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aren Hartman: So, I got really, really excited by the invitation to do this panel, and I’ve been thinking about why it was such a “Hell yes” for me. It was a ten second, “Oh, hell yes, I really want to talk to playwrights about grief.” And I think it has to do with our shared impulse to raise the dead through our work. So I first want to invite our dead into the conversation. I just want to bring our grief and our loved ones who we might be missing, who we might be writing about, who might be epochs of history, into the rooms where we are. And I want to jump right in and ask each of you: have you tried to raise the dead? And how did it go?

Nambi E. Kelley: I’m happy to start. First of all, hello, everybody. Actually, it’s serendipitous that today is the seventeen-year anniversary of the day I buried my mom. And when I realized that this was today, I was like “Oh, shit! No!” But then I thought, “What a beautiful way to honor her.” So, I’m literally raising the deceased by being present today, because she was the most important person in my life, as a lot of mothers are, but also my mother was mentally ill. So, she used to talk to voices when I was a kid and I used to watch her talk to voices and always wondered, “Who’s the other person that she’s talking to?” And that was my first foray into character. And now I’m a dramatist. So, I like to think that what the universe sent to destroy me actually created me as an artist. And I’m very grateful for that. And I wouldn’t trade it for anything, as painful as it was to witness her in all of her many incarnations. It’s a blessing.

She’s ever-present in my work, whether it’s listening to her poetry as she spoke to the voices that became my poetic ear. So, every time I write, I’m conjuring. Every single time I’m recreating the rhythms that she taught me that I learned from watching her. I have attempted many, many, many times to write her specifically, but I’ve also been super blessed in my career. Right now, I’m working on a play about Stokely Carmichael. That’s what I was working on before I came here today to the Zoom call. And what is it to conjure somebody that everybody’s heard of but nobody really knows anything about? And how do I honor his life and honor those that are still here? Because he came from a family of people who are still very actively engaged in his legacy and preserving his legacy. So, in the script it’s my mom’s poetic ear, my poetic ear as crafted through my witnessing her, also through trying to figure out what his poetry was. But most of my work is probably about conjuring those who have gone before in some form or fashion.

Sarah Ruhl: Thank you for the beautiful words. And I’m so sorry about your mom on this day. That’s an amazing way to become a playwright, to see someone you love talking to voices that you can’t see, because it really is what we do. One of the first plays I wrote was Eurydice, which was for my father, who had died when I was twenty. He was diagnosed with cancer when I was eighteen. And I really wrote it to have more conversations with him. There are little talismans in the play and fragments from interviews I did with him and directions to his house, inside the play. The first time I heard Eurydice out loud, it was  at New Dramatists, and the experience felt so raw that I just wanted to hide in the bathroom. Which I did, for a while. And I thought, “Why did I think it was a good idea to share this with other people? This is too personal.”

But the repetition of seeing the play over time made it belong to other people. I think there’s something about grief and ritual and repetition, counting the days, counting the years. And it’s something we do in theatre, too. So, it seems like a natural thing to do together. The other day I was at a reading and it was so cathartic. And I said, “Oh, I feel so much better after this. It’s almost like we should do this once a week. Why haven’t they invented a ritual you do once a week where you feel better?” I was like, “Oh, church, right? They’ve already figured this out—”

[Laughter]

Anyway…

Julia Izumi: Thank you both for sharing. Love to your mom, too, Nambi. The strange thing about theatre is that it is finite, and productions always have an end. And echoing what Sarah said, there is something about the ritual of it that invites grief, maybe more than other mediums. 

During the pandemic, in that first lockdown, I was going through my very first attempts at plays. And one of my first plays that I wrote for a class, my first playwriting class, was a very classic early play: it takes place in this strange little purgatory dream space, and a girl is contemplating taking her own life, and her uncle, who did take his own life, shows up and tries to convince her not to. I had lost my uncle to suicide when I was twelve, but at the time when I was writing the play, I was like, “This is not a story about me. This is just a crazy story I came up with totally out of nowhere.” So, it’s funny to read it way, way later and be like, “Oh, obviously that was me trying to work through that.” 

