“What a stage can be”: In Conversation with Djanet Sears

“Meet you in Front and Long!” For theatre students at the downtown campus of the University of Toronto, that means two gracious sitting rooms in the Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse, a converted mansion on St. George Street that now houses a theatre, a movement studio, and offices, along with a lounge for students who commute from outside the city. The couches and chairs lining the walls see a daily round of classes, meetings, and an informal tea party. Every afternoon, students emerge from all corners of the building to fortify themselves with tea and cookies. It’s here—amid all the comings and goings—that playwright Djanet Sears suggested we meet last October to talk about her work. Sears has taught playwriting at the University of Toronto since 2001. Dazzling and approachable in bafflingly-equal measure, Sears is a familiar figure in a building that brings to mind a line from Neil Young: “All my changes were there.” As a teaching assistant in Sears’s classes for two years, I often felt like I was witnessing not just the shaping of work but the shaping of selves. Week after week, I would see her listen with absolute attention to a reading, insist that the writer stay in the driver’s seat and respect their own process, then: “You can chuck this idea if you want, but . . .” and out would come a suggestion just too wild and enticing to resist. A multiple-award winning playwright, director, and actor, Sears is the author of Afrika Solo, Harlem Duet, Double Trouble, Who Killed Katie Ross, The Mother Project, The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God, and a novel that is currently in-progress. She is also the editor of Testifyin’, a two-volume anthology of African-Canadian drama. When we talked, I wanted to know how an artist so bent on facilitating process for her students was encountering the challenges of working in this new form. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.   Maria Meindl: You’ve written about being inspired by the multi-disciplinary Sundiata form from West Africa. The Sundiata involves music, dance, and storytelling; it unfolds in multiple dimensions. Why move from that to the page? Djanet Sears: I suspect that the page can do something similar. Sometimes when I write, I have books that accompany me—not as things to copy but as talismans. With one of my plays I had Brecht and Lorraine Hansberry with me. I have them close to where I write. Sometimes I have them under my pillow. And they’re just with me. The content is not the same, the stories are not the same, the characters are dissimilar, but there’s something in the piece—whether it be content or structure—that I feel I want to . . . ingest. MM: And what is with you in writing this novel? DS: Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, for one. She uses a multiplicity of forms to tell a story: poetry, dialogue, dramatic writing. She uses academic essay form, she’s got a lecture. And she quotes. All to tell the same story. And I find that one of the sexiest books ever! I know that it’s also a play. But that book jumps off the page in a way that I don’t frequently see in long-form prose. I think of Anne Carson and Dorothy Porter from Australia. She died in 2008. But she was a poet, a verse writer, and she wrote a detective novel in verse. People are pushing the flatness of the page so that there’s a kind of relief, a dimension to it.

People are pushing the flatness of the page so that there’s a kind of relief, a dimension to it.

