Everyday
Afroplay has undergone another, wholly new, transformation. While
every iteration of Everyday Afroplay requires reinvention—as
collaborators, venues, and text selections change—this new
incarnation of the play would present an alien array of opportunities
and challenges due to one important perspective shift: Mubashshir was
to craft Everyday Afroplay for publication rather than a specific
production.
This
offer from 3 Hole Press began a nearly yearlong process of writing,
rewriting, late-night phone calling, meeting, deadlines, missed
deadlines, new deadlines, and artistic soul-searching.
Aside
from the usual questions that arise in materializing any discreet
presentation of Everyday Afroplay—which individual plays to
include and why; how best to arrange them in accordance with those
thematic, substantive designs; whether any new interstitial material
needs to be developed towards those ends; and whether any of the
source plays need to be modified for dramatic, thematic
cohesiveness—it was now necessary to grapple with the demands of a
reader: what does it mean to read a play without seeing it, either
first or ever; how does the arrangement of the words on the page,
with all the attendant typographical and grammatical consideration,
affect the play's imaginary performance in its reader's mind; what
creative, unconventional materials might be deployed on the page to
form and inform read interpretations of the script; and finally, what
sorts of preemptive concessions, if any, should be made in all these
decisions with regards for potential future physical productions of
this particular product.
The
result of this process, The Immeasurable Want of Light,
addresses these formal concerns with answers both familiar and novel
while maintaining and even deepening the core concerns of Everyday
Afroplay—namely an expansive
blackness, historically grounded but infinitely human.
As
with the performance at JACK, this is an eclectic conglomeration of
individual playlettes stitched together by several parallel
through-lines delineated by specific combinations of characters. Last
time, those characters, Naj and Dandy or the formless dancer, were on
an imagistic journey through memory and imagination to examine and
hopefully find, their socio-historial place in the world, to
determine the freedom and totality with which they could navigate
through a life that is joyful and awful.
Here,
in The Immeasurable Want of Light,
through-lines burrow into veins of history, refract through memory,
and are scattered across a dark universe. The familial strife between
Naj and Dandy has been replaced with the romantic entangling of Maker
and Tress. Naj and Dandy had to reckon with a past dispersed across
printed books and distorted memories in order to reassemble their
fractured present. Maker and Tress, similarly, must transcend some
daunting limitation, this time across the infinite space of a
fictional cosmos. These structural similarities are under-girded by
the reappearance of several individual plays from earlier
presentations of Everyday Afroplay.
The
most striking departure from previous iterations of this project,
apart from the implementation of a naming convention and the
integration of four digital collages by Nell Painter into the text, is found in the
irreverent unmooring of towering black cultural figures from their
designated domains. As Everyday Afroplay seeks
to unearth the limitlessness of blackness, so too are the likes of
Ella Fitzgerald and Fred Moten dug up from the planters of their
dignified fame and allowed to shake out their dusty roots in
thoroughly post-modern style.
Overall,
the effect is a funky slice of painterly, avant-garde theater—what
Mubashshir frequently calls Afro New-Wave—that represents the
deliberate efforts of a host of readers and commentators, including
editor Rachel Kauder Nalebluff and dramaturg Stephen Christensen
(me). I was asked to provide a short description of the work for
publication which to the consternation of my vanity ended up largely
a causality of the editorial process. But as I still feel it is a
solid description of the work and its success (and for my ego's
satisfaction), I will reprint my own full accounting of The
Immeasurable Want of Light now,
Everyday
Afroplay is
an eclectic palette of thematic, sculptural, durational, and
short-form narrative performance-pieces about blackness in all its
permutations from which Daaimah Mubashshir--and often her
collaborators--selects then orders and blurs to give form to a more
limited consideration of her subject matter. In The
Immeasurable Want of Light,
one such discrete composition,
Mubashshir
paints a divided canvass where a galactic, inter-dimensional
blackness alternates with the bold, potentially overpowering colors
of world historical momentum. Uniting these sometimes wild
alternations is a fundamental question that has always been relevant
and will likely remain so: From where is value derived?
What
follow will be a few interviews about the formation and execution of
this publication between myself the playwright. First we will cover
what it is and how it came to be and then move on to general
questions about artistic intent and interpretation before finishing
with issues that more specifically pertain to the peculiarities of
Everyday Afroplay
including the production challenges of the fantastically impossible
and what it means recycle and refurbish material from production to
production and how that is affected by conventions of naming and
intellectual property.
