← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Gentrification and the American Dream in 'Good Bones' at The Public
00:23:49
We discusses the new play, 'Good Bones' from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright James Ijames.
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Listener support WNYC Studios.
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This is all of it. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in soho. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. I'm really grateful you're here. Coming up on the show today, we'll look at the remarkable and little known history of black Brooklynites in the years following the American Revolution. We'll speak with cookbook author and community organizer Paola Velez about her latest book, Bodega Bakes. And we'll speak with Lauren Greifeld, the director of the startling new docu series about teens and social media that's all happening in the future. Let's get the show started with Good Bones. In a new off Broadway show, a couple hopes to find a sense community after an exciting new job opportunity leads Aisha and her husband, Chef Travis, to buy and renovate a beautiful old house in Aisha's hometown. The play is called Good Bones. Aisha has an opportunity to revitalize her neighborhood, which the residents call the heat. She is a point person for a plan to put a large fancy new sports complex right in the center to bring new life to the community, which is full of old buildings, board up homes and businesses that have been neglected for decades. However, things get a little tense. That's when Aisha realizes that their contractor Earl also grew up in the area too, and he has strong feelings about the new project. He doesn't see buildings, he sees the people of the neighborhood. The two of them argue as Aisha confronts the ghosts of her past and looks to a new future with her husband as they expand their family. The show Good Bones is running now at the public through Sunday, October 27th. Today we're joined by lead actor Susan Kelechi Watson. Hi, Susan.
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Hi.
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Also joining us is James Iams, who last joined us to talk about his Pulitzer Prize winning play, Fat Ham. Nice to see you.
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Hello.
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Hello.
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And last but not least, Sahim Ali, the Public Theater's associate art director and also the director of this show. Hi, Sahim.
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Hey, Allison.
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So, James, you mentioned that you wanted to write a play about gentrification but not about white folks. So what changes in the conversation with when you talk about gentrification once you take white folks out of the equation?
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I think black people talk about questions of class and space and place a little bit differently. And so I think there's a frankness to the conversation. We know how to get in between the ribs in a way to say the thing that's really gonna try to get to the heart of the person you're talking to? Yeah, I just wanted to see what would happen if the people involved in the conversation had some shared value, had some shared history. And it adds so much complexity to the conversations around class and gentrification when it's just us talking about it.
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Sahim, when you heard that, how did you approach his vision?
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Well, reading the play, Reading one of James's plays is always a treat because he writes so differently each time. So the world was so evocative in a completely different sense of theatricality. And so I had this family and we had this ghost, and we had to figure out how to tell the story that was about gentrification, but about history and legacy and how it manifested in ways that were supernatural and intangible alongside the very real notions of capitalism and commerce and upward mobility that the play has. So it was just like a wonderful opportunity to think about how to create space, both with the performers, but the physical space as well, to tell the story.
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Susan, what did you find in the script that was going to be challenging for you as an actor?
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The biggest challenge I probably faced was seeing it from Aisha's point of view, because I definitely have very strong opinions about gentrification. I'm probably siding more with Earl, as in my real life. And so that was seeing it that way. I had to remind myself of people I've had conversations with within the community who saw it Aisha's way as well, who saw it for a chance to advance the community and for things to change in a positive way. And I think that was an interesting challenge because, like we mentioned at the beginning, usually this is such a black and white conversation, but to talk about people who are directly affected by it and what their position on that would be became, like, really interesting on another level.
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James, when you were writing this, originally it was a commission for the studio theater. How has it evolved since its first go around?
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Oh, no, it's changed a lot.
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I've basically rewritten it, really. But what is at the core and has remained and has, I think, become a stronger theme in this, and I think is maybe one of the tools to working through gentrification in real life is creating a way that people can belong without othering so that you can have a space where everybody feels like they can be a part of it, and that doesn't mean that someone is excluded from it. Like, Aisha has this line in the play where she says, if we're going to live together, we all got to live. And that's just true. What she's saying is right. And, you know, I think the things that we disagree on the most are how we approach those things. And so that is what the work of building the play for this production has been is. How do we make those things clearer, richer? The thing Sahim told me early on, he was like, we gotta get it hotter. The arguments have to be hotter. And so we're, like, turning the temperature up on stuff. And now it's this really complex. The word Sahim uses a lot is gnarly play about what it means to come home and become a part of that community again.
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Ooh.
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What does gnarly mean to you, Sahim?