The image that comes to mind is a pop-up book—the story pops out at you. Dorothy Porter has written one about Tutankhamun, one about the Monkey’s Paw. I just recently picked up Anne Carson’s Nox. This book comes in a beautiful box and you open it and it’s a series of maybe 300 accordion pages, all with scanned, handwritten notes that tell this story. To me, these writers are actually doing what the epic theatre artists—like Brecht—do in their rejection of the Aristotelian approach. These writers are pushing the boundaries of what prose is, what that flat page is, and that excites me. MM: So you’re attracted to writing something on the page to push what the page can do? DS: I don’t know why I’m attracted to it. I know that in a theatrical context, when I first ran into Brecht’s work it knocked me over. Wow! Ntozake Shange also writes work that has dramatic writing and it has poetry and it has prose and that stuff excites me. It takes more of me, brings in different parts of my brain. There’s some thinking—not necessarily about the story—but about how story and form are related. And that’s kind of the direction I might be going in, but I keep on changing my mind because I keep thinking: “Well, I shouldn’t.” I sometimes I think as a newcomer: “What the fuck am I doing? Why am I even approaching this?” But I have to go back to what interests me, what strikes me; that’s what I’ve got to follow because otherwise I’m thinking about what other people will think of my writing. And I can’t be in other people’s heads. I can barely be in my own! MM: Is there something lost, something gained in working on the page? DS: I’m a dramatist. I’m a theatre practitioner. Because I direct a lot of first productions of my plays, I see the text of the play as a piece of literature, and simultaneously as a blueprint for an end-vision. So, it’s not singular, it’s multiple, and I also want an opportunity to animate, to render this vision. When I got into directing, my friend Kate Lushington—she ran Nightwood Theatre at the time—was saying, “The worst it could be is as mediocre as everything else. That’s the worst it could be.” And she had training as an actor, so she knew. I started with small works in development and as I gained competence as a director I realized that I could really stimulate a lot of senses. I even have explored how to get smell in a theatre and how that in a very subtle way—I’m talking about a subtle way, not spreading perfume on everything!—it could also help the storytelling, the story, or the thinking. Look at what kinds of seats are in a theatre—soft, plushy ones, hard ones, different kind of chairs. What does that do to us? So I think there’s a way to affect and utilize different senses in aid of the storytelling and the major themes or motifs that you’re exploring, in a way that might be much more difficult on a flat page. But looking at this Anne Carson piece . . . it’s all handwriting. I read handwriting differently! It’s a personal letter. I wonder—what do images do? To me, it’s an exploration. I’m thinking about Marlene Nourbese Philip’s book: She Tries her Tongue—Her Silence Softly Breaks. She writes in the margins. What does that do? We’re talking about text on a white page and so to look at how the visual layout and space on the page affects the storytelling. I think that there are ways that I can take a multiple approach to telling a story. I don’t know if it’ll be successful. So yes, I do think theatre can more-directly affect the senses, but there might be a way for novels or prose to do it, too. There may be. MM: Is there something lost, something gained, just in terms of your process? Working with people, working with bodies in space, directing first productions? Is there something lost, something gained, being alone in a room? Or are you alone in a room? DS: In my writing process as a playwright, I work alone in a room. Even when I bring actors into a room to read the work, my aim is not for them to contribute through improvisation on the work. I want to hear what I have and to make changes. Very skilled actors can really help things jump off the page and you can hear rhythmically or content-wise or emotionally how the words do or do not achieve what you’re aiming for. I’m collaborative as a director, but not as a writer. MM: It’s much the same in that sense, your first draft. DS: Much the same. MM: So when you’re writing a play you sit there and imagine— DS: Sit there and imagine? Sit there a lot going! “What the fuck?” “What the fuck?” “What the fuck?” “Why can’t I write anything?” And then, suddenly, something comes through. But yes, I sit there. MM: And the Sundiata, as I understand it, is an oral tradition but the stories are an aid to memory, keeping memory alive? DS: Geneva Smitherman has written a wonderful book called Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. It looks at African-American oral tradition and its origin in Africa and the African worldview. And orality is a very primary part of that. Repeat the question? MM: I’m wondering if you’re attracted to the memory-keeping aspect, the historical aspect of that tradition as much as the form. You’re talking about the multiplicity of the form, the different levels on which it can happen, but are you also attracted to this idea of keeping memory alive? DS: It’s much less of an intellectualized experience for me. It’s more like, “I can speak in this language I can speak in,” and “Oh, here I am.” I see things where there’s a multiplicity and I say, “That’s how I move