This transcript was generated by AI and is most likely not entirely accurate.

Speaker 1:
Welcome to 30 to Curtain, a Center Theater Group podcast. I'm Neil Keller, Center Theater Group's Associate Artistic Director and Literary Director, and I'll be your guest host for this episode. Through my role at the organization, I work very closely with Artistic Director Michael Ritchie on the development of new plays, working with playwrights through our LA Writers Workshop, and at times, I direct plays across our three theaters, the Amundsen Theater, the Mark Taper Forum, and the Kirk Douglas.

Our guest on this episode of 30 to Curtain is Dale Orlandersmith, who's the writer and performer of Until the Flood, which is on stage at the Kirk Douglas Theater, January 24th through February 23rd, 2020. Dale is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a celebrated artist that I've had the great pleasure of working with for many years, including as the director of this play. She's no stranger to Center Theater Group, having developed works with us, including Bones, Stoop Stories, and Forever.

In Until the Flood, Dale explores the social upheaval in Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting of teenager Michael Brown, and the profound effects those events had on the area residents. In our conversation, you'll hear how this explosive moment in American history became a catalyst for this powerful new play and helped us continue our collaboration. I hope you enjoy the conversation, and we look forward to seeing you at the theater.

Dale is one of the people I have worked longest with in the theater. I think we met, we're fond of saying we met almost 30 years ago because 30 years sounds too distant, but I sneakily think it may actually be 30 now.

Speaker 2:
It is 30. It is 30 this year. It is actually 30.

Speaker 1:
Oh my gosh. Yeah. We met first doing a production of Romeo and Juliet Out of Doors at the Williamstown Theater Festival.

Speaker 2:
My gosh.

Speaker 1:
Yeah. When Dale came up and played the nurse. I don't remember much about the production other than Dale. That's about all I remember.

Speaker 2:
That's crazy.

Speaker 1:
Yeah. Right. No, it was fun. It was good. That was my equity card. It's hard to believe.

Speaker 1:
I had known of Dale because she used to perform her poetry at the New York Poetry Cafe on the Lower East Side where we both were living in New York back 30 years ago. And I'd seen her perform her poetry a couple of times and thought it'd be fun to have her come up and join the company of Shakespeareans.

Speaker 2:
It was fun. It was good. It was great.

Speaker 1:
Yeah. And then more recently, we've been working together on shows Dale has both written and performed. Really pretty solid for the last six or seven years on two plays.

Speaker 2:
Wow.

Speaker 1:
We did Forever, which was done here at the Kirk Douglas Theater. It was a CTG commission.

Speaker 2:
Right.

Speaker 1:
And then we performed that show around the country and also in Dublin.

Speaker 2:
Right.

Speaker 1:
And then starting in, while we were doing that show, which must have been 2015, maybe even to the spring of, must've been the spring of 15.

Speaker 2:
It was the spring of 15.

Speaker 1:
We were approached by St. Louis Rep to do this show.

Speaker 2:
Well, Michael Brown was, yeah, it was 2014 is when he, August 9th, 2014. So yes, it was 2015 when St. Louis Rep approached me about, you know, writing this play about him. So yeah, it's been that long.

Speaker 1:
It totally has. And I remember we were in rehearsal for Forever, the other play in New York, because Dale went back in the dressing room on a break and came back out of the dressing room and told me they had just contacted her about doing this play and that she told them I was doing it with her.

Speaker 2:
Yeah. That's it. That's the end. He's doing it.

Speaker 1:
And that started in 15 and it started, it was a very meaningful project, I always felt, but I had no idea it would become sort of what it's become all these years later. I mean, no one can really predict that, right?

Speaker 2:
It's, you know, it's, it's a trying piece and it's, you know, we've been doing it now, gosh, I guess it'd be like three and a half, four, what is it?

Speaker 1:
No, because-

Speaker 2:
Yeah. The first production was during the last presidential election. So we actually had the show up in the fall of 16.

