“There are people for whom, you know, it takes a very long time. I feel lucky that I’m able to have a first off-Broadway production. There are people who are still waiting for that.” Playwright Johnny G. Lloyd no longer has to wait as his play Patience is having its world premiere at Second Stage Theater’s The McGinn/Cazale Theater in New York.

The play depicts a Black gay champion solitaire player, Daniel (Justin Davis), considering if it is time to stop competing. As he’s making this professional calculation, his boyfriend (Jonathan Burke) is wanting to settle down in a more traditional way while Daniel is being challenged by an 18-year-old player named Ella (Zainab Barry) who wants to be the world’s best solitaire player.

Lloyd created the world of champion in-person solitaire for Patience. There are no such tournaments, but his own experience playing solitaire informed the world in which his play takes place.

“I played a lot of solitaire. I was a Windows95 kid. I always start my plays through a place of structure and then I try to find the story,” he revealed in a recent Zoom conversation. “With this play I knew that I was very interested in card games and I knew that I wanted solitary play. I felt like there was something that was theatrically really interesting about that. Solitaire is this thing that is so singular. I got really excited by that. It was really what are the games that I know and love and then how can I translate that into a theatrical medium.”

Patience began its life at Columbia University in January 2019 when Lloyd was being mentored by Lynn Nottage (Ruined). That was followed by a 2019 workshop at the Corkscrew Festival. A 2021 reading at Second Stage led to this world premiere.

When we spoke Patience was just starting the first of its previews. Lloyd was very clear about his role once a play finds its way into the hands of its cast and director.

“I like to always say that I’m the stupidest person in the room because I have a sense of what I want,” he said before letting out a warm laugh. “But as soon as an actor gets a hold of it, I’m just learning from that person. I believe wholeheartedly in really trying things out with actors and asking them how something feels. I find it just so necessary and this is such a giving group of actors.

“Where are you in your trajectory? What do you think is happening here? Is there where we need to go? Do you feel us getting there and sometime’s the answer’s yes and sometimes the answer is absolutely not. It’s been about excavating and finding all of those little micro moments that make a massive difference when you put them into motion.”

It all comes down to decisions. Just as Daniel faces in the play. In the language Lloyd has written for his protagonist, Daniel says, “Every time you make a choice, you reveal new things, but you also destroy new things and old things.”

“A lot of the idea of that comes from the structure of solitaire itself,” Lloyd says of that line. “Every time you flip over a card, it could be anything until you flip it over. I was always really interested in what does the game say? If I had to listen to the game what is in front of me in the game. As somebody who’s been in the theater for the last ten plus years and had a lot of jobs, there’s a moment when this moment is over. This particular part of this thing is over and also it’s feeding into the next chapter. So you have to release the things that you thought you wanted in order to move into the things that you actually want. I think that that’s been something that’s certainly paid off for me and my career constantly.”

With each decision, right or wrong in any given moment, that sets up a whole other bunch of choices that Lloyd, like all of us, has to make.

“A lot of my work is like time is a flat circle, like everything has already happened before. Yet I think that there’s a magic in the ability to decide things in the moment for yourself, even if perhaps you might not have all the right information. You might not have the ability to say this is right, but you’ll never know if it was right. Maybe it was right. Maybe the thing that seemed the most wrong was actually the most right. You have no way of knowing that and I think that there’s a power in accepting that the power you have is to choose.”

One of the themes that runs through Patience is the concept of Black excellence. Venus and Serena Williams are held up as examples of not just Black excellence, but also better than the best. Lloyd has given those concepts a lot of thought during the writing and development of his play.

During the Corkscrew Festival he gave an interview where he said that “The better than the best mentality can open up a lot of doors, but racism can still close them as quickly. And I think knowing that makes it difficult to make long term commitments.”

While there has been a lot of discussion about creating more equal playing fields in the theater for people of color, Lloyd isn’t ready to say significant progress has been made…yet.

