An Unruly Epic: Playwright Marcus Gardley on "Jesus Moonwalks" by / Sam Hurwitt

Although he lives in New York, Marcus Gardley has deep roots in the Bay Area. Born and raised in West Oakland, the 33-year-old playwright got his bachelor’s degree at San Francisco State University and his MFA at the Yale School of Drama. Gardley has explored Bay Area history in the past with plays for Shotgun Players, “Love Is a Dream House in Lorin” and “This World in a Woman’s Hands.” Although it’s set in the South during the Civil War, his play “...and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi” also harks back to his Oakland childhood, particularly the stories his great-grandmother told him about her father, who’d been a slave. Gardley wrote his first draft of the play at Yale 10 years ago, and in March 2010 San Francisco’s Cutting Ball Theater and Playwrights Foundation finally gave the play its first professional production at Exit on Taylor. I spoke with Gardley on the phone about “Jesus Moonwalks,” which we published in our January/February issue.

Tell me about the genesis of this play.

I started the first draft when I was at Yale Drama School. I wanted to write a play from the slave’s perspective. I really wanted to do an adaptation, because I felt the Greeks and their epic myths could really frame the epic notion of the loss of a child or having to give your child away. So I was really drawn to the myth of Demeter and Persephone, and I knew that was going to be at the center of the play. Then in my research I found some really beautiful facts that sort of stayed with me, of spirituals and quilts being used as maps and tools for slaves getting north. So those were the major ingredients I used to create this play.

There’s a lot of mythic content in this play from different cultural sources: Demeter, Brer Rabbit, Jesus. How did those pieces fall into place for you?

One thing was the notion of a quilt. The pieces that make up a quilt are from different fabrics, from swatches that collect over time. Also the notion of a gumbo, everything going into the pot, and this idea that America is a melting pot—these ingredients from all walks of life that are thrown together to create a nationality. I love that idea. I wanted to write a play into which everyone could find their entry, so that it was an American story as much as it was a story about this man trying to find his daughter.

I understand that this story also came out of family lore.

Absolutely. My great-grandmother, who’s still alive—she just turned 97—her father was a slave, and she always used to tell this story when we had family gatherings. Her mother died, and her great-uncle came back from the war with consumption that he brought back with him. All the women in the family died but her, and she was a baby. Her father didn’t feel like he could raise a girl by himself, so he gave her away to another family, the Gibsons. I think 10 years passed, and he regretted the decision, so he went to search for her. It’s just really moving story about a man who was a slave himself, and obviously his mother had to give him away. I think the idea that he gave his daughter away by choice haunted him, and he couldn’t live with that and went to find her. When the Gibsons adopted her they took her away, but he ended up finding her. She’d always tell that story at family reunions, and I was always moved by it. So that’s at the center of the play, which relates to the Demeter myth.

Was there a particular inspiration for the way you decided to use Jesus in the play?

My [great-]grandmother, when she used to tell this story, there was the extra element of her father dressing up as a woman when he was still a slave, because he was trying to get free. When I was starting to write this play I went and interviewed her again, so that she could retell these stories to me and I could make sure they were told in the right way. And the stories were changing. All her grandchildren call her Ma, and I’d say, “Ma, your stories keep changing every time you tell them.” And she said, “That’s what stories do. You have to change them.” She was losing her memory, really, but I think her way of handling it was that she would say, “You have to add your own piece to it. That’s how the story lives on.” I loved that idea, so Jesus was my entry into the story. When I was a kid, Jesus was my imaginary friend. So that’s why I gave Free Girl Jesus as an imaginary friend.

The Verse family members all have poetic names. Is there particular significance to that?

The Lorca quote that “a play is a poem standing up,” and I wanted to use these poetic literary devices to heighten that idea. I actually came up with the names first, so it was a really delicious coincidence that Free Girl could be Free Verse, Blanche is Blank Verse. Free Verse’s language is very free, Blanche’s verse is like blank verse, Jean obviously uses verse in his language, and Demeter is like “the meter,” so I tried to make her language kind of staccato, very rhythmic. And Cadence, the cadence of the drum.

Did you have to do a lot of general historical research because of the period you were setting it in?

I knew I would be setting myself up for failure if I tried to capture the actual language of the period word for word, and all of my plays have heightened language. So most of my research was reading slave narratives, because I really wanted to be authentic in terms of what they would be carrying with them and how they would speak to different people depending upon class. Beyond that I took a lot of poetic license, because it’s a historical play that is written for a contemporary audience.

Tell me a bit about the journey of the play itself.

