(gentle guitar music)
- Cities have died, have burned,
yet phoenix-like returned
to soar livelier,
lovelier than before.
Detroit has felt the fire,
yet each time left the fire
as if the flames had power to restore.
First, burn away the myths
of what it was and is:
a lovely, tree-lined
town of peace and trade.
Hatred has festered here,
and bigotry and fear
fill the streets with strife,
and raise the barricades.
Wealth of a city lies
not in its factories,
its marts and towers crowding to the sky,
but in its people, who possess grace
to imbue their lives with
beauty, wisdom, charity.
Together we build a city
that will yield to all
their hopes and dreams, so long deferred.
New faces will appear,
too long neglected here.
New minds, new means will
build a brave new world.
Good evening, everyone.
My name's Millery Polyne,
and I'm the associate dean
of faculty and academic affairs,
and also associate professor
at the Gallatin School
of Individualized Study.
On behalf of dean Susanne
Wofford and faculty,
we welcome you to this special event,
a conversation with esteemed
playwright Dominique Morisseau,
and our beloved professor
and noted dramatist
and theater historian, Michael Dinwiddie.
Professor Dinwiddie, alum with NYU,
has been playwright in residence
at a number of institutions,
received several prestigious awards,
including an NEA Fellow,
a Walt Disney Fellow,
and our Distinguished Teaching Award.
His courses include Motown Matrix,
Race, Gender, and Class Identity
in the South of Young America,
Poets and Protest, Footsteps to Hip Hop,
and Sissle, Blake and
the Minstrel Tradition.
I shared with you the excerpts of a poem
titled Detroit Renaissance,
from the remarkable and underappreciated
American poet, Dudley Randall,
because Dominique Morisseau,
like many other beautiful
people of Detroit,
is a poetic fighter, a brave
master builder of narrative
who seeks to unearth
the grace, the beauty,
the fantastic, the wisdom,
the charity of the folk.
We've seen it in her Detroit
Project three-work cycle
that produced the plays Detroit '67,
Paradise Blue, and the Skeleton Crew.
Her heart is in, and some of
her creative oeuvre of work
has focused on the D, Detroit.
But Dominique's work speaks
to the many who dwell
and have been relegated to the periphery,
particularly within the urban context.
It is clear that she is
a student of history,
as well as literature,
and the historical and structural forces
that magnify the struggle
of marginalized peoples.
At the same time, these same
forces ironically just helped
shape and inspire artistic innovation,
from the Motown sound to
the origins of hip hop.
So I congratulate you also
about Ain't Too Proud,
the Life and Times of The Temptations,
is headed to Broadway.
(audience applauding)
Dudley Randall, the Detroit poet,
noted publisher, Dudley Randall,
he ends the poem, as I read,
together we will build a
city that will yield to all
their hopes and dreams so long deferred.
New faces will appear,
too long neglected here.
New minds, new means will
build a brave new world.
So please welcome tonight, an
artist who has been grinding
in this world of theater
and arts for many years,
which I think needs to be said.
But she brings a new face,
a new mind, and a new means
to see and interpret this
complex American world of ours.
She's a 2018 MacArthur Genius Fellow,
and we welcome Dominique Morriseau.
(audience applauding and cheering)
(Dominique murmuring)
- I didn't know that you
was gonna do all that.
We have work to do here.
But Millery, I did not know
what you were gonna do,
but I brought you a couple of things.
So the first thing is, you may
have a copy of this already.
- I do.
- Well, you have another one.
The Black Poets, Dudley
Randall from Detroit.
That's the first one.
- We're on the same page.
- Now, this you might
also have a copy of too,
but I'm not sure.
I was going through the archives.
You want to see what it is?
- Oh, Lord.
(audience chuckling)
- You can't see it.
- Oh, Lord.
- There's Dominque down there.
Afros are in.
(audience chuckling)
Do you read them?
This is a gift for you.
- Thank you.
- For your house in LA.
- I'm gonna hang it.
- Because I know you're
gonna have to, 'cause I mean,
that's what it's for.
- That's one I don't have.
- You can just put it right there.
- I do have a whole bunch of stuff.
- I know, I kept it, but I didn't know
what it was for until now.
It's 2004.
- That's amazing.
- So who was that girl
who came to New York?
Who was she?
Tell us about that girl,
that Dominique, and why.
- Okay, why?
- Yeah.
- I went to Michigan to study acting.
I was getting my BFA
in theater performance.
- What kind of roles were you getting?
- (laughs) None.