Speaker 1:
That's right. So, and then, you know, traveling around the world with it. So, and it becomes a different play each time. I was saying that to our lighting designer, ML, that, you know, it does become a different play each time. It's a different challenge each time and it's interesting to see how audiences respond.

Speaker 2:
It was interesting seeing those audiences respond to it in Europe and how the way it resonated.

Speaker 1:
Yeah.

Speaker 2:
Yeah. It resonated much more than I thought it was going to.

Speaker 1:
Yeah, exactly right. But I feel like that's sort of been the, for me, the experience of the play. I remember when, so Dale, so when they contacted us in 2015, it was less than a year after the shooting. And at that point there had been lots of protests. There had been the decision not to indict the police officer.

Speaker 2:
Right.

Speaker 1:
And there had been, I think, just recently at that point, the Department of Justice report outlining the years of trouble in Ferguson and around Ferguson.

Speaker 2:
Unbelievable.

Speaker 1:
So Dale went out first, I think if I remember the order right, Dale went out first to interview people.

Speaker 2:
Right.

Speaker 1:
And the theater in St. Louis set up lots of interviews for her. And, but what I wanted to keep the emphasis on was how the shooting affected people. I don't use the word murder. A few people use the word murder. We don't know whether it is or not. We don't know what happened with, you know, between them and the ensuing moments.

Speaker 2:
But what did race mean to one of the most segregated cities in the U.S.? How far had we come or not? How did it affect them on a personal level? So that's the thing, you know, I wanted to keep the emphasis, and we did keep the emphasis on that.

Speaker 1:
But of course, there are going to be certain people who said to me, you know, well, who's guilty, who's not guilty? They're going to want their own sense of justice at the expense of someone else's truth. So how far have we come racially?

Speaker 2:
But it was also interesting to see how the way race and ethnicity, you know, also is very strong within Europe as well. It was interesting seeing that in Scotland and Ireland and England, you know, the Black Lives Matter movement. And we had, and again, that was the early stages of it, you know, and it wasn't about repping that, but somehow that, you know, and of course, I can see where there'd be a juxtaposition and a joining of, but that wasn't, as we both know, that wasn't the emphasis.

Speaker 1:
What does this mean to you personally? How does this shooting affect you personally? Are the races within you, because whether we care to admit it or not, you know, as open minded as we are, I think everybody does have a racist within them. And there certainly are, well, every character in this play has some, some racial history, some more twisted than others.

Speaker 2:
And I think it's the, and it's important to know that after interviewing the people, Dale doesn't then portray those specific people or say exactly what they said. She takes what they said.

Speaker 1:
And we also made research trips to St. Louis where, with all the designers and Dale, and we visited various sites that had to do with the incident between the police officer and Michael Brown. But we also just visited places that had to do with St. Louis history and the culture of that city, because we were very aware that we were outsiders coming in.

Speaker 2:
Right.

Speaker 1:
And we didn't want a sense of trying to tell those people anything about their city as though we knew it. We just wanted to sort of try, as Dale said, to understand the emotions of what people were feeling and how they'd been affected by all the upheaval. And I think that's why it continues to speak to people, I think.

Speaker 2:
But it's also the way you manage to play those characters. And it's always fascinating to me.

Speaker 1:
Well, I had a good director and I did that.

Speaker 2:
Oh, there you go.

Speaker 1:
But it's always fascinating to me the way that you, every night, can play some characters who we really feel for and love and some characters who we hate by the time their time on stage is over and that you manage to bring a humanity to all of those characters is remarkable to me.

Speaker 2:
But that's what theater is, because, you know, first and foremost, we're theater workers. And even if you don't necessarily like a character, that character has to be fleshed out and understood. You know, just to simply play, I mean, I don't think people are born evil, whatever evil means, you know, we have to look at as to why that happened or have a certain kind of empathy, you know, otherwise they will be one dimensional, you know, so that doesn't interest me.

Speaker 1:
I mean, it's like, how did this person come to this place? What helped form that, conditioning, the innate, all of that combined, yeah?

