Sunday, April 28, 2019

Sunday Brunch Thoughts on Legacy


I woke up this morning to the irresistible smell of a Sunday brunch being cooked upstairs. My stomach rumbled. I was going to have a breakfast shake but that damn brunch smell permeated the apt hallways. it seeped through my door. I couldn't take it. I ran out of my apartment to get an egg sandwich on a biscuit. In the throes of my cravings, I forgot my keys. Locked out. Not going to make it the gym in time for yoga. I sat on the stoop and looked around. I ate my sandwich and drank kombucha. I watched a father rolling his son down the street on a bike. I thought about the connection between father and son. That's some legacy 'ish.' The scene was like out of a Norman Rockwell painting about family and generations. My mind drifted. After about 20 minutes, a neighbor came back from a morning walk. He let me in and I was back in my apartment. I got back to writing, but the silent sitting had shifted something or opened up my mind. My head started buzzing with random questions...

-is it unusual that there's this sonic boom for Black playwrights but not for Black theatre institutions?

- Maybe it's irrelevant. Maybe a theatremakers true legacy is just the written word.

-In TV, a successful writer ends up having their own show, creating their own company, hiring execs, and getting development deals. They eventually own the means of production (and maybe even distribution down the line) Black moguls like Oprah, Shonda Rhimes, Tyler Perry, Lee Daniels, and Jordan Peele don't just create new stories. They package, produce, market. They build empires that employ others and control...and it all started with the written word. Isn't this a better legacy?

- Imagine if Dick Wolf was a really great playwright. He would have a lot of plays. His plays would get produced by other people, in other cities. The control would be minimal.

- Say what you will about him, David Mamet has a connection to Atlantic Theatre Company. Is that legacy building?

- But is money/power a real legacy? Maybe theatre stays true to the real thing, the only thing that carries over: the written word.

- Or is that 'written word' legacy just romantic bullshit to keep artists from controlling their own shows?

- Maybe a lot of black theatre institutions from the 1960s and 1970s became incestuous and backward? I know very few Black writers from Yale, Juilliard, Brown or any of the elite schools who are being hit up by the Black Theatre conference in NC. Negro Ensemble Company helped create Pulitzer-prize winning plays.

- is the theatre grind so hard, that writers don't think about getting together to own the means of production? When you're on the rise, your main obsession is the next commission and next production, getting connected to the bigger org, the director with more power. Often this leads to tribes of nomadic artists that mingle together for a few months for production and then wander off to the next show.

- The nomads were eventually destroyed by the farmers who built homes. Is the same fate true for artists? Or is the home only what you carry in a script?

- if August Wilson was alive today, would he be running a TV room? Would he have his own prestige empire of tv dramas? Is that hopeful or sad? Would we have gotten the decalogue?

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