(audience chuckling)
When I'd say, well, oh
no, that's not true.
So Michele Shay--
- Oh, yes.
- Came and blessed our lives
my first year at Michigan,
by directing, being our guest director
for the Wedding Band by Alice Childress.
And you might be familiar with the play.
But if you are not familiar with the play,
it is about a Black, what is it called,
a love-hate story of Black women.
But it is about a Black woman
and the white man that is her lover.
And they're in love, but
the mother of this man
is very against their relationship.
And she's a part of a
community of Black women
who are all sort of socially rejected,
and have found fellowship
together in this one back yard.
So anyway, there are all
these great characters.
I was none of them.
(audience laughing)
But Michele Shay came to our school
and saw the African-American students,
and put me in the play as ensemble.
There is no ensemble in the Wedding Band.
(audience laughing)
And sometimes when I would tell people
that I was in the play,
I was in the ensemble,
and they thought I was saying Aunt Selma.
(audience laughing)
I was never Aunt Selma in a play.
But she made space where
I was feeling invisible.
And then the following
year, Glenda Dickerson,
who was a professor at Michigan
and Spelman and other
places, who was, I think,
the second Black woman
to direct on Broadway.
And she also came and
brought, did classical works,
and would reimagine them
and things like that.
But there was very little,
there was very little,
and we were not studying work
by any people of color or any women, none.
I went through my entire
four years at Michigan,
not ever being required,
it was never a class
requirement for my major.
So I took, when I was studying
any work by Black writers,
it was called, you know, Black theater.
It was an elective.
If I was reading Maria Irene
Fornes, I was doing that
in a women's studies class,
but it was never part of the
main pedagogy of the program.
But anyway, so by the time I got to
my third year at Michigan,
I started writing plays.
- But you had started writing
when you were in second grade, you said.
- I had started writing in second grade.
But I hadn't start, only my play,
my first play was at Michigan.
And that was--
- What was it called?
- To try to make myself more of a role.
Okay, now you trying.
(audience laughing)
So it was called The Blackness Blues:
Time to Change the Tune.
- Okay.
- A Sister's Story.
(audience laughing)
- Okay, all right!
- If that sounded a little bit like
the other long title that we all know,
For Colored Girls, da-da-da-da-da,
it was because that was my entry point.
Ntozake Shange was my entry point
into how to become a playwright.
She coined the choreopoem,
and at the time I was a poet.
I was a spoken word artist.
I used to spoken word things,
events at Michigan with Millery,
'cause he's also a great poet.
- We might have to get him to
get up here and spit later on.
- I don't know if y'all
know that about him,
but he's a great poet.
I have his book at home.
But anyway, yeah, chapbook, come on.
And so anyway, so that was
my entry point into writing,
to writing plays, was through poetry
and through trying to get myself
and the two other Black women
in my department at that time
roles that we could sink our teeth into.
- You also talk about the idea
of what August Wilson brought to you,
in terms of talking about
his city and his world.
So talk about your Detroit Cycle,
your Detroit trilogy and how that came.
'Cause I know, I mean, out of love I know,
but I mean, what pushed you to do that?
- Well, you know, so
fast-forwarding from Michigan,
I came to New York after teaching,
and while I was in New York I
worked at Creative Arts Team,
which used to be in residence at NYU.
They are now currently in residence
at City University of New York.
But for the first couple of
years that they were at NYU,
I used to hustle.
And we had a NYU ID,
we could take classes at night, hopefully.
So I was taking classes, but
I'd also just try to come
and get around NYU community.
You know, like fake a education.
(audience laughing)
And use resources,
because we were working.
- Yeah, we know.
- Yeah, we know, you know.
And thank you, NYU.
Y'all helped a lot.
I got a lot of plays
written in the computer lab.
This was before everybody had laptops.
But while I was doing that work,
I got to a point where I had been doing
social justice theater
and education theater
and education for a number of years.
And I had realized my
professional acting work
had started to dwindle,
and I was not pursuing.
And then I looked up this one year,
and I had gone a whole year
without writing anything.
And I thought, oh God,
now I'm losing focus,
and I need to kinda reset.
And at the time, I was doing a study
of Pearle Cleage's work, as an
actor, another Detroit girl.
And I was reading her work back to back,
because we were doing a study of her work
in our presentation, what is it?
Shooting Star Field.
- Oh sure, oh yeah, sure.
- Imani.
- Imani teaches here too,
just so you know.
- Imani teaches here.