Speaker 2:
But I think there's a sense of that that makes it interesting to people when we play in Europe or anywhere, because it's not specifically about the events. As Dale says, no one knows what happened in like the 45 seconds that those two people actually confronted each other. There are theories, there's different eyewitness testimony that's confusing, but nobody actually knows.

Speaker 1:
And so the piece doesn't really, it's not an investigative piece of a crime or an event. It's this looking into people's sort of souls about who we all are as this sort of amalgam of all of these characters.

Speaker 2:
And I feel like that, it was interesting to me how people understood the underlying human qualities of those characters, even in very foreign cultures.

Speaker 1:
Well, no, I mean, it's like someone, I'd forgotten to tell you this, someone in Edinburgh from Northern Ireland talked about what it was like for them as a Protestant, you know, the whole pride Catholic, how it affected them, you know, back in the seventies, you know, and they said, this applies to us as well.

Speaker 2:
So it's, I mean, certainly it is about that. I mean, there's no denying about the race and gender, but there's also a universalism to the piece, which is the thing that I think that's interesting, you know, not just simply for lack of a better term, black or white.

Speaker 1:
Yeah. And that's been surprising to me. The piece has continued to surprise me everywhere we've done it. I see different things in it. I'm moved in different ways.

Speaker 2:
One of the amazing things about working with Dale over the, on these two plays over the last six years is just the relationship of working closely with someone who is both writing the piece and ultimately the performer and interpreter of the piece on stage.

Speaker 1:
It's it feels like there's no middleman and I love actors. So I'm not saying, but when you work with a writer who's not going to perform it and the cast of actors, there's there's just another level of translation or interpretation or meaning that, that you work as a team to help everyone come to.

Speaker 2:
And when you work directly with the writer, who's going to perform it, and when we get the chance to do it multiple times, there's a, there's a connection, there's a language and a communication and a bond that builds.

Speaker 1:
That's interesting. Dale and I have one of the most moving, complicated things to me over the last five years is it on certain occasions, Dale and I will be out because we'll be in some city doing the show or we'll be at an airport or we'll be at a restaurant or we'll, you know, we'll just be out and we'll be talking about the play or, or not even talking about the play, talking about the weather, walking down the street and we'll have interactions with people.

Speaker 2:
And it's only after several awkward moments that I will realize, and Dale will look at me or whatever, and we'll realize they think we're a couple, you know, and, and that's both, I find that very horrifying and moving, not horrifying to be a couple, but often their reaction to us is very different meeting us, assuming we're an interracial couple than if they met us individually.

Speaker 1:
Well, I think the answer that you're talking about was when we were doing Flood in Milwaukee and statistically Milwaukee is the most segregated city within the U.S. And you know, just for people who are listening, we were on our way to Chicago and at the airport, we got thrown a lot of shade.

Speaker 2:
And it was interesting seeing that, you know, and I, since then I've talked to people who I know who gone, who actually were interracial couples who were in Milwaukee and they experienced that same thing.

Speaker 1:
And at one point, you know, Neil and I went to the theater and a woman very, she seemed kind enough, but I think, you know, she kind of put her foot in it and she goes, you know, we have to treat our blacks very nicer. You know, we were trying to be nicer to our blacks here in Milwaukee.

Speaker 2:
And then later on, you know, after, during intermission, she said, I hope you're not insulted. I said, well, I am. It's kind of like, we have to take care of our pet dog, you know, because I really didn't mean it that way.

Speaker 1:
So it's, it's interesting. Again, this was only what last year, last year, 2019, that's when that took place. So it's how far have we come? Have we gone 40 paces, then gone back 60 paces? It's interesting.

Speaker 2:
Yeah. And what do you feel, do you feel that you as the writer have responsibilities when you do a piece like this that is even loosely based on real events or real people or real, as opposed to, well, your autobiographical pieces are also based on in a way real people and real events.

Speaker 1:
I think I have a healthy sense of boundary. I mean, I think the master of the person who does that in terms of playing people that way verbatim is Anna Deavere Smith. She's a master. I am a playwright, not saying that she isn't as well, but she does documentary theater. This just so happens that this is based on a real event.

