ART/LIFE/PROCESS (346 Words)

I entered back into playwriting in a really impactful way yesterday. Some days I feel that I step out of it in order to collect information, and then without warning, words come through me and I know they belong in the play.

Or, a play.

I’d like to think I’m working on one play right now—the one I’m turning in as part of my Columbia Thesis—but I’m really holding three plays—some days four.

They swirl around me in the world.

Sometimes I see or hear a word repeatedly and know it’s for the play. Sometimes it’s an idea that repeats and repeats. Sometimes it’s a person or an object.

It’s a wild way to write. It’s a challenge to capture everything and form it into something I think other people will understand. So far, every time, I am pleasantly surprised by how well audiences “get” the things I make.

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I think one of the plays, SKiNFoLK, came rushing through me again yesterday because I was having a “black girl fatigue” day. I have days where I get tired of carrying around the projections, ideas, history (read: trauma), significance the world places on living in a black woman body. I don’t mean to say I don’t participate in the making of “blackness”—of course I do. Most times, I do it intentionally. This is not a post-racial world, and trying to move to that place without first taking care of the extensive damage of our past is a futile act.<—This is a message that applies for my fellow “spiritual” friends, all of my ‘don’t see color people,’ and Raven Symone, Stacey Dash and other deeply hurt and confused black people. (Oh, Bow Wow!)

But anyway, I get tired sometimes of the Work of Freedom. Yesterday, I was fatigued and I was at work and BOOM!: a bunch of words came, and I caught them via email, pressed “send” to myself (a technique I learned from Chuck Mee) and when the time is ready, I will copy and paste them into my play.