The Lineage We Write Into

I must begin with Adrienne Kennedy. She is one of my mothers, but in a very particular way. The polaroid shot of me meeting her is me in long microbraids, probably wearing a black coverall and Doc Martens, bright red lipstick and hoop earrings. Somewhere between Rhythm Nation Janet Jackson and Apache's “Gangsta Bitch.” Her class exercises were about bringing dreams into plays, bringing fully formed characters into our work. I wrote a short family play under her, and she said "this is a gold mine." I loved sitting and eating soup with her and telling her about ideas for stories....When I came to New York I wanted to be closer to her, but this was difficult given that she is a recluse. Then I was cast in June and Jean in Concert, her family play, her adaptation of her scrapbook "biography" People Who Led To My Plays. It was a dream come true, playing her as a young girl, a twin. I got my Equity card and gained a mentor. She doesn't read people's plays anymore because it tires her out. But she was kind enough to support me with all these early morning phone calls and then was the one who said "you've written three full lengths already, you can write about Angela." She adores Angela. So between her and the Hip Hop Theater Fest giving me a reading slot, I wrote Angela's Mixtape. In a lot of ways it's for her, through her, her aesthetic of never lying, that I was able to have the strength to write the play.

There's part of me that's [also] a recluse who only wants to come out of the cave when it's time. But I'm also trying to be much more transparent and generous with my truth these days, turning the vagina inside out if you would.

I feel a twinship with Adrienne. We have so much in common—and it's definitely around trying to make sense of/celebrate/destroy a racist version of blackness--and Cleveland, Ohio.

So many Polaroids. There are all kinds of influences--the ones who teach you craft, the ones who teach you to imagine, and the ones who love you enough to let you bloom.

I want to give props to New Dramatists, Hip Hop Theater Festival and Cave Canem . These are non-hierarchical systems of people communing with each other’s work and each other as people. The kind of artist that I need to be flourishes in these places, and without these organizations, I couldn’t have become the artist that I am. You’re a part of this community that keeps on growing, and then someone in it has some success, and these triumphs that are happening all over the place are yours because you’re in community with them.

Sankofa can mean either the word in the Akan language of Ghana that translates in English to "go back and get it" (san - to return; ko - to go; fa - to look, to seek and take) or the Asante Adinkra symbols of a bird with its head turned backwards taking

I'm gonna throw down a list and we can bounce from there: Anna Deavere Smith, Queen Latifah, Ai, ntozake shange, Hazel Scott, Dorothy Dandridge, Majora Carter, Paul Robeson, Donny Hathaway, Stevie Wonder, Claude Debussy, Elvis Costello, Prince, Michael Jackson, Joni Mitchell, Prince, Guy Debord, Edward Albee (who was Adrienne's mentor), Lynn Nottage, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Marlon Brando, Spike Lee, Frida Kahlo, Rumi, Kanye West, HIP HOP!, Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, Franny and Zooey, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Mendocino, my grandmother and all the Davises. Stew and my Passing Strange and my Angela’s Mixtape families. All my teachers, especially at music school. All my teachers in the Gelukpa Tibetan Buddhist lineage. Everything is my teacher; even this glass of orange juice in front of me. We have to begin with lineage because we have to begin with gratitude.

Audacity. I’m a shy, introverted girl, so I lean toward the bold. The first time I met Prince I just collapsed because he is pure sex. Nothing but a walking pheromone. And no one can figure it out. It can't be figured out! No algorithm applies. He just made himself pure, pulsing dance music sex romance. He is also his lineage embodied--Sly, James Brown, Jimi...

It’s crucial to me—has been—and at the same time the only way to fully embody is to move out of their house! There's a requirement involved in individuation, in becoming an artist, in evolving—and you have to kill your parents, metaphorically. The Oedipus/Electra complex isn't just a myth, it's a real process.

My mother, aunt, and my father are very meticulous and gifted writers so I had no choice.

Polaroid: me on the rose colored carpet of my mother's house, in a shaft of light, having just finished Franny and Zooey. I couldn't bear its ending—that it ended at all. I didn't understand what it meant—that everyone is the fat lady—until later, but it gave me something beyond what I was looking for...I didn't know that you could find whole pathways into spirit, a trance that lasted longer than the reading of the book. Words and characters and imaginary places could literally lift you into that "queer, divine dissatisfaction" Martha Graham talks of. Books, books, glorious magic carpet ride books...