Speaker 2:
But I'm interested in terms of making composite figures. Even though this did not happen, say it's loosely based on an incident, it's not necessarily verbatim. I'm interested in the theatrical reality as well, the theatrical truth.

Speaker 1:
And like I said, again, I have a healthy sense of boundary in terms of what actually happened versus how the way people feel about it, how the way it could also possibly have happened, but it's still within the realm of that truth. So that's what I do.

Speaker 2:
But in terms of giving messages, that's not what I do. I mean, beginning, middle, end, story, conflict, resolution, that's what theater is about.

Speaker 1:
And when you approach a piece like this, like when you're either writing or performing it every night, is it different than when you approach a piece like Forever that is based on your own life and your own experience? Is the psychological preparation to perform that piece very different on a nightly basis?

Speaker 2:
Yes. I mean, with Forever, I realized that aspects of it are in fact me, but then again, there's also another part that is not me. So it is both, but yes, with this, certainly it's different, yeah.

Speaker 1:
But it doesn't necessarily mean that the psychological and emotional investment and the theatrical investment is any less, it's just different.

Speaker 2:
And do you know right when you start writing a play whether you're going to perform it? I'm thinking of Lady in Denmark or something, a play that was recently done in Chicago at the Goodman Theater in which you did not perform. Do you know when you get the idea, the kernel of the idea to start writing a play, whether you're going to be in it or not?

Speaker 1:
Like do you approach those differently? You know, I don't think that way. I just kind of check it out. And then when it's on the, when the baby is born and I look at it, but like there's certain plays I know that I just won't do.

Speaker 2:
I really don't think about it right then if that makes, I just kind of write the work and then we'll see what happens.

Speaker 1:
Like, for instance, with Lady in Denmark, I knew, I mean, it wasn't written, I mean, it was understood that I wasn't going to be in that one. But when I'm just simply writing in my house or wherever I am, I really don't think about it. I just kind of go.

Speaker 2:
And do you have a sense of the characters coming to you? Do the characters, do you consciously, like the woman in Lady in Denmark, or even the characters in this play, did you consciously think them up or at some level, do they start speaking to you?

Speaker 1:
You know, it's not as, again, it's not as methodical as that. I could be listening to a piece of music and something will come and hit me. An idea from, you know, or I'll look at a painting, an idea will hit me, you know, and I'll look at somebody in the street, you know, and there might be an aspect of something.

Speaker 2:
I might hear something within a coffee shop or in a restaurant or whatever it is, you know, and things. I mean, I'm always thinking about stuff. I have this thing they call synthesis. You know what that is? Where color or sound and everything merges with me and things just come automatically.

Speaker 1:
For instance, I understand why blues music is considered blue. I understand why the color blue is associated with that. I get that. I understand why that happens, you know?

Speaker 2:
I remember hearing about how, oh my God, Leonard Bernstein was in the room with a very famous musician and the musician said, I want this music to sound orange. And he said that the musician played it and it was orange and the person he was talking about was Jimi Hendrix.

Speaker 1:
Right. I was in rehearsal yesterday, the sound designer, our composer, Justin Ellington was reworking a cue and it meant that he had to break little pieces of the music onto separate tracks to do that. And so Dale and I were hearing parts of the tracks we had never heard before and he was playing part of a track that is associated with one particular character in this piece.

Speaker 2:
And I remember you looked up on the stage and you said, oh, you know, what's funny is that music in some way doesn't necessarily on the surface immediately seem appropriate for that character, but you can actually hear in the music, his walk, his stride, that Justin captured him and you hear that.

Speaker 1:
And it's interesting because, oh, my children have grown up with Dale now and they perceive a music differently because of Dale, I think.

Speaker 2:
Is that true?

Speaker 1:
Yeah. They listen because we listen to all the music from the two shows we've done. Okay. Play those playlists over. They asked me lots of questions.

Speaker 2:
You know, my daughter was the only 12-year-old I know who used to listen to Patti Smith's Piss Factory and defend it to her classmates who were confused whether it was even a song.

