Spoken-word poetry and performance has a history in Actors Theatre of Louisville?s Humana Festival of New American Plays dating back to 2003, when the theater wove performances by hip-hop poets into the festival.
Since then, hip-hop-infused plays have premiered at several Humana Festivals, the most recent being in 2008 with Marc Bamuthi Joseph?s ?the break/s? followed by ?Ameriville,? by the New York ensemble Universes.
With this year?s festival, the rhythm is back, but, as usual, with a playwright who puts his own twist on a story.
Idris Goodwin is not only a playwright, but also an essayist and spoken-word poet and performer. He has produced his own hip-hop music, and his collection of essays, ?These Are the Breaks,? was published last year and nominated for a Pushcart Prize, the annual American literary prize honoring work published in the small presses.
He comes to the festival fresh off nearly 50 performances last year, based on his book, and an appearance on ?Sesame Street? where he talked about writing.
He describes his play ?How We Got On? as a coming-of-age story of three African-American kids that unfolds in the suburban Midwest in the 1980s era of ?YO! MTV Raps.?
Actors Theatre discovered his play when it was part of Connecticut-based Eugene O?Neill Theater Center?s 2011 National Playwrights Conference.
We caught up with Goodwin between rehearsals as he was refining some of the writing in ?How We Got On.?
What motivated you to become a playwright?
Generally speaking, I love writing for live performance, and as a kid I was into comic books and rap music. I drew comic books and I wrote rap in the suburbs of Detroit and also in Chicago, where I moved when I was 18.
I?ve also always been very creative. I?ve always had a good relationship with paper. I fell into playwriting because I?m so in love with film and wanted to write screenplays. But my screenplays were very dialogue-oriented, because I liked a lot of the early ?90s indie films like those by Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith, and Steven Soderbergh.
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That whole Miramax era of indies was very talky and very character-oriented. So my screenplays were very talky, and when I was in graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2001, my adviser was a playwright named Beau O?Reilly. He read my screenplay and said this is like people just talking, so why don?t you just write a play. And he had a theater festival he put on every year in Chicago called the Rhinoceros Theater Festival. He said write a script, and come be in the festival. So I did it.
But what appeals to me about live theater, just as what appeals to me about music and spoken word, is the relationship between the audience and performer. I like the art of writing for that relationship.
What writers and/or subjects have influenced your writing most?
Obviously, a lot of the writers and voices in hip-hop like KRS 1, Big Daddy Kane and Rakim, the Fugees and Lauryn Hill. Then, also, I like a lot of people from the performance poetry world: Patricia Smith, Kevin Covel.
I like writers of the black arts movement like Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni.
In the world of plays, it?s a mixed bag because I came to playwriting indirectly, so a lot of the writers from Chicago who I hung out with are influences ? Tanya Saracho, Beau O?Reilly and others I?ve encountered. I like Sam Shepherd?s and David Mamet?s work a lot ? and August Wilson, of course.
I like people who have a very specific point of view and very specific way of telling their stories that is uniquely them. That to me is across the board and even in music and film. The Coen brothers have a huge influence on my work.
The people I like understand that anything that involves time is all about rhythm and it needs that in order to sustain an audience. I lose interest in a lot of work that isn?t aware of that. Often dense writing turns me off.
In hip-hop culture, it?s all about coming up with something new and next. You need to pull out things people won?t expect you to pull out. So I try to have a diverse palette to keep me from getting locked into one style.
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What planted the idea for ?How We Got On??
I wanted to tell a very familiar story, but I also wanted to find a new way to present that. I had never written a play in this way. It follows a structure like hip-hop mixed tapes, which involves a lot of blending, overlapping and manipulation by a DJ and commentary.
Other plays I?ve seen that work to blend hip-hop aesthetics with theater I?ve found too often use multiple narratives. But here I want to tell a basic story, a simple coming-of-age tale in a way that?s fresh.
And this is the play that when my friends and family see it will say ?That?s you!? But it?s not an attempt to tell my story, although I?m definitely drawing from a well that I know a lot about. I did grow up in the suburbs of the Midwest. I did come up in the early era of hip-hop. I was one of the few kids in the neighborhood who liked rap.
How has it changed in taking it from the page to the stage?
This play has had quite a development life. First, when I was a graduate student at Iowa (in the University of Iowa?s Writers? Workshop) back in the fall of 2010. The first reading was with a company in Chicago called New Leaf Theatre, and then it was read at the O?Neill. Each time, there were new changes, new drafts, but it definitely had its most significant exploration at the O?Neill. After I was invited by Humana, I just basically spent from August to February re-tinkering it.
But during the process for me, a play always stays dramatically and conceptually the same through the process. The only thing that?s really changed is trying to communicate the story. I think there is an expectation of who is going to be in the audience, and I know the room isn?t going to be filled with hip-hop fans. So I want to make sure people are comfortable, see things they understand and are drawn in by these kids and their story.
What does it mean to you to have this play as part of the Humana Festival?
It?s a huge deal. I had my sights on this place when I first started working on this play because it?s the Detroit Auto Show for plays. Everybody from across the country comes out. And for me, someone who?s existed off the radar and who made plays in Chicago, it?s a great step. It?s a very big deal for me.
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