I found a lot of solace in the word
students, you can diagnose immediately where they are in terms of grasping
structure, and what they want from theatre. I think that play is amazing. But I
remember everyone else being like, “I don’t get it.” At the end of the year Neal
said, “I think you should keep writing plays. You’re doing something really
complicated.” I found a lot of solace in the word “complicated.” That somehow
it was okay to be messy, okay to wrestle in your plays with a million things.
Signature: It’s true, you’re always operating on multiple levels in your work.
BJJ: Right. So I applied to write a full-length play for my thesis, but I was
an anthropology major. Within my anthro studies though, I was very much
“complicated.”
which I actually teach in my own classes today. When you teach that play to
into performance studies. I took a class called “On Literature and Culture”
about reading texts in order to discuss culture but also as relics of culture.
It was about literature as a culturally located idea. I was obsessed with
ideas of appropriation and value and race and Americanness.
Signature: But you hadn’t yet written about race, or really engaged with those
issues in your work, right?
BJJ: Well around this time I took a class with Daphne Brooks on African
American theatre. I was suddenly curious about blackness in the theatre
and what that was. The first thing she said, which was very provocative, was,
“There are two places I could’ve started this class. I could’ve started with
minstrelsy or with Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I’m choosing Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
Her point had to do with the idea of a canon. A lot of the nar Ʌѥٔ