The first quote-unquote “production” was when I was in my second year at the Yale drama school. It was very well received, but I wasn’t satisfied with it, because Miss Ssippi as a character was really small. She was just the narrator, and it felt contrived to me. She didn’t have any stake in the actual central conflict. So I kind of shelved it after that. A friend of mine asked me to send him some plays and I sent it to him, and he said, “You should submit this to the Sundance Theatre Lab.” I said, “No, no, I want to send something else to them,” but he sent it anyway, without my permission, and it ended up getting accepted. So I did a major rewrite on the play while I was there, and that was close to the draft that we used for the San Francisco production. Two years later, Philip Himberg from the Sundance Theatre Lab called me and said, “I can’t stop thinking about that play. We’re going to do ‘Sundance Comes to New York,’ and we want this play to be the inaugural play for the festival.” So I got really excited about the play. This is the only play that I shelve a lot. It’s very unruly as a play, because there’s so much going on in it. So we did a reading of it in New York, and the experience was very disastrous for me, because the advice that I got was that it had to be very mean and lean if I wanted a New York production. A whole crew of the New York theatre scene, including Tony Kushner, Lynn Nottage and Oskar Eustis, all came to the reading and gave me notes. Because the play cannot be mean and lean for various reasons, the response to it was not as positive as I would have hoped, so I really shelved it then. I kind of buried it. It wasn’t until Amy [Mueller of Playwrights Foundation] approached me and said she wanted to produce it that I took it off the shelf, and that had to be three years after the New York reading.

The Cutting Ball/Playwrights Foundation production was its first professional production, right?

Yes. I really got excited about bringing to that community, because I grew up there. A play about my family in the area where I grew up, it was like a golden opportunity.

Has the play gone on to other productions since then?

You know, it’s so funny, because a lot of people want to do the play, but I wish they could have seen the San Francisco production. Theatres have slated it for their seasons, but they get afraid that it’s too expensive to make, and so people bow out. When you have more than six characters, people get really nervous. I actually think a bare set is what the play calls for because the language is so rich; too many visual elements would become sensory overload. So I’m always trying to convince people that it actually doesn’t require that much in terms of set.

How do you think this play fits in with the rest of your work in terms of its themes and style?

After I finished this play, I realized that part of my aesthetic is epic in nature. My voice and the artistic landscape that I’m working in is epic. And so it confirmed for me that I can’t be worried about too many actors or highly poetic language and all of that that I think scares certain theatres. What I need to do for myself as an artist is keep honing my voice, because the more I do that, the more I get excited about what I’m making. And I’ve stuck to my guns, pretty much, and to this day I’ve never written a play that hasn’t been produced, so I think it’s working for me. But without that play, I think I would have been writing two-character, more conventional work. I think that play taught me this is why I’m in this business and this is the kind of work I’m passionate about. And you know, I feel like it’s a young play. I feel like I’ve grown a lot since that play. There are certain things about it that I would change, but I like that it’s messy. I wouldn’t write that play now—it would be totally different—but I haven’t changed a lot because I think messy is good for certain plays and that play in particular. I love that it’s big and juicy.

What have you been working on recently?

I’m doing two trilogies. One is historical plays about the migration of black Seminoles from Florida to Oklahoma, and it covers 100 years. The first play takes place in Florida, the second play takes place during the migration and the last play takes place in Oklahoma. The last play, “The Road Weeps, the Well Runs Dry,” will be produced all across the country next year at four different theatres through this grant with the Mellon Foundation. And then after that is done, the trilogy will be done in Chicago at Victory Gardens. And then the other trilogy I’m working on is an adaptation of Lorca’s Rural Trilogy—“Yerma,” “Blood Wedding” and “The House of Bernarda Alba”—except it takes place in New Orleans, and that will cover 100 years as well.

You’ve been out of the Bay Area for a while but identify as a Bay Area playwright. What does that mean for you?

It means a lot to me. Most people that live in the Bay Area have migrated there, so I’m the product of people who have migrated. On my dad’s side they migrated from Texas, and on my mom’s side from Louisiana. So migration is a huge theme in all of my work. But also because it’s so diverse. There’s a celebration of diversity in the Bay Area that I haven’t found anywhere in the same way in the United States. People ask me, “Why are all your plays multicultural? Why do they all have people from different backgrounds?” I think because I grew up in the Bay Area, that’s how I see the world. I hear different voices, I see a spectrum of people, and I get really excited about people from different backgrounds forming their own communities, forming their own families, and that is definitely evident in the Bay Area. Also, I would say, being close to water—water is a huge theme in all of my work. I also have a very strong sense of family because my grandparents moved from Louisiana; they all moved onto the same street and occupied three homes on the same street. So when I grew up, I had family always around me. All that’s to say that the Bay Area is my idea of home in a really interesting way. Even though I live in New York and I write mostly about the South, when I think of home I think of the Bay Area for sure, and it has influenced all of my work.

Sam Hurwitt is editor-in-chief for Theatre Bay Area. He is also the author of The Idiolect, a blog about theater, movies, comics, media and the decline and fall of Western civilization.
E-mail sam@theatrebayarea.org.