{"id":360816,"date":"2024-10-23T21:15:05","date_gmt":"2024-10-24T01:15:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dctheaterarts.org\/?p=360816"},"modified":"2024-10-23T21:15:05","modified_gmt":"2024-10-24T01:15:05","slug":"playwright-dave-harris-hopes-we-can-language-our-way-through-this","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dctheaterarts.org\/2024\/10\/23\/playwright-dave-harris-hopes-we-can-language-our-way-through-this\/","title":{"rendered":"Playwright Dave Harris hopes ‘we can language our way through this’"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/span>here comes a point in every Dave Harris play when the world falters, and something disturbingly true tumbles out.<\/p>\n

In Exception to the Rule<\/em><\/a> (running through October 27 at DC\u2019s Studio Theatre<\/a>), an inner-city detention classroom is plunged into surreal darkness. Soon, a seemingly straight-laced student Erika reveals a harrowing account of the ruptures in her identity. In Incendiary<\/em><\/a> (which had its world premiere at DC\u2019s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in the summer of 2023), a mother Tanya goes on a wacky, madcap adventure to free her incarcerated son from prison. In a thrilling reversal, the audience quickly realizes Tanya\u2019s death drive is hopelessly misguided, and we understand the horrific truths underpinning the farce.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s Tambo and Bones<\/em><\/a> (which tours across the UK next summer), and its triplet reveals. The play moves from an existential comedy to a rap concert to an Afrofuturist world, each time folding in strangely specific details and histories within the dialogue. These moments feel like Harris dancing through his self-written chaos to catch a brief glimpse of the audience. Even though this dance is well choreographed, it\u2019s still disarming for audiences to immediately match Harris\u2019 gaze.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Dave Harris. Photo by Izak Rappaport courtesy of the artist.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Over the past year and a half, I\u2019ve reviewed<\/a> the DC productions of Exception to the Rule <\/em>and Incendiary<\/em>. Although Dave Harris<\/a> started as a poet and even published a poetry collection, Patricide<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>in 2019, his theatrical breakthrough came in 2022 when he had two plays off-Broadway within the same year. These were Tambo and Bones<\/em> at Playwrights Horizons<\/a> (directed by Taylor Reynolds, a director who often works in DC), and Exception to the Rule <\/em>at Roundabout Theatre Company<\/a> (directed by Miranda Haymon, who previously had a fellowship at Arena Stage).<\/p>\n

Although I\u2019ve found Harris\u2019 works thrilling in their surprising structures and twists, I\u2019ve also felt the DC audiences around me shifting in their seats with discomfort, both physical and emotional. Maybe Harris\u2019 truths are too disturbing to accept with immediate grace. Maybe we\u2019re all just trying to understand how the theatrical worlds we\u2019ve been living in have transformed \u2014 or rather how Harris transforms the world we live in every day. In any case, engaging with a Dave Harris play isn\u2019t easy: It can be simultaneously pleasurable, painful, hilarious, and terrifying. Still, it\u2019s my hope that the DC community rises to the occasion.<\/p>\n

When I spoke to Dave Harris over Zoom earlier this month, he was candid about how his personal life shapes his playwriting (perhaps more candid than any playwright I\u2019ve interviewed so far). He told me that Exception to the Rule <\/em>is very much drawn from his experiences. Like the characters in the show, specifically Erika, he struggles with how leaving the community in which he was raised is both a gain and a loss.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Khalia Muhammad, Jacques Jean-Mary, Sabrina Lynne Sawyer (as Erika), Steven Taylor Jr., and Shana Lee Hill in \u2018Exception to the Rule\u2019 at Studio Theatre. Photo by Margot Schulman.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Harris was born in Los Angeles but grew up in West Philly. In sixth grade, he started attending an all-boys private school, where he was one of a handful of students of color. He says this all happened during \u201ca really rough time,\u201d while his family was evicted from their home and was sleeping on couches. His mother saw Harris\u2019 education as an opportunity.<\/p>\n

\u201cSomething she said to me as a kid was \u2018You have to be able to see beyond your block,\u2019 and like \u2018You\u2019re going to be the one that finally gonna escape this place,\u2019\u201d Harris says. \u201cSo she kind of gave me that mentality. Again, she didn\u2019t do it with any malicious intent. She didn\u2019t even really know what she was sending me to. She just had inherited this idea that this other place is better, and if you go there and be there, you\u2019ll do something better. You won\u2019t have to live like us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although he purposefully didn\u2019t share this fact much when Exception to the Rule<\/em> premiered off-Broadway in 2022, Harris started writing it as an undergrad sophomore at Yale. It was his attempt to reckon with his adolescence, when academic success and his family felt increasingly distant.<\/p>\n