through the world.” It even goes down to the narrative level. I’m attracted to multiple narrative voices more than a singular, third-person voice. It’s a way of seeing the world. MM: Are you doing that in your novel? A multiplicity of voices? DS: I tried not to. Because in a way as I’m learning a new genre. I look at the rules. I have a whole draft, several chapters done in a certain voice. And you know, I realize that’s not my voice. That’s the voice I think I need to do to tell the story. It feels like the story is not simply the events, not only the experience of events. It’s the repercussions and the waves that come out. There’s a multi-dimensional process, moving through space, moving air as opposed to something that feels a little more flat. Learning the rules, I keep on thinking, “This is how you are supposed to do it,” and then I think, “You! Go back! Go back! Cough cough, cough cough. Sing with your voice, sing, sing!” MM: Has it taken a long time? DS: [Extended multi-phonic shriek] That novel has been kicking my ass! It’s taken a long time, and really because of things like that. There’s a way I think it’s supposed to be. Because, as a writer, I want to knock people’s socks off. But the closer I get to finishing, I just want people to like it. So, I feel like there’s a duality in me already, you know? And the rules help me, help things appear more acceptable, but they aren’t telling it in the way that enhances my story. I think the story is enhanced through this kind of multiple approach. MM: Anything else you want to say about this novel? DS: The name of the novel—working title—is Song of Grace, and it’s about a character named Grace. But the truth is, I don’t want to talk about the novel. I have a fear that if I tell the story then I’ll have no need to write it. And I want to nurture that part of me that thinks it’s important. And hopefully that will hasten this already-prolonged process of birthing the story! MM: I’m interested in the idea of autobiomythography—not just the idea, but taking the long view of it, because it’s something you did in your very first play. Do you still feel close to that idea? Do you still feel inspired or informed by that idea? DS: Absolutely. I came across autobiomythography via bell hooks, and she was talking about Audre Lorde. In Zami, Lorde’s publisher first approached the term biomythography to talk about some of the work she was doing. bell hooks also is someone who wanted to do much more fiction and she was getting a lot of rejection for her fiction-writing from publishers. And she was talking a lot about the difficulty for women of colour to get published, when their work comes from a different point of view. She talked about her work as being “autobiomythographical.” She used autobiographical material and mythologized it; it’s not as if the work itself is true, but it’s based on true events. Then you mythologize it so that you create the fiction you want to render, as opposed to “a narrative of my life.” Autobiomythography is fiction and autobiography is non-fiction. I was really interested in that. I was also interested in slave narratives. When Africans first came to this continent, they were told, “You are forbidden from reading and writing!” And when slavery was over, the literature that began to surface was stories that were the experiences of ex-slaves. There’s the story of Olaudah Aquianu by Gustavus Vassa; there’s the stuff that Henry Louis Gates has done, the books of slave narratives. When we look at African diasporic writing in North America, it seems like we frequently start with our own lives. I think there is a kind of paradigm that’s set up; even if I’m writing something that’s non-fiction, it’s closely related to something that relates to me. I find that playwrights begin with material that closely relates to them. Often it’s a way to get authenticity in the story-making. I’m not making Jason Bourne, I’m actually making a story about something that concerns me. It concerns me because some of the context has happened in my life. I often tell the students, “Use those events, then mythologize them.” MM: In Afrika Solo, there’s a sense of claiming identity, claiming space, creating a part, creating a role. DS: And it’s a play about identity or self-discovery, where the author has the name of the character. But even that play, which is about someone called Janet who changes her name to Djanet—beginning with a D—is not what happened. That is autobiomythography. It’s based on events that are real, but those things did not happen, or did not happen in that order, or did not happen in the same way, or one character was actually a composite of many characters. In that play, I felt free to create in any way I wanted. I wasn’t limited by what was “real.” I wasn’t limited at all. MM: This idea was important to you in your first play, and you’re talking about your teaching now. What does it mean to you now, as you encounter it? DS: Many writers start with the self and mythologize the work and then go on to explore other ways. I think the beginning of your own story is a frequent starting place. Not for everyone, but for some people. I think it’s very much—to use another analogy—the way that first albums are sometimes so rich. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is one of the greatest albums of all time. But now she’s been picked up by a studio and they want an album next year, and so she’s had 27 years to come with this first album and they want now the second album 18 months later.

