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n May 17, 2005, in the pleasant environs of Caffe Pane e Cioccolato near the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, I had the pleasure of a couple of hours of intelligent
conversation with Leslie Lee, award-winning playwright, screenwriter, novelist, documentarian, director, and teacher (currently in the NYU Department of Dramatic Writing and the MFA Program at Goddard
College in Vermont).
I met Leslie Lee in 2003 when I was in the Graduate Dramatic Writing Program at NYU. He was my supervisor on an independent screenwriting study (from which I produced Ain't Ethiopia). I liked
working with Leslie because of his theatrical and personal background. As an African American dramatic writer who often incorporated the history of African Americans into his plays (such as with Black Eagles, about the Tuskegee airmen), he had a working
knowledge of how to do this well that I needed in my script about an African American man from Mississippi who went to Spain in 1937 to fight against Franco.
And he has had extensive experience in the business, working on such diverse projects as being a scriptwriter for the soap opera Another World, creating a new version of the musical Golden Boy,
doing documentaries on people like Langston Hughes and Ralph Bunche, adapting works by Richard Wright and James Baldwin, and writing the screenplay for The Killing Floor, about the labor movement
in the Chicago stockyards during World War I (which received a special mention at Sundance and was presented at Cannes).
The occasion for our get-together was a new play Lee had written that had been produced by the Alumni of the Negro Ensemble Company, titled Blues in a Broken Tongue, from March 4 - 19, 2005,
at Primary Stages. The story centers on a family of African Americans who went to Russia in the 1930s to escape American racism. The
daughters in the family grow up, as Lee says, "Russian to the core," but one of them, Irina, found old LPs of Billie Holliday, Bessie Smith,
Paul Robeson, Sarah Vaughan -- and she would sing along with the records in her faulty English (which is the source of the play's title).
Irina's sister commits suicide in Russia, and Irina sets out on a quest to find someone who would "host" her sister's lost soul so that the
sister could find peace. Irina becomes a wig mistress at the Metropolitan Opera, where she meets a temperamental opera singer from Martinique and a young actress from Philadelphia, both of whom
might serve as the "host" for her dead sister's spirit. In this search, these women realize that they are all connected by a common
spiritual thread that they share beyond and past all of their cultural and age differences.
Lee says he wrote the play as part of his on-going effort to present the African American experience in as many different ways as
possible and to include sensibilities and cultures that are not normally included in the category called "African American." That category, he
believes, has been too narrowly circumscribed. "I believe in universality," he said, and a source of his purpose for writing is to
show that "we can carry on the spirit of people...[and] embrace that soul and carry it with us." This is Art what does, as far as he is
concerned, and Art should not be restricted by categories. If it is, it is up to the writer to break them, and for Lee the best way to break them
is to explore the multiple universalities that make up our lives on this planet.
Blues in a Broken Tongue is being remounted in June at the Producers' Club to see if it can gather enough investors to give it a longer run at another venue.
This mention of a search for universality led us into a discussion about the ongoing debate between August Wilson and Robert
Brustein (among others) about "black theatre" versus "theatre," or, as one article titled it, "On Cultural Power: The August Wilson / Robert Brustein Discussion."
Lee walks a divided path on this question, as do many African American artists. On the one hand, as Lee points out, the African
American experience is, above all, an "American experience," no different from the history of any other people in this country, and he
often feels tired having to "beg to have it done -- tired of tokenism." It is a rich experience, very much unexplored, and should not have to
have a special pleading on its behalf to be recognized and deeply mined.
On the other hand, Lee agrees with the idea of what he calls an "African American theatre," if for no other reason so that works by
African American artists get done. But he also notes that within that community, changes need to happen: a greater sharing of vision and
resources, more African-American administrators in universities, more African-American critics who can evaluate theatrical works for a still largely white audience.
His solution? For a teacher, it is not hard to predict it: education. We need, Lee says, a "new wave" of writers and artists who, at one and
the same time, can acknowledge in their works the "multidimensionality" of the African American experience and become better writers than August Wilson and Leslie Lee. Again, Lee
emphasizes that there are "so many levels not yet explored," and only through exploring them can there be created that tensile balance
between the "African" and the "American" elements of being African American.
Thus, it is no surprise that teaching writers is essential to Lee's sense of himself as an artist engaged in an on-going project of defining and
dimensioning black culture. His students "are like my kids," and for Lee, teaching is another form of caring, much like Irina's search in Blues in a Broken Tongue for a host to carry her sister's spirit.
However, Lee is also aware of the inhospitable world out there for dramatic writers of any ethnicity or culture. The "state of the theatre,"
to Lee, is diminished because the economics of theatre seem now to require small casts (and thus, to Lee, small ideas) and are driven by producers without taste who feel that all they have to do is raise
money regardless of the worth of the project. Broadway "is not the place for straight-forward dramatic writers" and dramatic writers who
love the stage will have to venture into television and the movies to make a living.
Lee says many times during this interview that "I like being black" and that he can't imagine being anything else. He also concedes that the
navigation of American culture by a black person is sometimes angering and demeaning. But he also chooses to see himself as one of his own students, which helps him remember that the struggle to
"bring [this experience] to people" is part of what makes the artistic struggle worth the candle.
"I have no regrets for who I am," he states, and as a writer Lee sees himself as someone continually pushing outward. He is currently
working on two new pieces, a screenplay about German POWs and black soldiers and a play about a couple of kneecappers who have an affinity for Frank Sinatra. He continues to look for those
undiscovered dimensions of the African American experience that are both particular and universal so that we can all become a host for the spirit that will carry us as we carry it.
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