\u201cSuddenly I was like, \u2018Oh, I\u2019m living two completely different worlds, and these things are becoming split from each other,\u2019\u201d Harris says.<\/p>\n

In his private school, Harris participated in extracurricular activities, honed his writing practice, traveled across the country, and got into every college where he applied. Despite all of this success, he still realized in college how much he\u2019d sacrificed in order to get where he was.<\/p>\n

\u201cI ate that shit up, and then I got to college and was like, \u2018Wow, I\u2019ve turned my back on so much,\u2019\u201d Harris says. \u201cAnd also this place I\u2019m at is just as fucked. Also, this place I\u2019m at tokenizes me and has done all of these things, like I\u2019ve changed myself so much in order to earn a dead white man\u2019s approval. And that was sort of the crisis that led to Exception to the Rule<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

B<\/span>lack upward mobility is a throughline in all of Harris\u2019 playwriting \u2014 it\u2019s an internal conflict he externalizes and then connects to larger Black American histories. For example, the two main characters of Tambo and Bones<\/em> are \u201cclowns\u201d who gain success by performing minstrel-like shows for a white audience, in both historical and allegorical performances.<\/p>\n

Harris wrote Tambo and Bones <\/em>after Exception to the Rule<\/em> when he realized there was a market and appetite for Black struggle narratives. Characters might try to escape detention in Exception to the Rule<\/em>, but in Tambo and Bones<\/em>, characters can\u2019t escape society or history.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re watching characters try to escape, and we find with each act, they escape somewhere further, they ascend further and further,\u201d Harris says of Tambo and Bones<\/em>. \u201cNothing fills the original hole. The question that they will have to confront is that original void. Is that void caused by the loss of home? Caused by slavery and oppression and 400 years? Is that void just human nature, and actually all of us are trying to fill something?\u201d<\/p>\n

Part of Harris\u2019 critique in Tambo and Bones <\/em>extends to the audience itself. There\u2019s even a metatheatrical address in the play that calls attention to the racial dynamics in the audience. Tambo addresses an audience that, in the world of the show, is Black \u2014 but in production, the actor will likely be performing in front of a mostly white crowd. Tambo asks, \u201cHow could anyone know freedom in a world where they are always being watched?\u201d<\/p>\n

Harris isn\u2019t alone in questioning how dramatists of color can live under a threatening white gaze \u2014 I\u2019ve also<\/a> written<\/a> about that struggle in this publication. Although writers of color feel this most acutely, every writer must struggle with a thorny question: Who do you write for? Slave Play <\/em>playwright Jeremy O. Harris encourages<\/a> other Black playwrights to \u201cmake black art for your black self.\u201d Cost of Living <\/em>playwright Martyna Majok expresses<\/a> her goal of writing for and about her friends and family. Alternatively, experimental Black playwrights like Michael R. Jackson<\/a> and Jackie Sibblies Drury<\/a> build entire shows confronting a white gaze. I\u2019ve personally been haunted by words from poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong, who writes<\/a>, \u201cEven to declare that I\u2019m writing for myself would still mean I\u2019m writing to a part of me that wants to please white people.\u201d<\/p>\n

I bring up this question with Harris, who has multiple responses to it. Similar to Hong, he believes that even if there\u2019s part of yourself that thinks about a white audience, \u201cthat doesn\u2019t make it any less you.\u201d Similar to Majok, he writes to make his friends laugh, especially his fellow playwright friend Mara Nelson-Greenberg<\/a>. Simultaneously, he acknowledges that his characters and plays live separately from his life.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had a poetry professor, Elizabeth Alexander,\u201d he says. \u201cOne of the quotes she would always say is that as soon as you put something down, it kind of doesn\u2019t belong to you anymore. You create something to look at yourself, and it can look back at you in a way. But the act of writing is the act of putting something impossible inside of you onto something else, and then leaving that for anyone else to read whatever they want into it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harris also brings up how he\u2019s increasingly aware of the commercial and capitalist forces that move behind a piece of artwork. He\u2019s selective about what film and TV projects he chooses to join \u2014 he\u2019s currently in the writing room for the Apple TV+ television show Widow\u2019s Bay<\/em><\/a>. Harris says he\u2019s so selective because he wants to protect what draws him to writing in the first place.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe hard thing is having to work on that side and also making sure I don\u2019t lose the things that feel of my own impulse and the most inexplicable,\u201d he says. \u201cInexplicable in the sense of, like, I\u2019m chasing something I don\u2019t actually know where it\u2019s going.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are maybe four places in the world where I feel most myself,\u201d Harris continues, with a laugh. \u201cIt\u2019s when I\u2019m writing, cooking, dancing, and having sex are the places where I\u2019m the most me. Things are happening before I have the ability to process where the impulse is coming from. When writing is best for me, it\u2019s happening before I can think and be conscious of the forces affecting it. I love being in that space.\u201d<\/p>\n

