Plays Addition

"I'm working to fill my life with life... so I don't just see my life as work." - Me

It started with a surprise birthday gift from my dear friend Carla - two tickets to see The Piano Lesson, by the incredible August Wilson. It was then that I realized how much I missed seeing live theater. It's true that I love movies and binge watch TV, but there's something about seeing art in real time, watching bodies move and breathe on stage, hearing the collective gasps, laughs, sighs of an audience and knowing that the performers on the stage hear them too. And realizing that even though those same actors will hit those same marks and say those same lines again tomorrow, somehow it'll still be different.

From that play I made it my own personal goal to watch more plays this year, specifically plays either written by black writers or writers of color and with all or predominantly black casts. So far, I've averaged about 2 a month, not bad, but I know there's a lot more to see. I've thought about maybe doing some play reviews, just to put my thoughts down about the art that I've been watching. It also has given me the desire to write my own play - we'll see how that goes!

Anyway, here's my general list of thoughts after watching plays for the first part of 2023:

• Seeing black bodies, black people, black stories on stage is a thing of beauty

• We really out here winning Pulitzer's and whatnot!

• Audiences absolutely do have an influence on the play watching experience

• Is it weird to want to see an all-black play with an all-black audience? Just to see if it would feel different? (I know that it would totally feel different... lol)

• Our stories are nuanced, layered, and worthy to be told

• What makes a black play a black play?

• If there's black people on stage and what they're experiencing has nothing to do with their race, would Broadway still produce it?

• The lengths we've had to go through to attempt to get a slice of the mythical American Dream is painful

• God/Faith/Religion/spirituality always seems to pop up - we're forever connected to it, even when we don't want to be

• The way we bend and shape words, the slide and intonation in our cadences, the way we laugh... ❤️

• The work that it takes to make an audience feel like you're performing this for them and only for them and it's not the 67th time you've done it - impressive, especially when I've sat through shows with folks who were clearly phoning it in.

• It's beautiful to see an older woman own her life and her sexuality on stage, to desire pleasure and go after it.

• Set designers - to bring a world to life, to know if a stage needs to rotate or remain static, to know how to populate the stage with items, knick knacks, should there be two chairs or four? To show what time period we're in, and location whether it's the rural South, Chicago, a bar back alley, or inside the crevices of someone's imagination. To know how to position furniture, to figure out where to put windows or not. You literally set the world before a word is spoken... I see you and 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾

• You can tell the productions where folks were having a good time together and when they were not.

• I miss talkbacks where artist(s) and audience dialog together

• It's a weird thing for me to ask for an autograph from someone, cause I feel like I really do say to myself now, "what exactly are you going to do with that?"

• Blackness has no bounds

• Just because you did it doesn't mean I have to like it, I supported via buying a ticket, not lying when we both know it could be better

• I miss sitting afterwards for at least an hour to talk about what was on the stage - it's a part of the process.

• Man, I saw a play where there was literally hundreds of balloons and I said a silent prayer to the crew who have to keep buying and blowing up balloons and/or cleaning them up every time they pop

• Plays can be too long, even if the story is compelling

• Physicality is a real thing

• I ❤️ my people.

I'm hoping to keep seeing plays and productions as the year progresses. If you're around and want to check one out with me, let me know! 😉 Until then...