Yeah, so while we were doing that,
she's an essayist, a
novelist, and a playwright.
And while I was reading
her works back to back,
I thought, man, this is good.
I like studying a
writer's voice over time.
There's a lot of stuff I'm
learning about the writer,
but also about the continuity
of character and person and location.
So then I thought, oh, I'm
gonna do the same thing.
I'm gonna do August Wilson,
and so I'm gonna read all 10.
I got to like, seven,
(coughs) before life happened.
And so while I was reading
August Wilson's work,
I thought, oh my God.
I had been familiar with
his work in college,
in my Black theater and acting
and the Black experience classes.
(audience laughing)
But I had not ever read his body of work.
And I thought, oh my God, wow.
The way he captures jazz
and rhythm and blues and Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh people must feel so loved
and so immortalized about him.
And I said, I'm gonna do that for my city.
- You did it.
- Yeah.
- So I have to tell you that
having seen all three of those,
'cause I never seen, the one I haven't
seen before is Sunset Baby.
When you're talking about Nina,
that character, I want
to see that someday.
I'm sure it's gonna come back.
But I have to tell you,
those three plays in the
trilogy just really, you know.
I'm a Detroiter, and going and
seeing that and feeling that,
and my father worked at Chrysler,
so that, the shutdown, the plant,
all of those stories
really resonated for me.
But the other thing that's interesting,
you talk about Ntozake
Shange as an influence.
August also started spoken word,
started in the Black Nationalist movement.
The Ground on Which I Stand,
I mean, he was very much
out of the kind of political
mindset that you come out of.
And so I say all that to now segue into,
tell me a little bit about
your experience of Hollywood.
(Michael and Dominique laughing)
- You jumping to it, you
getting right into it.
(audience laughing)
No warm-ups.
You know, so I, in 2015,
that's when I started becoming bi-coastal
and being in Hollywood,
working on three seasons of Shameless,
for those who watch Shameless on Showtime.
And I really actually, I
want to say that I loved,
I loved working on Shameless.
I did not know what of my plays they read
to think that that was my voice.
(audience laughing)
You know, and I really remember watching.
I had to binge-watch three seasons
before I went out there, in a week,
because they gave me a call
on Monday to move on a Friday.
So I was like, oh my
God, I can't say goodbye.
Anybody want to say goodbye with me?
Come watch Shameless with
me, I guess I'm gonna be--
(audience laughing)
In my house watching three
seasons of Shameless to catch up.
And while I was watching
it I was thinking like,
are they, what could they be doing
in that writers' room, acid?
(audience laughing)
'Cause y'all be like, ooh,
what happens when I tell
them I don't do drugs?
Am I still gonna get this job?
I thought they must be high
while they're writing this.
This is not normal minds, you know.
And they're not.
I know them now, very well.
None of them are normal.
But they're really genius
and creative minds on that
show, and I love them.
I really do love the people I work with.
However, I was the only person of color
in the room on Shameless.
And you know, Shameless is a satire.
And there became so many things
that you have to negotiate.
And satire, everybody gets it, right?
Every community, every culture
gets shots fired, right?
And there was always, you know,
I remember having a conversation,
like day three I was
trying to say why blackface
absolutely should not be on that show.
That was day three.
(Michael laughing)
You know, I was like,
if my third day I was,
I didn't understand anything about,
I didn't understand anything about ranks,
and I didn't know
anything about this stuff,
and that saved me.
'Cause I did not act like I was
some kind of low-ranking anything.
I just came like I knew that I
didn't know what I was doing,
and had never written
in television before.
But I also knew my opinion.
I'm the only person of color in this room.
I'm gonna speak.
- You're gonna hear it.
You better.
- You know?
But it sounds, I sound
strong, but it wasn't.
It was complicated, because
I was stressed every day.
And by day three, when
blackface got on the table
and I was fighting by myself
to get it off the table,
I called my agent like,
get me out of here.
Hollywood is the devil.
(audience laughing)
I'm feeling like this is the Matrix.
I get in there, I understand everything.
(audience laughing)
But it was like clouds were
opening up, I'll tell you now.
I mean, I understand why you have
a Black president of a country
before you have one of a network.
Listen, I know what's going on.
You know, I was like, it's images.
I know, and I get it all now.
It's evil.
And he's like, "Dominique, I
think you're freaking out."
I was like, no, no, no, you are not here.
(audience laughing)
You don't see what I see.
You know, I really did.
I was like, Illuminati.
(audience laughing)
And so I had to really come down.