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It means something that's tangled and complicated, and you have to kind of lean into the complication, but you have to also make space for the complication to be visible enough that we have a foothold. So it's all those things that are exciting and enticing, but that are kind of complicated because we have to deal with some truths that are uncomfortable and, like, a landscape that's uncomfortable too. So, like, how do you make these real conversations happen in a space that has a sense of something intangible in it? So I love that. And part of it was just leaning into the gnarliness.
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So your character Aisha is right at the center of the conversation, the play, working to revitalize the neighborhood. Where do we meet her? What's going on with her? What's important to her? When we meet Aisha, we meet Aisha.
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At a really tense moment in her life. I think there's so much going on that means a lot to her that. But she's struggling to figure out what these things mean to her. She knows they mean a lot, but she's like, what does it mean to now want to start trying to have a family with her husband? How does she really feel about that? She knows it's important, but how does she feel? She's grappling with that in this moment of moving back to her old neighborhood, which she thought she'd never come back to, but she's now gonna, like, do something that she feels is gonna change it for the better. But how does she feel being in this neighborhood? And what pressure does that put on her? Is she trying to keep the world sort of at bay, or is she really trying to embrace this world that she's now re entered? And, like, how does she feel about running and. And sort of being at the. At the lead in terms of having this partnership with the community and this, you know, new entity moving into the city, this big sports complex. And it's. It's. Everything is like, you know, you should look at it and say, oh, this is all great. And yet this all ends up being sort of very complicated for her and unknowingly so until she really kind of dives into all of it. And Earl, the contractor that is from her hood that enters into their space, is sort of the person that holds a mirror to that, I think, for her, when she finally engages with him. And so I think she's at. You know, one of the first things she says in the play is that she's overwhelmed. And I think that that's very true. And the rest of the play, she spends trying to untangle this sense of what is making her feel that way, what is making her feel like she's completely overwhelmed.
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In this moment, a new play tackles gentrification through the lens of a black couple renovating their new home. It's called Good Bones. It's running at the Public theater through Sunday, October 27th. We're talking to Susan Kelechi Watson, playwright James Iams, and director Sahim Ali. You know, this is a conversation that we've all talked about in New York, we've Talked about in D.C. we've talked about it everywhere. There's a city and there's gentrification happening. James, which character's journey do you resonate with the most?
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Oh, gosh. You know, when we started this process, I felt really raw. Whenever Travis would speak, I was like, oh, God, this is too close to me. And then over the course of it, I was like, oh, there's a lot of, like, how Aisha is in a relationship that feels very close to how I am in a relationship. So there's a lot of me and my, like, idiosyncratic stuff in it, but I think I'm a little bit of all of them. Like, all of them have things that they say or they do that I'm like, yeah, I totally get that. So I'm a little bit of. A little bit of all of them.
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Sahim, when you go in and you enter the theater, you realize that it's sort of set up like a construction site. There's big plastic that hangs down sort of. It's a dust barrier for a renovation, but it's sort of a fourth wall a little bit for us as the audience. Where did that idea come from?
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Well, Maruti Evans is a set designer. He's fantastic. And every play I've done of James Maruti has been the designer for. So it's A part of our continuing collaboration in realizing James's worlds in three dimension. And so we circled around the plastic because it's such a beautiful manifestation of something simple that's practical in the space that you need it, but. But it created these different portals through which we could gradually reveal the kitchen. And so as time passes, you see more and more of the kitchen, so you get the illusion of, like, actually you're witnessing this, the unfurling of the space, even though it's been there the entire time. So it became this canvas through which we could both obscure but reveal things in the kitchen. And so we explored the different elements of the supernatural. And would we see the ghost? Would we hear the ghost? What would we feel and see in the plastic? So it both, like I said, obscured, like the kitchen, but managed to reveal, like. Like an effervescent energy that we wanted to have in the space to give you that sense of the intangible.
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It's funny, though, New Yorkers, when that kitchen gets revealed, they're like, ooh.
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Very impressive. You have the height. You have so much storage. I read a dream.
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It's a dream.
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Susan, how does that fourth wall affect your. Your.
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Your.
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I guess the way you. You interact with the audience. I know we're not there, but you do interact with us.