H<\/span>arris\u2019 questioning of the film and television industry also extends to the theater world. Both off-Broadway productions of Exception to the Rule <\/em>and Tambo and Bones <\/em>were scheduled for 2020 \u2014 until the pandemic scrambled production plans, and the Omicron wave in 2022 continued to impact shows even when they were staged. Harris says he\u2019s seeking a more \u201csustainable\u201d relationship to productions of his plays.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs exciting as it was and as proud I am of those productions, it was a really, really intense and really trying time,\u201d he says. \u201cIt took more energy than I ought to have given to it. But partly I had been waiting so long, so we were just obsessed with it. I love theater so much and I have no intention of ever stopping. And also, I think what I took from that was I need to protect my energy and space, because it can really take a lot from me without giving a lot back.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"
Dave Harris. Photo by Izak Rappaport courtesy of the artist.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Harris sees himself as a writer first and foremost. That means he appreciates the collaboration process of production, but also acknowledges that his first love of theater didn\u2019t come from seeing productions.<\/p>\n

\u201cI arrived to playwriting, and I never really saw any shows in New York,\u201d he says. \u201cI didn\u2019t grow up going to plays. My whole understanding of theater was all through the literary art of it.\u2026 Roundabout [Theatre Company] programmed my play before I had even seen a play at Roundabout.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harris also is frank about treating playwriting as literature \u2014 an art form that can be appreciated solely through reading. He values the written word the most of all.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m so grateful for production, so many beautiful things happen inside of it,\u201d he says. \u201cAlso in some ways \u2014 this might get me in trouble \u2014 it\u2019s the part of the process I care the least about. To me, playwriting is a literary form. I come from a poetry background, and poetry and playwriting don\u2019t exist separately for me. My love of theater came entirely from reading it, not from seeing it. So when I\u2019m writing the play, the thing that I care the most about is the reader experience and my experience of reading and writing it. I feel so protective of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

R<\/span>eaders of Dave Harris\u2019 plays will appreciate their innovative forms. The climaxes of both Exception to the Rule <\/em>and Incendiary <\/em>are startling monologues \u2014 ones that, like an Adrienne Kennedy one-act, break theatrical form and radically discuss the potential filth, disgust, and madness of Black culture. This is particularly true of Incendiary<\/em>, in which audiences finally face the character of Eric (Tanya\u2019s incarcerated son), and he delivers some shockingly masochistic lines about murder. When I saw the Woolly Mammoth production last summer, those lines elicited scoffs, gasps, and nervous laughter. We had reached a vertiginous breaking point.<\/p>\n

Harris says that it\u2019s important for him to earn those shocks, both for the characters and himself.<\/p>\n

\u201cPart of the reason why I think all of these monologues happen in my shows is because we\u2019ve pushed the character through humor and spectacle and rhythm,\u201d Harris says. \u201cA lot of my plays have a certain rhythm that they operate inside of, we\u2019re using that to push someone to the brink, where suddenly they have to say something that hasn\u2019t come out yet. I think that is usually for me the experience of writing, where I feel like sometimes I\u2019m tricking myself through the journey to finally, inside of myself, realize something I hadn\u2019t encountered before, or hadn\u2019t let myself say, or let myself claim.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, Harris doesn\u2019t want us to completely abandon the humor and spectacle that came before these revelations. For him, writing is still a pleasurable experience.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven when my writing is at its worst, most laborious, it\u2019s still really fun because I\u2019m making myself laugh, and I\u2019m surprising myself,\u201d Harris says. \u201cThat exploration, I think, lets me go into some places that I think genuinely terrify me, and let me go into places where I\u2019m confronting something that I\u2019ve been afraid to say out loud for a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harris\u2019 mixture of confrontation and humor combines in his new play Manakin<\/em>, which recently won the 2024 Relentless Award<\/a>. Harris says it follows four generations of a family brought together by a wedding, and if it goes well, Satan will \u201cbring an end to the tedium of mortal existence.\u201d Even though he has no idea how it will be staged, he calls it his favorite play he\u2019s written so far.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s trauma about war, trauma around domestic abuse,\u201d he says. \u201cThe play is very much a comedy. It\u2019s fun! It\u2019s funny the entire way through. It\u2019s one where, in more ways than any other play, I think I\u2019m very directly staring into the wound that is family.\u201d<\/p>\n