Speaker 1:
And so, but I think that, yes, I think their sort of minds have been broadened about what music is and how it communicates, what sound is and why certain songs and certain music and just your breadth of knowledge about music, I think, has been fascinating to them.

Speaker 2:
That's nice. Tell them thank you.

Speaker 1:
You'll see them soon.

Speaker 2:
I will see them soon. Yeah. You'll see them too.

Speaker 1:
Okay. And tell us about what new are you working on? Tell us about the play, what you can tell us about plays you currently are working on.

Speaker 2:
Well, there's a couple of plays. One of them you're directing. This is how I find out.

Speaker 1:
This is how you find out stuff.

Speaker 2:
This is a, I don't have a title for it yet, but I'm writing about mixed race Irish people, black slash Irish people who were not accepted within the Irish community in Ireland. There's one person specifically that I'm working on that grew up in the Magdalene system.

Speaker 1:
What is it?

Speaker 2:
But it's not just simply about race. What does it mean to be an outsider in many ways? Certainly, obviously race does apply to it. How do people give birth to themselves? The beauty of it. Ireland is a country that I feel connected to in certain ways. I love the literature. I understand the outsider stuff that goes on there.

Speaker 1:
Irish and black people do something that's interesting. It's like within the throes of craziness, they try to find humor in something.

Speaker 2:
So that's it. And there was a man years ago that I was in love with that when I went there, but also as a child, it's a long story, and you know that story, as a child, an Irishman saved me.

Speaker 1:
Well, two Irishmen saved me.

Speaker 2:
And then there was reading Eugene O'Neill. So that was like, oh my gosh, this is... And then like in the streets, in Harlem, you hear the guy singing Moon Dance, Van Morrison. So all of this was around me in the weirdest way, as well as Tito Puente and Junior Walker and the All-Stars growing up and all that stuff.

Speaker 1:
But writing about that, there's another play that I've written about aging called New Age. And I took that title from the Velvet Underground song, New Age.

Speaker 2:
And there's another piece about, I'm writing with my friend, David Care, we're writing about loneliness. What does that mean? Because somehow that's considered a taboo subject. When somebody says that they're lonely or they're alone, we tend to get uncomfortable with that.

Speaker 1:
But that's also a natural, that's a thing that naturally happens. I like that both you and David write about the uncomfortable things that we're all experiencing.

Speaker 2:
Other people are desperately, particularly in this town, desperately trying not to age and to hide the fact that they're aging or not deal with it or not talk about it.

Speaker 1:
That is so weird.

Speaker 2:
Or that they're lonely. There's a certain film we saw, I'm not going to say because I like the actors, where it's nominated this year. I just give it away, Dale, because you just did.

Speaker 1:
But you're looking at these people and they're saying, you know, they don't look their age. Like, oh, yes, they do. And it's, it looks kind of strange.

Speaker 2:
But what is the, you know, you're supposed to age. And also times of, you know, the difference between loneliness, isolation, all those things. We all get that way.

Speaker 1:
There's a stereotype, I guess, about being older and being alone and or lonely. And it's like, I like looking at things that make us uncomfortable, because that way it's like we can bring it into a light and understand it.

Speaker 2:
You know, but there's, so those are the pieces that I'm working on. And I'm actually working on a book, writing it in my mother's voice. I got a lot going on.

Speaker 1:
You got a lot going on. I must say.

Speaker 2:
Yeah. You know, as for all the creaky bones of age, I do feel like it took, I always feel like somehow it took the 30 years for me to be able to work with you on Forever and Until the Flood. You know, I feel like if we tried to do those or I tried to do those with you 25 years ago, they would not have come out as well.

Speaker 1:
Well, I couldn't, I couldn't have written them. I, you know, I mean, there's certain people who maybe say they hit a certain, oh God, they hit a certain zenith, but they don't understand it. And they're no longer here.

Speaker 2:
And specifically what I'm talking about, someone like an Amy Winehouse who didn't, who had the voice of a 50 year old, but didn't quite understand what to do with it.