“It’s still too soon to tell. In 2020 there was a lot of energy around these issues. Yet also I think we’ve seen institutions, particularly the theater right now, take that energy and then stifle that energy. In another five years perhaps we’ll be able to say yeah, this was a turning point or this wasn’t a turning point. In this particular moment where’s the space for a person of color to be mediocre? That doesn’t really exist in the way that it should. Hopefully that is shifting and hopefully that is changing.”

Lloyd isn’t talking about being mediocre, but of support for the maturation of an artist.

“I feel very lucky that I’ve been able to, in a way, fail at certain parts of the theatrical tradition in order to learn things. I think there are a lot of people who, in their experiences, one is done. As an artist the only thing you can really hope for is grace. We’re all trying to create something together and having the opportunity to simply exist is how you learn and how you grow.”

It’s no accident that of that many various types of solitaire games, Lloyd chose Patience as the title for his play. Asked how much patience he personally has, he’s quick to respond.

“A lot of patience, but not as much as some people. The dream really is to be able to collaborate with other people. You can always find opportunities for that. Any chance to collaborate is a thing to explore. I’m so thankful for the opportunity and the platform and I’ve had such an amazing time working with Second Stage.

“I think about it in terms of am I going to be able to just write. That’s all I really want to do. Having the opportunity to do that by myself means that I don’t feel like I have to wait all the time because I’m able to do this thing myself and I’m able to work with people that I truly care about. I love productions and I would love as many productions as possible. But I think the mentality that you have to get the thing is what destroys a lot of people. Really we’re in this because we love connecting with others. I think that when you bring that energy you can never be waiting for to work.”

Johnny G. Lloyd’s Patience is scheduled to run through August 28th.

Main photo: Jonathan Burke and Justin Davis in Patience (Photo by Jeremy Daniei/Courtesy Second Stage Theater)

The post Playwright Johnny G. Lloyd Practices Patience appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

Many theatergoers took notice of playwright Rajiv Joseph in 2009 when his play, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, had its world premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for the play which found its way to Broadway in 2011 with Robin Williams heading the cast.

In 2008, New York’s Second Stage Theater gave the world premiere production of Joseph’s play Animals Out of Paper. In that play an origami artist takes a teenage prodigy, Suresh, under her wing at the suggestion of his high school teacher.

Joseph has revisited the character of Suresh for his new play, Letters of Suresh, which is having its world-premiere at Second Stage Theater. The play continues through Sunday, October 24th.

Letters of Suresh is told via letters sent by Suresh to a priest in Nagasaki, Japan, whom he encountered in the first play. After Father Hiromoto’s passing, his grand-niece, Melody, has taken possession of a box of letters Suresh sent to him. She tries to figure out exactly who Suresh is to her great uncle and why all these letters exist in the first place.

Last week I spoke via Zoom with Joseph about his new play, the lost art of letter-writing and the parallels to be found in origami and playwriting. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

Origami master Robert J. Lang said “The secret to productivity in so many fields and in origami is letting dead people do your work for you because what you can do is take your problem and turn it into a problem that someone else has solved and used their solutions.” Do you agree and how much does that represent perhaps what Suresh is doing in Letters of Suresh? 

I mean, that’s really interesting. Dead people. (LAUGHS) You know, I don’t know if that’s Suresh is doing. I think that is a really interesting observation by Robert Lang. I think that Suresh’s reckoning within this play is his own contribution and his own participation in a sort of violence or potential violence that can exist in the world. And I think that what we see in his letters to Father Hashimoto are, at first, kind of friendly getting to know you fuck off letters.

But then I think the play really begins when he writes to Father Hashimoto five years later. And I think therein begins his engagement with this priest. All the while wanting to ask or tell him something that he’s unable to do until the very end.

I think that most people who do origami and are passionate about it understand it on a metaphorical /perhaps spiritual level. They understand themselves in their folds and they understand the world in their folds. And I think that for me as the playwright, and also for Suresh, the examination of that talent is how he thinks about the world and also thinks about his own sort of complicity in his choices and the kind of business that he’s decided to go into.

Though he has major differences with Hashimoto, he still reaches out to him.

