by Andrea Hairston
2015 was quite a
year. Trying times. Amazing times.
I am grateful to
all the artists whose brilliance offered us much needed perspectives, analysis,
fun, insight, and hope. In the midst of willful ignorance and raging disinformation,
so many artists rehearsed complex truth and rescued meaning. There was/is no
time to despair—so imagination to the rescue!
I teach
screenwriting and playwriting at Smith College, and I was particularly struck
this year by the creativity and audacity of my students. Instead of trying to
second-guess the market or a phantom mainstream audience, these writers crafted
stories they wanted to tell, stories they longed to see on stage or screen but
rarely get a chance to. Every week their plays and screenplays got better.
Everybody’s work got better.
I was also
excited to see the readings and productions that Smith College students directed,
designed, and performed in: Yellowface
by David Henry Hwang,
Stop Kiss by Diana Son,
Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman,
Photograph 51 by Anna Ziegler, Water By The Spoonful by Quiara
Alegria Hudes , In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play)
by Sarah Ruhl,
And The Sun Stood Still by Dava Sobel ),
The Koyal’s Cage by Afreen Gandhi, and
Dirty Talk by Shaheen Vaaz.
Read these plays.
If a theatre is doing a production, check it out. Or better yet talk producers
into bringing these plays to a stage near you!
I didn’t see a
production of By the Way, Meet Vera Stark
by Lynn Nottage but reading it for my class—Rehearsing the Impossible: Black women playwrights
interrupting the Master Narrative—was a real treat. Nottage makes the invisible
mind-control of the stories we see, live, and act in visible and she has a
laugh-out-loud, good time recalibrating our narrative landscape.
One of the best
shows of the year on the east coast of the USA was the blood moon or total
super moon eclipse on September 27, 2015. Nothing like standing in the dark and
watching the celestial bodies line up.
Other highlights
of the year include:
Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon by Kim Zetter.
Stuxnet and binge-watching three
seasons of Person of Interest—cyber horror
to read/watch when you can’t sleep.
Steeplejack by A. J. Hartley--
a YA debut novel offering murder, mystery, romance, and political intrigue in a
fresh landscape that riffs on South Africa’s multicultural history.
Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World by Naomi S. Baron --
Another book that kept me company during sleepless nights.
Stories for Chip edited by Nisi Shawl
and Bill Campbell.
This is a breathtaking, whirlwind tour of the mythic, science fictional
landscape that Samuel Delaney has engendered.
Watching the same
screen at the same time, we all see a different movie. I delighted in this
while watching Mad Max Fury Road.
Director George Miller, and performers Charlize Theron
and Tom Hardy had some folks fussing about THE FEMINIST
TAKEOVER. Not me. Let the feminists take over. Chi-Raq, Spike Lee’s anti-gun, anti-violence riff on Aristophanes’
satire Lysistrata, wasn’t “real”
enough for some folks who proclaimed that satire won’t “stop the bullets.” Hey,
neither does realism stop the bullets. But I certainly was inspired by the screen images of women in
Chicago and all over the world from West Africa to Denmark, Japan, India, and Brazil
refusing to have sex with men until they quit their violent ways. No Peace, No
Piece.
Spike Lee
references Nobel Prize winner Leymah Roberta Gbowee and women in Liberia who
worked across ethnic and religious divides to end civil war in Liberia. Women using
collective power and sex strikes to challenge male violence and tyranny has a long tradition in
West Africa. Igbo women in Nigeria call it ogu ndem—sitting on a man
or women’s war. How real is that?
Realism is just what you’re willing to
believe. Hooray to the artists who make me believe in tomorrow. Imagination to
the rescue!
Andrea
Hairston is the Artistic Director of Chrysalis Theatre and has created
original productions with music, dance, and masks for over thirty
years. She is also the Louise Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor of Theatre and
Afro-American Studies at Smith College. Her first novel from Aqueduct Press, Mindscape, won the Carl Brandon Parallax Award and was shortlisted for the Phillip K Dick Award and the Tiptree Award. Her second novel, Redwood and Wildfire, published
by Aqueduct in 2012, won the James Tiptree Jr. Award as well as the
Carl Brandon Kindred Award. Aqueduct released Lonely Stardust: Two Plays, a Speech, and Eight Essays, last year and will be publishing her new novel, Will Do Magic for Small Change in Spring 2016.
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