In recent years, I’ve noticed all the ways in which my uncle’s passing has influenced my writing. When I saw my first off-Broadway production, I had this realization: the motivating drive for me to pursue playwriting professionally is that I thought that if I was successful at doing this, maybe my uncle would come back to life. And now that it’s happened, I have to finally face the reality that he wasn’t. So, yeah, I think writing for me has definitely always been influenced by grief and loss, especially when it’s subconscious.

Karen Hartman: Thank you all for jumping right in with that question. I’m really drawn by how specifically and directly you each went to someone so personal: your mother or your father or your uncle. And I shared that hope, Julia, that somehow by writing about ancestors they would literally live again, and that disappointment when they didn’t. It’s so poignant to hear you say it directly. I wonder about the experience—transmutation is a very Christian word—but the move from those private, specific people into the public space for each of you, and how that public-private nature of grieving works when you have brought something personal and then watched it with a group, whether it’s your own work or even as a theatregoer. What is the role of theatre in public grieving?

Sarah Ruhl: Well, I’m just thinking about Eurydice again and how, during the first production at Berkeley Rep, everyone working on the show had lost someone. This is, I don’t know, fifteen, twenty years ago, but Les Waters had just lost his dad and he was directing. Russell Champa (lighting) had just lost his dad. Scott Bradley, who did the set design, had just lost his partner, his husband. It felt like there was a collective sensibility of loss, like we were all making this play for all these people that we’d lost. I think you never can bring the ghosts back, but there’s something unique about the stage where the person gets embodied, which is different from language on a page. For me, there’s something about capturing the music of how someone speaks on a page that helps them live forever, and they’re sort of immortal on the page, but then there’s also this amazing moment where an actor embodies someone you’ve lost and you catch a gesture or something physical. How did they intuit that that’s how my father walked or that was the twinkle he had or the cadence he had?

Nambi E. Kelley: I’ll jump in. I’ll go back to the moment that I lost my mom in 2008. Before she passed, I was under commission from a theatre, and the deadline was coming up. And Black and Brown people, we ain’t gonna let nobody turn us around, even grief. So, you keep marching. So, I said, “I’m going to keep marching. I’m gonna go in. I’m gonna write this play,” even though I should have been nowhere near a theatre. But I wrote the play and bawled all the way through it, as it was about my mother, because what else could I write about? And my mother passed very close to Christmas. So, I wound up writing a twenty-minute play about a family who had just lost their matriarch before Christmas. And I was in the play as a character even though I had a different name, and my family was in the play even though they had different names, and my mother was in the play even though she had a different name. And it was a very, very horrific time, not only because I was so, so deeply entrenched in this grief but also the director I was working with was very disrespectful of my grief space and very cruel to me, to be super frank. It got to a point where I could no longer attend rehearsals because it was too overwhelming to be in the midst of so much grief around somebody who was such a careless caretaker.

So, I stopped going to rehearsal and just relied on the reports. He would call me and say, “Can we do some notes?” And I’d be like, “Yes.” And he’d ask me questions about stuff and I’d say, “Okay.” And then I’d say, “Yeah, but I’m not changing it because it’s not about the play. It’s about this moment in life that I’m putting on. I’m just vomiting this on the page. And as broken as it is, it has to stay that way.” I was then told by an actor that the director rewrote my monologue. Yep.

And the reason I found this out was because I had cast the show, so these actors were my friends. And one of the actors called me and said, “Hey, by the way, XYZ.” So, I made a call to the director pretending I didn’t know and said, “Oh, you know what? I know I haven’t been in rehearsal, but I’m going to come see the show.” So, he put the monologue back in the way it was intended to be written. And then I didn’t show up because I couldn’t, because it was too raw. And I cannot tell you how painful that was to be jerked around like that.

I was gifted a production of that same play in 2013. My family boycotted the play. It was still super raw for my family—you talked about the public piece of this—because I had taken the liberty of incarnating people without their permission. And this is my fault. They didn’t come—which is a whole other level of grief. I wrote this to honor our family and to honor our family member and they weren’t having any piece of it. And they have never seen the play to this day. Anyway.