I feel very strongly about—not authenticity of voice, but authenticity of objective or goal or aim.

Those first pieces are decades in the making and are inside us. And I think that for our subsequent album or subsequent work, there’s a pressure to do something new. And I go, “Use those same 25 years, those same 29 years, those same 50 years, because you didn’t get it all in that first album, in that first play.” I feel very strongly about—not authenticity of voice, but authenticity of objective or goal or aim. That, I think, is apparent in a good story. I like all manner of stories. I love Swedish and Norwegian and Danish police series, because I find their story-making really rich, detailed; it happens on many levels. A good story is a vehicle that can hold a multiplicity of ideas and autobiomythography. Sometimes you think, “Oh, I’m going to create a novel!” There’s this huge precipice below you. “Agh! How am I going to create a bridge to that world?” Whereas the idea that “I need to cross from here to there” is a bit of a fallacy. Why can’t I just write from there to here? If you’re writing a bridge, there’s a bridge you just crossed! A lot of the things we hope to find outside of ourselves are already inside of ourselves. And it’s not that every bit of the plot, every bit of the narrative, every bit—what I’m saying is that some central parts are already there. Autobiograpmythography assists in looking inside for the core, the heart of the work you’re trying to create. I’m reminded of Stephen King in his book on writing, where he speaks about the inner territory and he says plot is like a fossil and you have to be very careful about how you dig it up. As if it’s already created and we’re searching for the details of it underneath, and if we come in with plot and a big outline, sometimes we use that like a jackhammer and we lose very delicate parts of that fossil. MM: Can you talk about context? In all the plays of yours that I’ve read or seen, there’s an element of context that you provide. At the end of Afrika Solo, the book version, there’s that essay that says, “Here are some things that you might not know about African history” and “Here are some things that you might not know about Africa” and “Here are some references.” To what extent do you feel it’s incumbent on you to educate people in that way? DS: It seems to be a necessary part, although I find that my patience is shrinking. Things that I would be much more open to exploring as someone who tries to help people widen their view . . . I’m just tired of it now. It’s like, no. I’m almost 60. I’m tired of it now. I’m finding I’m impatient. Teaching takes a kind of patience and understanding that just because you’re in grade three doesn’t mean you laugh at someone who’s in grade one and they don’t know how to spell “apple.” It’s a struggle, because part of me wants to say, “Catch up. Catch up. Follow me.” But I also know my audience. Will they understand what I’m saying? And the likelihood is that they won’t, if I continue with that attitude. There’s a new play I’m working on right now, called Rac(e)ing. It’s a harsh-ass play that no one is going to want to see. It’s just harsh. But I don’t know if it’s a worthy play, in that people are going to get something out of it. I just know it does reflect how I feel. But I don’t know if something needs to go up on stage just because I feel it. So it’s not finished yet, and I struggle with that work because I go, “What’s the point of that?” MM: I had a couple of versions of that question, and the first one was talking about context and the second one was: Who do you write for? That might be asking the same question. DS: In your question and even in your clarification of what’s at the heart of your question, I wonder if my audience is changing. MM: Ah! DS: Is my audience becoming more solidly me? People like me? And when I say an audience like me, I don’t mean in terms of race or only in terms of gender. I know men. I know women of many, many races and sexual preferences, who still see the world a bit like me. [Laughter] You know, why don’t the middle aged cultural activists deserve a point of view that is presented, heralded, explored, or just a place to vent our frustration? How would I write for Trump’s folks? Number one, they would never come to my play. But let’s say I had an opportunity. So what’s the breadth of my sense of educating my audience, in terms of the context I give a piece? The context that you’ve seen in other works give options. They give clues. Sometimes, I think that people see, say, a Black novel as Black culture. And when I see their picture of Black culture it’s very small. A woman who was interviewing me about one of my plays said, “This isn’t a Black play. This is a human play.” My response was, “What part of Blackness is not human?” Her intent was not malicious, but how often are people not going to look for the larger ideas in the play, because they think that it’s a Black play and those plays don’t have larger ideas, or they only have these three larger ideas. And so, there’s a bit of wariness. I might just be writing plays for myself, but there are people who are on the edge—about 12 percent who are on the edge—whose minds might be changed and who might be interested. And there’s a place for them, just in case. But the notion of me as an educator in my work—it’s not meant to be Educational with a big E. I think your word “context” is more appropriate, because it gives people a springboard for further study. Even in my collection of plays, my anthology, Testifyin’, I do an intro, and each play of the anthology has a scholarly introduction so that it can be used for further study. So that’s giving context—not context for understanding what the play’s about, but for understanding how broad the play is,  saying, “Look at this, there is much more!” I know I’m going all over the place, but sometimes I worry that it’s just reactionary. I know people see me and they say, “You’re Black, you’re limited.” Even if they’re doing it unconsciously, we all do it. “You’re a woman, you’re limited.” You know? I’m pissed off, but in Rac(e)ing I’m still going to give context, so I don’t even believe myself when I say it’s over! MM: If somebody’s in grade one and they don’t know how to spell “apple,” that’s one thing. But if they are in grade one and they don’t know how to spell “apple” and they’re kicking you in the head, that’s another thing. DS: Right, or if someone’s in grade one and they don’t know how to spell “apple,” while they’re not kicking me in the head they are supporting someone who is kicking me in the head. I probably can’t teach them or change their point of view, but what I can do is put a footnote at the end of the word “apple.” Later, they can say, “I learned to spell apple when I was in grade three, but now I’m grade nine and I see this footnote. Let me just inquire.” So there’s a possibility. So “apple” has a footnote, “apple” has context and if by chance you go back and revisit or come across it again, “apple” is not just “apple.” “Apple” is gravity. “Apple” is about me. “Apple” is about Steve Jobs. “Apple!” That’s part of me, but I have a personal struggle. It means that there’s constantly an other in my head, and what does that do for my own voice? It’s a struggle. MM: When you were on the panel at the Canadian Association for Theatre Research, there was a comment from a man in the audience. You had been giving suggestions for people, that they could read . . . some people who are outside the canon. Even in terms of form. And he said something like, “Yeah, but the canon takes so much time,” or something like that. And if I remember correctly you very-cheerfully said, “You do both!” DS: He was finding some resistance. “One second! You’re asking me to do twice as much work!” I have even come up with a word for it: Obama-ing. You do twice as much work for no credit. That’s right.  That’s how you change the world. Even a small corner of the world. If you want to include other people, other kinds of people, you read the canon, you read everything else. You bring it into your class. You fight to bring it into your class. You do twice as much work. For no credit. Obama-ing.