I think the reason that he always comes back to Hashimoto is because he understands Hashimoto has wisdom that he lacks. Even as he rails against Hashimoto’s religious tact or approach to life, he is curious about a different way of thinking, a different way of living. I think that the the characters in this play, not just Suresh and Hashimoto, but also Melody and Amelia, are all in these crisis points of trying to figure out a new way of approaching life. What’s interesting to me about spiritual thought is that if you begin to contemplate it in any way, there’s a sort of infinite reservoir of ideas that can come from it. And I think that that’s that’s what I see Suresh is looking for in Hashimoto.

In an era where we’re so used to texting and emailing, has society lost something, in your opinion, by not continuing in the tradition of writing letters? 

Yeah, I think so. I think that we always lose when we gain something else. I’m not one to bad mouth technology. I rely on it as much as anybody else. But I spent three years in the Peace Corps between 1997 and 2000. When I went into the Peace Corps in ’97, I didn’t, and no one I knew, had an e-mail address. And when I returned in 2000, all of my friends and parents and families, they all had e-mail addresses and I had to suddenly get one. My main communication with my friends and family had been through letter writing and through receiving letters from all of them – handwritten on paper and put in an envelope with a stamp and sent across the ocean.

I wonder if I was the last class of Peace Corps volunteers that wrote letters. I still have them, and my parents gave me back the ones I wrote to them. I remember the way that I thought about communicating with people. It was so much deeper, I think. I still think that people have significant communication with each other, but it’s different.

I think that letter writing is a lost art form. To re-engage with it requires a sort of a purposeful fetish with the art rather than necessity. No one needs to write them anymore. So to do it is like going back to vinyl, which people do these days. It’s just going to take, if anyone is interested in doing it, a kind of purposeful reversion to an analog state.

Suresh says in one of his letters, “It’s strange how you can forget about the person you used to be.” I just stopped when I read that line because I started thinking who I used to be, which is something I don’t think we evaluate as we get older. We don’t look back. Do you think that forgetfulness about who we used to be is either a good or bad thing? 

I think it’s a sad thing. I don’t think it’s good or bad. It may be a sad and necessary thing – maybe. I have letters, but I’ve also been keeping a journal pretty consistently for the past twenty five years or so since I graduated from college. Every so often I go back and just read entries from it and they always kind of stun me.

They stunned me in two ways. In some ways they stun me because I’m so similar to that. I am the same person I was. But then it stuns me what my life used to be like and how I used to live and how I used to kind of think and do things.

I think that we have this endless capacity to change, to improve and evolve. But I think that, like in that evolution, you can lose a sense of wonder or lose a sense of curiosity. So there are things to mourn and also things to be like, I’m glad that kid’s no longer be around because what an asshole!

In the very next letter, Melody says, “A few years ago when I was a different person.” I feel like there’s a call and response. I don’t know if that if that was intentional in the way you structured the letters, but it feels like we get opposing views of exactly that concept in back-to-back letters. 

Absolutely. The Melody letter is actually the one that gets to the heart of it because in her case, it’s a very sad thing. She knew that she had this thing that she’s kind of not open for many years. And then the act of re-reading and re-reading Suresh’s letters has finally caused her to remember a mistake that she made that that sent her life in a different direction. I think everybody has those little moments. I know that I think about them sometimes. And I think that a lot of this is play is about considering the paths that have not been taken. For me this is really interesting. 

Are there ways in which playwriting and origami are similar? 

Absolutely. When you have origami you can fold the paper in half and and that can be a bird. You can be like that’s a bird. Then you can also have a crease pattern with hundreds and hundreds of folds, and that can be a three-dimensional bird. There’s not necessarily a corollary between complexity and beauty. I think that for me the most beautiful plays and the most beautiful origami are the surprising ones. And it’s not because they have so many folds or such a complicated structure, but it’s because somebody has taken a simple piece of paper and made something unexpected and beautiful out of it. And the more unique that design can be, and the more surprising it is, the more satisfying the work of art is.

For tickets to Letters of Suresh by Rajiv Joseph, please go here.

All production photos by Joan Marcus (Courtesy Second Stage Theater)

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