So, I had some time with that same play last year in New York  with Grief Dialogues produced by Elizabeth Coplan. She generously allowed my play to be part of this festival she curated where she did an installation of different pieces about grief in different rooms. And that was the second time I was able to sit in the room with the work. And this was only last year. Now, my mom’s been gone seventeen years, so it’s only been last year that I could sit in the room and not feel like it was mine and, to what Sarah was saying, that it finally became something for other people and other people step into it. So, in terms of the public piece of it, I’m always grateful that other people can find themselves in that particular play because I literally have embodied my mom in a character and things she would say and do and my relationship with her. But it’s super public, and I’m proud of myself for finally being able to be in the room.

Karen Hartman: Yeah, that’s a lot.

Nambi E. Kelley: That experience with that director taught me that I very, very seldom divulge anymore in a process if something is personal.

Julia Izumi: It’s always a tricky thing to navigate, because it can go so many ways. You can have an experience, like Sarah’s, where everyone in the room understands and is on the same page with you, and you can also have an experience like Nambi’s where the director doesn’t understand. That’s the hard part about making art public, because in some ways you’re hoping it can be a solace for other people, but other people experience grief and loss differently and have different interpretations of what that is, and what you’re doing, too. That’s the very, very tricky part of putting that kind of grief and personal story into the work.

Karen Hartman: It is hard. And that’s what I wanted to ask you all next: How do we work with the rawness, especially when the hustle culture of the theatre doesn’t really honor it? Look, I was in rehearsal 72 hours after burying my mother. So, that’s one thing. It doesn’t really honor the pause or the bodily cycles that we might actually need. And then also, we’re writing onto a nerve, which is why the work maybe finds production. And so, how do we become more caring caretakers, to go back to Nambi’s words? How do we care for ourselves? How do we care for others? Have you done anything that worked?

Sarah Ruhl: Karen, can you speak more about that experience you had going into rehearsal 72 hours after you lost your mom?

Karen Hartman: It was a project that was seven years in the making and I had said, “My mother is dying. I’m going to miss the beginning of rehearsal.” But once she died, it didn’t make sense to wait much longer. It didn’t make sense to sit shiva in my hometown where I didn’t have friends or family anymore. It made the most “sense” to go where I was needed. And I learned that everyone over age 40 in the company had been through something similar. It was accepted as the norm, almost a source of pride. But circling back to Nambi, I feel I paid for that rush in years. You know what I mean? It took longer to to circle around that mourning period. So, my self-care, or “What should we do about it?” question is real.

Nambi E. Kelley: I have a similar story, Karen. My mom had a massive stroke October 3, 2008. I was in a rehearsal and I had a sharp pain in my chest at the same time, and I was like, “What is this? Oh, I should go to the doctor.” Right? I get home. And at the time I was staying with my mother. She wasn’t home. And that was unusual. And something told me something was wrong. I ran through the streets of Rogers Park in Chicago to try to find her. I couldn’t find her. 9:00, 10:00 comes. My brother calls. He’s like, “Oh, the hospital just called. They found her. She had a stroke, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Held her five days. She died October 8, 2008 in my arms at about 9:35 PM. October 9th at 10:00 AM, I was back in rehearsal, I went right back to work.

And in terms of the self-care piece of that, again, it’s ingrained in us as people of color. You just keep on walking. Right? But I should have stopped because I intentionally held that entire rehearsal process hostage, and I didn’t mean to do that. It was a production of Glass Menagerie. I was playing Laura. And literally, the makeup of that cast was the makeup of my family, so, I felt so cocooned by them. I felt like, “Okay, this is family.” Until there was a day the stage manager said to me—I was like “Oh, my mother’s funeral is Tuesday,” and she’s like, “Oh, great. Well, can you come in for a fitting after?” I’m not making this up. She asked me to come in for a fitting after I put my mother in the ground. And I just looked at her.

