The first collective realization in our first rehearsal was all of them had been previous guys in all kinds of performs, however by no means previous guys in an previous man play. This realization delivered to the floor the truth that, in America at any charge, narratives in regards to the aged the place their considerations are heart stage are uncommon. Perhaps they thought that they had discovered age-appropriate roles to show their artistry. Perhaps they discovered a strategy to face previous males’s fears of being forgotten. In rehearsing We Take Care of Our Own, the fiction and the truth pale into one. The characters and the actors shared the identical existential anxieties, the frailness, the fragility, the uncertainly, the finality of rising previous. On the opposite hand, previous age acquires a knowledge that’s wrought from having lived lengthy sufficient to see how issues have performed out, and a watchful humbleness if you go searching and see who’s left. From the primary learn by means of they knew the play utterly and embraced the poetic, ethereal, comedian, and tragic world of this play about three previous males dealing with the inevitable abyss. Among them there was a comradery specific to previous males sharing their illnesses, their aches and pains, and confessing the mechanical replacements of their physique elements, at all times with humor and true sincerity. They labored leisurely as if making ready to go the space. Nothing was fraught or overstated. They acted with the boldness received from greater than sixty years of stage time between them. An amazing solid and an awesome script, our staged studying was nicely acquired and confirmed what we had anticipated, that We Take Care of Our Own was a really efficient, evocative, and shifting piece of theatre.
The first Afro-Atlantic Playwright Festival was one thing of a hit and in consequence the Cultural Diaspora Playwright Project was invited to convey the three performs to New York University’s Tisch School of Drama to be carried out by college students and directed by alumni. The different two performs had been Deux Femmes on the Edge de la Revolution Part 2, the second installment in France-Luce Benson’s epic historic trilogy of the Haitian Revolution, and Canoes by veteran Nigerian playwright Femi Osofisan, a examine of three younger Black ladies coming of age in Kwame Nkrumah’s newly unbiased Ghana who would turn into literary giants Efua Sutherland, Maryse Conde’, and Maya Angelou. The three younger appearing college students who portrayed their aged characters in We Take Care Of Our Own rendered the play nicely sufficient. Their director properly discouraged them from appearing previous and to only do the scenes and reveal the play. They had been advantageous younger actors they usually did a advantageous job, however identical to the songs says, “Ain’t nothing like the real thing baby, ain’t nothing like the real thing.”
Somewhere within the subsequent 12 months, 2020, Adolphus Ward who performed Youssouf handed on to the ancestors. On listening to that unhappy information, one couldn’t assist however notice that his character, Youssouf, additionally passes away within the play.
Perhaps the work and doing what one loves is sufficient.
In the interim I had acquired a Mellon Foundation National Playwright Residency Program fellowship with Illusion Theater in Minneapolis. In my assertion of creative intent, one of many issues I proposed was to supply and direct We Take Care of Our Own. Producing administrators Michael Robins and Bonnie Morris favored the thought. They favored the play. They needed to have a public studying, however COVID was raging, so we did it on-line. Richard Ooms returned to us along with his deep, resonant, baritone voice. Glenn Kubota who performed Moon-So would come to us from California having performed throughout mediums on stage and in movie and tv. And veteran actor Arthur French, an authentic founding member of the Negro Ensemble Company, performed Youssouf. At eighty-nine years previous, he was the identical age as his character. I hadn’t ready or actually thought of how we’d assist an elder actor, a lot much less an octogenarian, despite the fact that I used to be approaching that threshold myself, however Arthur had troubles with know-how. Not solely did he have troubles with know-how, he had a concern of it that put him at an sad drawback and crammed him with nervousness. He was dwelling alone on his son’s laptop. He lived along with his son, however his son was at work once we labored and with the remainder of us in California and Minneapolis, simply speaking heads on a pc display screen, there was no direct approach for us to assist him. A consummate skilled, Arthur grew to become offended with himself, offended that he felt himself not ready to do his job as an actor. The worst of it was when he couldn’t get his microphone to work. We someway muddled by means of it. Arthur’s son, the playwright Arthur French III, took off from work to assist his father with the know-how and to place him comfy. In the top Arthur took on the character of Youssouf, the astrophysicist awash in know-how, and rendered him with authenticity and depth. He lifted the character Youssouf off of the web page and breathed him onto life in a play the place his life is fading away. Four months later, on 24 July 2021, Arthur French himself, after struggling a stroke, within the uncontestable future of previous males, pale away into the arms of heaven.
As we put together for its premiere later this 12 months within the fall of 2023 at Illusion Theater in Minneapolis, we’re aware and considerate of the best way to assist our aged actors: ear prompters, extra rehearsal time, individuals to assist them run their strains…understudies? Perhaps the work and doing what one loves is sufficient. To stick with it to the very finish a lifetime of function. To use our artwork type to aim to make sense of the incomprehensible.
I don’t fairly know what to make of the journey of We Take Care of Our Own to date, or how its creator Zainabu Jallo at thirty-two years of age may probably know such issues, apart from her personal poetic and empathic creativeness. “I have a specialty of love for the elderly,” she says, “old men especially,” as she demonstrates so clearly in her lovely new play.