All Eyes Are On Playwright Larry Powell

In the performing arts those who have found a way to innovate and/or navigate the pandemic have been most likely to thrive. Playwright/actor Larry Powell is certainly one of them.

His play, The Gaze…No Homo Part One, the first in a cycle of plays he is writing, was a finalist at this year’s National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut. It’s a timely play that depicts the efforts of a young gay Black actor to navigate a theater festival headed by a white woman.

Not knowing how long the pandemic was going to last and when theaters might be able to re-open put Powell in the position of figuring out what was next for his play.

“I knew I had a work that spoke to this moment and I didn’t want to wait until 2021 to talk about it,” he said by phone last week. “The moment would pass. I knew the only way to work on it was digitally and remotely.”

Along with his team of producers, Powell set up a GoFundMe page and raised the money necessary to create a 12-part online version of his play. The series is currently available through the Fountain Theatre’s website.

Powell drew not just on his own experiences, but those of others he knows.

“People know a couple of experiences or collaborations I’ve had and they think I’m talking about those. I’ve had conversations with so many people even in the development of this piece and I’ve added all all of those into this. This is not about white American theater, this goes back to education.”

“There are a lot of Miranda Cryers [the festival director] in grade school. Or working at H&M or at a fellowship for biology – it’s everywhere. There are also Miranda Cryers that aren’t white. That’s what I can’t wait for people to understand. A lot of experiences I’ve had with supremacy and racism were from Black people. That’s why the second episode is called All Skinfolk ain’t Kinfolk.”

The pairing of The Gaze with The Fountain Theatre might strike some as an odd pairing. But it was The Fountain that reached out to Powell.

“They said they want to show it to our audiences,” he revealed. “It’s not that I’m not going to Ebony Rep. It’s trying to find every avenue to get the story across.”

Another theater that reached out to Powell was the Greenway Court Theatre who commissioned him to write a piece to be included in their two-part If I Should Wake project. Nine playwrights were asked to create monologues that explore life in our present-day pandemic world.

Powell’s piece is called The Reclamation of My Black Ass Imagination: An Awakening. It appears in part one of If I Should Wake and finds a solo dancer moving in rhythm to Powell’s text with the playwright reading the work himself. The dancer was not Powell’s idea, but he embraced the concept.

“Reena Dutt, the director, had the idea and I found it to be fascinating and completely in line with how I create. What’s so funny is I went into my closet and did a few takes of the monologue and I sent them to her and she chose the one. It was really a process of trust and surrender, but I had complete support every step of the way. As the universe goes, [dancer] Jamal Wade is someone I love and respect so much.”

As for his imagination, it has been a valuable tool for Powell since a very young age.

“I’m a 4th generation Los Angeleno. I grew up in South Central LA in situations that have been very violent due to systemic issues, red-lining, white supremacist issues and how they trickle down and affect the Black community. I’ve had to have my imagination intact in order to survive – in order to see a world where I didn’t feel like every time I walked out of my house I’d be in danger. Being queer in my neighborhood you have to have your imagination to dream a world where you feel secure, empowered and where you can walk through the world as yourself.”

Late in The Reclamation the narrator realizes he has everything he needs. It’s not just a new-found discovery for the narrator, but also for the playwright.

“As far as my work is concerned it is now. It hadn’t been until this pandemic, the quarantine, the uprising and my involvement in fights for justice and conversations around the decolonization of black imagination, it has all brought me to that moment that I am enough.

“To know anything I want – and want also means ‘lack’ to me – I try to remember if I want something I’m lacking it. If I truly believe that I have everything inside of me, no one can take the experiences away from me. When I wake up in the morning and the ideas, the characters, the words and the visions I have, they are enough without anyone having anything to say about them. The longer I can stay in that place the better. There’s a sense of agency there, of ownership that I think is necessary, that I know is necessary, for those who walk and talk and look like me.”

Next week check back for Part 2 of my interview with Larry Powell where he will discuss race in American theater.

For our preview of The Gaze…No Homo, please go here.

For our preview of If I Should Wake (included in our Best Bets at Home), please go here.

Photo: Jamal Wade in The Reclamation from If I Should Wake (Courtesy Greenway Court Theatre)