I digress.  But I’m saying all this to say that there were moments where I would just be in the middle of a scene and I would just start screaming. It was not fair to the cast. I should have left the show. It was the best thing for me to keep working, as you were saying, to go where you’re needed. But I should have thought about everybody else and how it impacted them. And I didn’t. I just didn’t. And in hindsight, now I have learned in terms of the caretaking piece of it, the best thing that you can sometimes do is to find other ways to keep moving, because I held that cast hostage and I did not mean to do that. And even opening night, like “Oh, it’s the first time my mom’s not going to see me in a play.” I’m screaming in the dressing room, just bawling my eyes out. And the poor actress who played my mother in the show—“It’s her opening, too, Nambi. Hello, lightbulb.” But she just held me and let me weep and scream for twenty minutes and snot up her costume. And I will never forget her kindness and her generosity as long as I live. And any time I have a show, I try to get her in it as an actor because I owe her.

Karen Hartman: Do you want to say her name…?

Nambi E. Kelley: Shanésia Davis is her name, and she’s a fabulous actress in Chicago. I’m saying all this to say that sometimes you’ve just got to stop. And the caretaking piece for myself is sometimes you’ve just got to stop.

Karen Hartman: Yeah.

Nambi E. Kelley: And I had to learn that the hard way.

Sarah Ruhl: Well, I’m flashing on a couple of things. I mean, one is that you’d think that COVID taught us that sometimes in the theater you’ve got to stop. But I don’t know that the industry really ever adjusted. The costume person asking you to have a fitting the day of your mom’s burial reminds me that there can be this crazy disconnect when you’re doing ritual work within a context of professional theatre—equity breaks and costume fittings and photographers and reviews, reviews who are going to judge your aesthetic object as opposed to thinking of it in a ritual context. And I remember when I wrote this play, Letters from Max, about my student Max Ritvo (first it was a book I wrote with Max and then I made it into a play) which felt fraught with responsibility because I was putting this real young man on stage and having an actor play him.

And the casting process felt so much more emotional than usual. I felt very emotional about it and very easily upset about a process that normally would have been much more regimented and professional, let’s say. I think we were having previews and there was a photo call and I was thinking, “Oh, my God, the reviewers are coming.” And I decided to put an addendum on the title, which is “a ritual,” Letters from Max: A Ritual, just to remind audiences that they were engaging in something that was about a real person I’d lost.. And I was hoping that frame could help situate the play in opposition to just business-as-usual.

Julia Izumi: I had just talked about how theatre is in some ways a great space for grief, but it’s also sometimes the worst. There’s always a time crunch somewhere because it’s a time-based medium.

I lost my father as well last December. He was in hospice while I was in this workshop for a play. And I’m an only child, so it’s just my mom and me. And she had asked me to come on the morning of the showing of the workshop to let the nurse in. And I was so resentful of her for that in the moment because I was like, “I’m busy. I’m in a workshop,” which is so silly looking back. What a silly, stupid thing.

Karen Hartman: But it’s not.

Julia Izumi: It isn’t. It isn’t. And it also is in some ways. I went in the morning and had half an hour to make sure the nurse got there, and I remember as I was leaving, my dad turned to me and was like, “Where are you going?” And I was like, “Oh, I have to go to this workshop.” And he was like, “Okay. When are you coming back?” And I was like, “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. I have to go. I have to go. I have to go,” and then I did. And my dad took a turn for the worse 24 hours later. So, looking back, I was like, “Oh, that was him really being like, ‘Come back. This is toward the end.’” I wish I hadn’t been so focused on going to work and just taken a moment to be like, “I have to stop. I have to be here.”

I guess in answer to your question, Karen, I don’t know how to take care of myself during those moments. But I think it’s so important to stop and assess what’s going on, as painful and awful as that is.

Sarah Ruhl: I’m so sorry that happened to you. It’s such a heartbreak and it’s the theatre culture that makes you feel it’s a life-or-death situation. And this culture of scarcity. You get so few opportunities in the Americ an theatre, so you’re like, “Well, shit. I haven’t worked…” It seems so important at the time. And there are so few institutions where the artistic director says, “You know what? No. It’s okay. Go home. I get it.” They exist, but they’re few and far between. I’ll never forget certain actors trying to get out of their Broadway contracts to go home for a funeral. I just think that’s inhumane in terms of the life cycles.