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Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's. It's funny. It felt. It felt like it created distance and space. And sometimes I think, you know, as. As the artist on stage, I wondered. I'm like, did they see us? Do they know what's going on? Can they feel this? You know? And I think that made me just invest more with connecting with whomever I was on the stage with at that, like, everything very, very clear, so that the life of what was happening on stage was something that I. I could trust was happening and truthful. So. And I feel like when that happens, then people will do whatever they can to sort of engage and, you know, and sort of break into that fourth wall. And then also just trusting Sahim's vision of it and, you know, trusting him, saying, like, no, we get it. We can see it. We feel it. It's landing. And, you know, that's what you want when you collaborate with people and, you know, the trust and all of that to be there, because there are elements that I. Being on the stage for the play, the whole play, I don't have a concept of how certain things look or how they might feel or how they're landing. So it's a wonderful thing to be able to trust the people that you're collaborating with specifically Sahim and James and feel very secure when they say, yeah, that thing works. Then it's like, all right, moving on. It works. We can keep it going. Keep going. So I. I've learned that there's really beauty in sort of playing with the lights and playing with, you know, seeing things through some, you know, through something that's there but you can actually see through adds another dimension to the theatricality of it. And that's theater. Right. You come in and you want to see something different. You want something to surprise you. And I think I've never seen a play through plastic, you know.
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Yeah.
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So, like, you know, like to come in and see that is, I think, a feast for the eyes as well. And I love that about theater. I love when you walk in and something you haven't seen before is there.
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James, tell us about the house.
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Well, you know, the house in the. My initial imagination was kind of one of these, like, squat row homes that are like these mid Atlantic staples. They're in Philly, they're in D.C. they're in Baltimore. And we wanted this to be able to graft onto any city. So we just were like, you know, we wanted the kitchen to look like the dream kitchen, like the ideal dream kitchen. I think there's some point in one of the stage directions, I say it becomes all kitchens. And so it kind of needs to just sort of look like capital K kitchen. That's all I really care about. But that it has these layers of history because of Earl's relationship to the space when he was a kid. And now Eisha is there and, like, her memory of, you know, her. Her mother, you know, cleaning and then, you know, hanging out in the kitchen while she's cleaning. It's also a place where people gather. Like, it's. It's just a really powerful space. And so it's just felt really good to do that. It's also going to be more interesting to watch that be developed over time than like a bedroom. Like, a bathroom would be great, but then there's not a lot of hanging out in the bathroom. So the kitchen is like the best room for that.
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And Sahim, you've mentioned it a couple times, whether the house is haunted in your mind, is the house haunted?
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Yes. Now who's haunting and why they're haunting and how they're haunting? It's. James is like, you know, he always puts a gesture on the page, and then you get to extend it and interpret it with the performers, with the designers, and we Were exploring this till the last minute. I mean, we made some decisions about that ghost, like, a day before we stopped working on the play. So it was.
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Oh, really?
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To the last minute? Yeah, because it was a presence that we had to grapple with, and we had to decide, it's useful here. It isn't useful here. This feels right. This doesn't feel right. And that's the best kind of collaboration when you're all participating in the building of a thing and being honest about it, because you can hold onto an idea and think that, oh, we decided this on day one. It has to go all the way through. And you just know how theater happens, especially when you're working with a new piece that's trying something new. So everything about it was just, like, incredible sense of exploration.
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That's interesting. Susan, was there anything that changed in your performance that you. You changed up until the last minute about.
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Oh, a thousand percent. Yeah, a thousand percent. I felt like for a lot of our previews, because of the exploration that we were having, there were different endings, like, every night, you know, for a while. And so it was very explorative. But the thing that we kept trying to get to was the honesty of this moment. Like, what is most useful to help this character break open and have her biggest revelation. And hopefully by the end of it, you feel like, okay, another chapter has beg. And that was the most important thing. It was like, we have to be, you know, really honest about what would allow this woman at the end of the play to kind of strip bare and say, this is the thing that has been holding me back. And understanding that it's been the revelation of the ghosts of her past, the ghosts in this house, of Earl as somebody from her past, of her husband, of all these people sort of chiming in and sort of pressing into her and, like, pressing and pressing and pressing until she finally has to reveal it. And what was the best way to do that in the last moment? And so there was a lot of change, exciting change. I mean, we went all the way there and sometimes went back when, you know, and kind of pulled back, or sometimes we felt like we were pulling back and we had to go all the way there. But whatever it was, I am so in love with the ending that we came to now that it was all worth it. It was worth that exploration. A thousand percent.
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In the show, you have to perform a bit of a step routine.
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A bit.
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A bit.
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Honey, that thing we stepping.
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How long did it take to get down?
