I’d been avoiding the news all week. But whispers about the police shootings of black men in Tulsa and Charlotte had seeped into the rehearsal room for our London production of One Night in Miami by Kemp Powers. How could they not? The play, set in 1964, has a cast of six black actors – portraying Cassius Clay (as Muhammad Ali was then known), Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, the American football player (and soon to be actor) Jim Brown, and two Nation of Islam security men.
As he walked into the room, one of the actors asked: “Have you heard about what happened in Tulsa?” There was a searching in his voice. In truth he wasn’t really asking if we’d heard. He was asking why this nightmare keeps recurring. Again and again and again. I looked around at the other men in the room, particularly our American cast member Francois Battiste, and I decided to shut the discussion down.
For anyone who has worked with me, the idea that I would exclude anything from the rehearsal room may come as a surprise. My process revolves around the exploration and articulation of everything the world throws at us and delving into our own deep emotional hinterland; the two then collide through the text of the play. This process does not allow for the exclusion of seismic events that personally touch each individual in the room.
I asked the actors if we could do something radical that day. We removed 90% of the furniture from the set and, rather than work scene by scene as we had planned to, I suggested we run the play non-stop from beginning to end. No discussion, no preparation, just take to the air and see where we land. This would be almost a week earlier than we had planned, but the actors all agreed to just hit it.
I’m sure there’s a clear psychological explanation for my reaction. Avoidance is a tool I use successfully each time I’m about to start writing a new narrative. (Never is my house cleaner, or my garden in better shape.) But this was neither an act of avoidance nor of channelling rage or pain into the work. It was an attempt to not allow the bandwidth of my company be decreased by acts of terror that have the potential to traumatise beyond their geographic location.
I had witnessed this trauma in my adopted city of Baltimore after the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin. I saw in the eyes of black mothers and fathers alike, an almost existential angst as they tried to realign this new reality, against age-old strategies they had used to protect their children, their boys, from the ravages of extreme racism. I remember arriving at my theatre the next morning and seeing that pain in the eyes of some of my African American staff members. All of us were asking ourselves: how can I, how can art, help at this moment? We decided to commission eight local artists to write and perform whatever they wanted to on the subject, so long as they looked the trauma in question right in the eye. They performed these pieces on the streets, in community centres, in the homes of those most touched by the events and then led a post-show discussion around the issues. We were less interested in discussing police brutality, far more interested in discussing new tools for a new age. Our theory being that trauma binds you to the present and the past. There is no room for tomorrow in there. And without tomorrow, what do we have? Survival. Is that enough?
We got to the end of the run-through of One Night in Miami and the actors and I began to discuss what, if any, discoveries we had made. It was impossible to avoid the parallels of then and now. The play is set in 1964, during the first civil rights era. Each of the characters had lived through the kind of systemic inequalities that make or break you. Far from being broken, these men had soared! They were truly celebrated individuals. So celebrated that, in segregated Miami, Sam Cooke (albeit under cover) was allowed to stay at a whites-only hotel on the night Clay beat Sonny Liston to become the heavyweight champion of the world. However, at the heart of our play, these men are in Malcolm X’s segregated hotel room, negotiating how to serve. How to contribute. How to not be set apart from the community but help to elevate it.
My cast of actors began to think of the modern black artists, entertainers and sportspeople and the questions they must be asking themselves amid what many are calling a second civil rights era. Beyoncé’s Lemonade. The footballer Colin Kaepernick sitting for the national anthem. The actor Jesse Williams’s Black Lives Matter speech at the BET awards. All of these acts of defiance and service rush to the surface. And although I applaud these acts from my soul, I find myself dissatisfied.
Dissatisfied because the thing I find most fascinating about the icons in the play is not their acts of defiance but that they were intellectually on the cutting edge of new thoughts and ideas. Sam Cooke was way ahead of nearly every artist in owning his own record label and the publishing rights to his songs. Jim Brown was making the transition from a career in football to being a movie star and was soon to create the Black Economic Union, designed to help black businesses. Clay was about to announce his name change and membership of the Nation of Islam, and Malcolm X was laying the groundwork for his new organisation, taking the United States to the United Nations on charges of crimes against humanity for its treatment of its black community.
These men were future-scoping. Owning their todays while shaping their tomorrows. Who are these people today? And what might they be thinking about? What ideas are exciting those people? Might Malcolm be into the “renegade” scientist Robert Lanza’s biocentric view of the universe and consciousness? Might Sam Cooke be jazzed by the digital disruptors? Might Jim Brown be thinking about global microfinancing? Might Ali … who knows what he might be thinking about! But most importantly, who are their modern comparisons, beyond gender and beyond race?
The rest of the week we stayed in this area of discussion, never tipping into the pain of what was happening in cities across the United States to men that look like them. I felt good about this. I felt we had found a way to speak to the young people who will come and see One Night in Miami. A way to not let them ignore the realities of today but not be bound in the agonies of them.
Then I opened my newsfeed and I saw the video of Keith Scott being shot in Charlotte. The video of his wife begging the officers not to kill him. I cry. I write to my cast and I apologise for not letting us process the pain of this terror together. Because sometimes, tomorrow is just another day.
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One Night in Miami is at the Donmar Warehouse, London, until 3 December. Box office: 0844 871 7624.