Karen Hartman: I’m struck that just on this Zoom, so many of us have had really similar experiences. And by what Julia said, that in some ways theatre is the best place for grief (which is kind of what I was thinking we’d be moving toward in our conversation) and in another way, the logistics are the worst. There’s a push that works against the potential grieving of the makers while we are making.

I did want to ask about this legacy question, because in a way, to Julia’s earlier point, we don’t bring our loved ones back. But I think about Nambi’s project about Stokely Carmichael, and in a way, we actually really do. There is an opportunity for legacy, public mourning, public revisiting, going backward that is so hard to do in our ever-forward-rolling culture. And my question is somewhat open, which is: how do you see the potential? What do you want to make? Whose legacy, either individual or collective, are you hoping to bring to the stage yourself? Or where have you felt a legacy come forward as an audience member?

Sarah Ruhl: I mean, I can say that studying with Paula Vogel, she’s such an incredible teacher of grief and how to transmute grief. Before I was her student even, I saw her play The Baltimore Waltz at Brown, and it’s about her brother Carl, who died of AIDS. And I was with my friend whose dad had died of AIDS, and we were just sobbing at the end. And there was something so sneaky about the play in terms of how you think you’re in this surreal romp and then it just sneaks up on you. Paula would always teach us in class that you have to look at grief indirectly, and you can’t look directly at the sun. You have to kind of pivot and then let the unconscious material come out. And that was a huge lesson for me. So, I guess I think about Paula’s legacy a lot when I’m writing.

Karen Hartman: Yeah, I do, too.

Nambi E. Kelley: That’s beautiful. Thank you. I think about the legacy of my parents and my ancestors. And specifically for my father. My father was a historian and an activist and a documentarian. While he was passing, I was under commission for a regional theatre and had written a draft and let them know, “Oh, I’m sitting at daddy’s bedside.” And they were blowing up my phone saying, “Yeah, but we need to do a reading.” [Laughs]  And I was like “Oh my God.” I fell apart. I called my agent and the agent handled it. I was like, “I can’t deal with these people.” But they pushed me at a time where it just freaked me out.

But anyway, my father was a historian, and because he’s a historian, unintentionally for me I’ve become this archiver of historic people and historic works. And it jazzes me. It feels like it’s mine, but I’m super clear that it came from him, which came from his father. I’m third-generation on my father’s side post-enslavement. Only third. So, for us, legacy is massive. I mean, it’s massive for everybody, but just in terms of the proximity to enslavement and knowing who our ancestors were, when we came, and all of it chronicled. We know who our people were. It’s not a lot of Black families.

So, I like to think of it as I’m just here in this little moment in life and I’m just doing the part I’m supposed to do until I can’t do it anymore. And that doesn’t mean anything attached to my name per se. It’s more so just being a vessel and allowing myself to be used in that way. And that’s the best way: to honor my family, my father, my mom, and all those people who came before that made a way for me to have this kind of freedom.

Julia Izumi: Everybody has shared such beautiful things. And it’s actually very inspiring to hear from you all, especially as people who have more literally put the people they’ve lost on stage, which I’ve done sort of less directly. Doing it directly sounds so scary to me, just so terrifying, mostly because I feel like I have to be a stronger writer to do that. I want to make sure that they know that their lives meant something to me, so I have to honor them with a level of writing that I can’t achieve yet. And I’m sadly not a very religious person. I’m not someone who’s sort of spiritually connected to the people that I’ve lost. To me, when they’re gone, they’re gone. But I still want to communicate with them in some way, so, I think my writing is the only way that I feel like I can speak to them, like Sarah said earlier. The idea of putting them more literally on stage though, I’m like, “Oh, no, now I’d have to talk to them directly.” [Laughs] But your plays give me hope that maybe it’s possible

Karen Hartman: Thank you. This has been such a beautiful conversation. It’s really beyond what I hoped for. And I appreciate your openness and just bringing it all in.

Sarah Ruhl: It’s such good medicine to talk to you all and see all of your faces.

Karen Hartman: Yeah, exactly. Good medicine. Thanks, Sarah and Nambi and Julia.