Family is also one of an audience that Harris thinks about a lot, especially as he pulls elements of his own life and transforms them into fictional plays. Sometimes, the reaction he gets isn\u2019t always what he\u2019s expecting.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Nehassaiu deGannes as Tanya in \u2018Incendiary’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre. Photo by Teresa Castracane.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cMy mom saw the reading of Incendiary<\/em>, and two pages in, she was weeping,\u201d he says. \u201cThen at the end, she was like, \u2018Oh that was really good!\u2019 And I was like, \u2018Girl!\u2019 I know there\u2019s so much happening inside of you and this is the whole fucking thing, that I know you\u2019re seeing this. I know you\u2019re smart enough to connect the dots and know where it\u2019s coming from. And also, like, you\u2019re not able to share that or say that, and I respect that. Language is not everyone\u2019s tool of moving through the world\u2026 I want so much for my family to have access to storytelling, to the ability to narrate for themselves who they are and why they are.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, Harris\u2019 writing has initiated discussions within his family that might never have occurred if not for his literature. Harris hadn\u2019t spoken to his father for around 20 years, but after Patricide <\/em>was published, Harris\u2019 father reached out to him to meet in San Diego. When they met for coffee, his father brought a copy of Patricide <\/em>in which he had taken notes.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had 20 years of shit to work through,\u201d Harris says. \u201cHe was a very problematic figure in a lot of ways. And also I was like, \u2018You\u2019re putting in the work to understand this.\u2019 I had to put so much work to understand my family and who I am inside of it. And for the first time, it was like someone else meeting that work with their work. Just the fact of that was really powerful. Suddenly in that moment, I was like, \u2018Oh my God.\u2019 What I would want for my family is not just a silent understanding of the shared memory, but also a sense of \u2018We can all language our way through this.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

H<\/span>arris and I are not that far apart in age: He graduated from Yale in 2016 and I started undergrad at the closeby Wesleyan University in 2017. We\u2019re not necessarily united in the same community \u2014 our differences in upbringing and identity are stark, and I hope to respect them. At the same time, I wonder if there\u2019s a generational affinity among us: people born in the mid-to-late \u201990s, young millennials but elder Gen Z.<\/p>\n

The confrontational, radical monologues of Harris remind me of what scholar Werner Sollors once wrote of Adrienne Kennedy\u2019s plays: \u201cKennedy\u2019s most important works explore the tragic condition of daughter, mother, father, sibling, and lover in a painful web of American race and kin relations in which violence can erupt at any point.\u201d Harris extends Kennedy\u2019s \u201cpainful web of American race and kin relations\u201d to the violent present day. Our generation has benefited from diversity initiatives only to see us tokenized and those initiatives made illegal<\/a>; we\u2019re asked to study and work in increasingly impossible<\/a> circumstances<\/a>; we\u2019re tasked with saving the current world<\/a> even as it\u2019s clearly in the process of collapse.<\/p>\n

Exception to the Rule<\/em>, Tambo and Bones<\/em>, Incendiary<\/em>, and now Manakin <\/em>don\u2019t seek to save the world, nor do they provide definitive answers or catharsis for audiences. Still, there\u2019s something freeing in the way Dave Harris incorporates the full breadth of life within his plays. Violence can erupt at any time in Harris\u2019 plays, but laughter can erupt at any time, too. Harris might show us how to live in the unpredictable world we call home. If his plays\u2019 truths are too disturbing to accept with immediate grace, maybe grace can grow in our memories of reading and seeing his shows. It\u2019s certainly grown in my memories.<\/p>\n

Exception to the Rule<\/i><\/b><\/a> plays through October 27, 2024, in the Mead Theatre at Studio Theatre, 1501 14th Street NW, Washington, DC. For tickets ($42\u2013$93, with low-cost options and discounts<\/a> available), go online<\/b><\/a> or call the box office at 202-332-3300.<\/p>\n

Running Time: Approximately 80 minutes with no intermission.
\nThe program for Exception to the Rule<\/i> is online here.<\/a><\/p>\n

COVID Safety:<\/b> All performances are mask recommended. Studio Theatre\u2019s complete Health and Safety protocols are here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A probing and startling interview with the writer behind DC productions of ‘Exception to the Rule’ at Studio and ‘Incendiary’ at Woolly Mammoth. 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