I have even come up with a word for it: Obama-ing. You do twice as much work for no credit.

MM: How hard do you work? DS: [Laughter] I think I work hard. I took some time off this summer to go head-to-head with my writing, my novel. We are often at war. Some writers write every day and have that wonderful habit. I have heard that Michael Ondaatje writes every day. I remember hearing Margaret Atwood doesn’t write every day. I’m the kind of writer that when I’m not editing, I like to binge write. Oh! Write for big periods of time! Let’s just say you have two months off. The first two weeks are just letting go of your year. And then, if you are lucky, you can start to get into a rhythm. Sometimes we think writing is just writing. Writing is also thinking. The mind having space to write. Because even if I’m not typing it, it can be cooking in my mind, but there is so much being thrown at me all the time it’s very hard to have that little free space. There’s the book and the politics of going through your PhD and there’s your life and there’s your marriage and . . . and . . . and. . . . I think if you’re a woman and you have to battle sexism or armour against the kind of—not the Trumpian sexism—the sexism that’s little micro-aggressions that will deny you access. And that takes part of our psyche, to do that. And so add race to that. A lot of time is taken up responding, and I don’t have a lot of free space in my head. I find I work too hard. And maybe everybody’s threshold for that free space is different, but I find it’s too much. I find I do a lot of work, and I think I should do less, although I don’t see how. MM: I spent a couple of years as a teaching assistant in your playwriting class. Something that continued to impress me was that it would be very difficult to imagine somebody feeling frightened or intimidated in your class. Ever. DS: That’s great. That’s a wonderful compliment. MM: Why is it important? DS: I think that comes from my actor training. If you’re relaxed, you can respond better to things. If you’re tense, a lot of your psyche or a lot of your creative attention is taken up protecting yourself or experiencing the pain. I don’t know if it’s necessarily something that I have thought of consciously; it’s just part of my personality, in the sense that I naturally like to even-up the status a little bit. It helps me to be open to learning things. I am not the expert. I am not the only expert in the room. I might have more experience, but I think if we come together as a group of educators and learners—I tell people in my class, “Please steal from each other. Not your content! Look at formatting, look at form, look at structural things. Look at approaches to beginning scenes.”

It’s filled with our imagination of what can be created on stage, what a stage can be.

If we approach the writing of plays—and especially the dramaturgy of plays—as a group of educators and learners, I think we learn more. And then they’re not just writing for me. I have certain tastes. Then you have a bunch of 20-year-old, primarily-White women writing about middle-aged Black women, and that’s not the aim. The aim is to write about themselves and/or write about things that move them, that concern them, that interest them. I think it’s the best way to learn. I’m not the kind of dead teacher/expert to my list of lectures that I give. No! I don’t think that’s how we learn best. I think experiential learning reaches deepest into our minds, into our psyches. I think about creating that environment, intellectually. I’d like to say that’s at the base of my pedagogical approach, but I think it’s probably just the way I am. Even in the way I direct plays, I want artists who can tell me things, who can have better ideas than me. Because then I receive! And it expands everybody. MM: It might seem natural to you and usual to you, but it’s not customary. It’s an unusual feeling in a classroom, actually. And particularly a creative writing class room . . . which is kind of a scary thought. DS: Agency for writers is taken away so quickly. Sometimes, I have to just give writers a bit more confidence. They don’t want to write stage directions, because they don’t want to undermine the director. What the fuck! It’s not the director’s play! It’s your play! Write what you want! The director’s going to do what they want! There’s so little agency given to writers; they write their play and they hand it to literary directors and artistic directors, to see if they choose it or not, and then directors do it. It’s one of the reasons I have my playwriting courses in the theatre. Often, playwrights don’t write for theatre. But in the theatre our minds begin to relax, begin to fill the space with our own imaginings. And we’re not fearful of what that creation might be. We’re not afraid of the stage or the theatre. Of the space. We’re filling it. Because 95 percent of plays begin with a writer alone in a room, and that mind of theirs—that 15-inch head—is infinitely big and it’s filled with our imagination of what can be created on stage, what a stage can be.