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You know what? Not too long. I Mean, you know, I'm just gonna throw it out there. I was the captain of my cheerleading team, and we used to do steps like that. You know what I mean? I went to a black school, so it was like, we weren't rah rah shish Mumbai. We were very much, like, you know, stomping, you know, But. But no, it was. It did take a minute because it was new steps. And it was, you know, it was. We did a beautiful collaboration of, like, you know, Brit Durrell, who was working with us, who Sahim has worked with before, came in and helped us with steps, and Abdoor, which, who works with Darrell, helped us to refine that. And then Sabrina, who is working with us, she's, you know, our beautiful understudy came in and she had steps, and then I had steps that I had done from when I was in junior high school and high school and, you know, Taya. And we thought of, like, the chance and the things to say. So it became like this real beautiful, communal collaboration of how we should make it happen. So, you know, we had a lot of fun coming up with chants like, oh, you know, like, we're hot, you're not. We're the heat, and all this kind of stuff. And it was just a fun little pocket to throw in there that makes, you know, Aisha kind of remember the fun parts of herself from the neighborhood because she is very quick to remember all the negative things that happened. So it's really nice for her to have this beautiful moment where she remembers, like, the fun memories of what made her childhood, you know, sweet.
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Sahim, this is an hour and 45 minute, no intermission. How does that. How does that affect the way that you pace the show when you know that your audience doesn't get to go back, come back, get back into it. They're there for an hour 45.
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Yeah. And one of the blessings of previews in is you get to sit with an audience through that and feel the show with them. So there's some things that we tell each other. There's some things that our colleagues tell us. There's some things that an audience will tell you if you ask them after the fact. But there's a lot that the audience will tell you without actually speaking. So sitting with an audience, as they experience it, feeling them breathe and move and shift, you get to experience where you have them and where you're losing them in the most, like, subtle ways. So we actually shrunk like, we were. We were running maybe like two hours in the beginning. And with the show tightened because of text, because of tempo, and all the ways that, like, we just learned the rhythm of a piece. So it felt important. Like, it's more than 90 minutes, but it felt like the story could sustain an hour, 45 minutes. And so it just becomes a subjective experience, sitting with a play and feeling how much time it should take.
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James, what do you hope people have conversations about gentrification after seeing the show? They go have coffee, they have a glass of wine. What do you want them to talk about?
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I hope they talk about how they show up in their community. Like, I think sometimes people take advantage because they live in close proximity to somebody that they got community. And actually, community is a work. It's actually a thing you have to cultivate. It's a thing you have to tend to. And I hope it makes people want to go meet people in their community that they wouldn't typically go and spend time with and cross paths with, like, one of the things that could save us, because I think, you know, New Yorkers know this. Like, you're used to living in these, like, intensely multicultural environments. You're. You're just sort of in a rush with a lot of people from a lot of different places. And so New York has always felt like a place where I'm like, teaches the world that this is really possible anywhere. You just have to sort of, like, go out and do the work of building community for yourself. And so that's what I hope people walk out doing and asking questions about.
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How about you, Susan?
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Wow. I hope it opens up a fresh conversation. I think that, you know, what is it to speak about gentrification from the points of view of two people in a community that have been there pre gentrification and understand what life was like before that? I do hope it shows the complexity of what it means to want to see better for your neighborhood and what that means to people. And mostly I. You know, I think it gives people at least one of my deepest impressions. It's what it means to have your people, what it means to not feel alone in this world, and. And for the people who are vying for that place in your life, who want to be your people, and that we would sort of allow that in. And I think one of the things that makes the most major impact for Aisha is realizing that she's not in the world alone, no matter what she feels like she grew up in, that there is family, there is friends, there's new community. There's always someone in her life trying to be in that place. The idea of having your people, your family, your friends as also community, not just the people that you live around has made a very strong impression on me.
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Sahim, anything you want to add?
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Yeah, that everything that James and Susan has said, and I think in particular for me, I want an audience to experience some reflection and think about the ways in which they might be culpable. Like Aisha could have moved through life not understanding that she needed to reconsider her actions because of the trauma that she suffered in her childhood. And we're all going about in some way maybe acting on some trauma that we're not aware of and potentially doing more harm. So I hope as with great theater, you just makes you empathetic and to think about your own actions relative to like what you've experienced.
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The play is called Good Bones. It's at the Public theater through Sunday, October 27th. I've been speaking with Susan Kelechi Watson, playwright James Iams and director Sahim Ali. Thanks for your time today.
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Thank you Allison.
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Thank you Alison.
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Thank you.
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