Speaker 1:
It's just saying, and again, you know, I hate that 27 club, but there's that, that 27 club, those people had, they hit the zenith. There was an emotional intensity that was there, but they didn't have the ability to sustain that because they weren't on the planet that long.

Speaker 2:
And also looking at the time, although Amy Winehouse has been dead, what, seven years. But again, still you have to have lifetime, I mean, time on the earth and to, to figure out how to deal with what you have.

Speaker 1:
You know, like the other day I was watching Grace Jones, Blood, Light and Bammy, right? Now Grace Jones is 71 years old. I remember she was, what she was doing, she was doing like 30, 40 years ago. People saying, this is not going to last.

Speaker 2:
And you watch that now and you go, whether you like her or not, it's an art form. You know, it is an art form. She learned how to deal with what she had because in the nineties, no one gave a damn and they still don't.

Speaker 1:
Cause in Europe, she's huge. A lot of people here don't even know how big she is in Europe, but you're looking at this person who's never done anything to themselves and who, who's a literal living art form.

Speaker 2:
Who's managed to live with being shunned by a lot of different people. She was too dark. She was too weird. Now you've got everybody looking at her, looking like her.

Speaker 1:
The same thing with Whoopi Goldberg, same thing. People laughed at her back in the day. Now people, their hair is just like hers. Although a lot of people tend to forget that they took from her and they laugh, but that always happens with the people who are iconic, who are still alive.

Speaker 2:
When they're dead, everybody goes, oh my God, you know, so yeah. But aging is not something that bothers me. It never has.

Speaker 1:
Cause I was always, the line that applies to me is turn, turn, turn. I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now. That's the thing that applies to me as a 60 year old, you know, it's amazing.

Speaker 2:
And I think too, I feel like we've been blessed to somehow have a home in Center Theater Group. I feel like we talk about it when we're on the road. We talk about like, when are we going to bring Until the Flood home? It feels strange that we played all these other theaters first, but we always knew.

Speaker 1:
I feel like we were coming here and you know, it's coincidence and chance and all that. But I also feel like somehow over the 30 years, we both ended up back here.

Speaker 2:
I mean, really all of the Forever and Until the Flood all sort of got started with Dale and I when she was out here doing Bones is really what happened, which was a CTG commission because we also did a short run of Stoop Stories with Dale.

Speaker 1:
And she and I worked on getting that up while she was working on Bones and that sort of got us back in touch with each other and working together.

Speaker 2:
Well, when I'm out in LA, when I'm here in LA, cause I still live in New York, LA has been real good to me and Center Theater Group has done work that other people wouldn't do.

Speaker 1:
Like Bones.

Speaker 2:
Yeah. So it's, and I've always felt like this has been a great artistic home and I'm so glad to be back.

Speaker 1:
And I feel like with Forever too, I feel like, you know, we were able to get it up here and work on it here and it got better and more finished later, but we never would have been able to do that without the time and the resources and the workshops and the productions and things we got here.

Speaker 2:
Right.

Speaker 1:
No, it was great doing it here. It was interesting, the reactions. And I feel like, I feel they all, I was thinking about the other day, the, the set for all four of those shows, you know, being in the Douglas, there's similarities to, you know, there's real, there are things about the Until the Flood set that remind me when you're up there of the Forever set, the same set designer and all, and so that doesn't surprise me.

Speaker 2:
And even the Bones and the Stoop stories, you in that space, yeah.

Speaker 1:
I wasn't in Bones though.

Speaker 2:
You were there, but you were here with us, but your voice in that space, I think is, is important.

Speaker 1:
Yeah, Bones was really important for us because it was the first time we had done a play in a very different way in the space where we use the space differently and put the audience up on stage with the play and sort of let the play dictate what it needed. It was a real, that was sort of a turning point for the Douglas and for Center Theater Group, I think.

Speaker 2:
Wow. That's cool.

Speaker 1:
That's great.

Speaker 2:
Yeah. It was very cool.

Speaker 1:
You've been listening to 30 to Curtain, a Center Theater Group podcast. You can find out more about Until the Flood, our organization, and all our upcoming productions on our website at centertheatergroup.org.