- Bring it down, yeah.
- And start to figure
out how, why am I here?
And I fortunately had other friends
that were writing in television,
or who weren't, but had maybe once before.
And they kept saying to me--
- Don't worry.
- They kept saying to me,
"Dominique, you have to stay in the room."
- You do.
- And I was like, really?
That's torture.
It's a little bit sometimes, you know?
'Cause money be damned.
- Exactly.
- I don't, you know.
I mean, I'm okay with,
I can just get the life
I live in New York.
I'm from Detroit and I lived
in New York for 15 years,
never with no money, and
I've been fine, you know?
So that's not the guide for me.
But I realized how important,
like blackface would've been on that show
without me being in that room.
(audience murmuring)
You understand?
And so it wasn't, it's not
out of malice of my peers.
It was completely--
- Of course they don't.
- I mean, it's just that nuts.
And because everything is
fodder, satire is tricky.
But for me it was always figuring out
how I'm going to negotiate, speaking up.
And in Hollywood, there is a hierarchy.
It's not like a myth.
It's a hierarchy.
If you're a staff writer
or a low-level writer,
the upper level writers get more voice
and they get more opportunity.
But my team, my fellow writers were very,
the way I used my voice,
they just really listened.
Not followed, but listened, you know.
And so by the end of my first season,
they were very supportive of me.
'Cause it can be very clique-ish,
and comedy writing can be mean.
That can be a mean room.
All my friends that work on comedy shows,
they're like the meanest rooms ever,
because everybody's like,
because who's not gonna leverage
the jokes of other comedians?
Guess who's not gonna think you funny?
And so everybody, we're sitting up here,
trying to break stuff at the table,
and this is like, nobody
thought that was funny.
And then I had a bunch of cultural humor
that not only they didn't understand
where I'm coming from
or any of this stuff.
I remember one time I,
excuse my language here,
but I remember one time the
character Debbie on the show,
a teenage white girl on the show,
and a guy was supposed to
be giving her a compliment.
This is just like a cultural clash.
And had written the guy saying
she's got a fat, you know.
And another fellow writer was like,
"We're gonna give her a weight complex."
(audience laughing)
And I was like, what?
(audience laughing)
He's complimenting her body.
What are we talking about here?
They were like, "Oh yeah, different.
"It's different to me."
If you say so.
I don't understand.
He said she had a fat one.
That's usually a nice
thing, you know what I mean?
It's objectifying, but
it's a nice objectifying.
(audience laughing)
By my third season, I had
learned what I needed to learn,
and it was time to move on.
- 'Cause you don't code switch.
- No, I don't code switch.
I don't code switch, yeah, I really don't.
And it just, I think when I first
started working on the show,
this is just to let you
know things can shift.
When I first started working on Shameless,
Obama was President.
And then Trump was President,
and those jokes are not funny anymore.
- Exactly.
They land in a different place.
- Satire is tricky in an age of Trump.
- Yeah, yeah, it really is.
There is hardly any place to go now.
But I know that one of the things
you did about your California experience,
which you're still experiencing,
you have become a mountain girl.
- I have.
- So tell us what that means.
- Very uninteresting.
(audience laughing)
It means, you know, my
husband was in New York
for awhile at the time I was in LA.
Every time he called me, he'd
be like, "So what you doing?"
I'm like, I'm in the mountains. (laughs)
Just sitting here in the mountains.
And that's what I would do.
You know, there's so many
hills, and I live in the Valley,
so we're just surrounded by mountains.
And you know, you go up there to think,
to get perspective, to see landscape.
I love, you know, I'm becoming
that girl, I love to hike.
I really love to hike.
Every few days I like to hike.
- You get ideas when you're,
you get ideas and you
put them out of your?
What's your process, in
terms of thinking about that?
Do things come to you,
or how do you create?
- No, but in LA I have space to think.
I have space to think.
In New York I have to carve.
I have to hide, that's the thing.
I'm like, ooh, I'm gonna go think.
I'm just gonna hide over here
and use my brain for a minute.
But yeah, in LA there's nothing but space,
and it's a good thing to a fault,
because it's also like,
the bumping into people
and having a creative
explosion in five minutes
in New York City does not exist in LA.
You have to pre-plan creativity.
You have to pre-plan spontaneity in LA.
- Well, you spent 20
years in the classroom.
So I want to hear a little bit about how
that informs what you do,
in terms Of your work.
- Yeah, I mean, I don't
think I'd be a good writer
without the work I spent in classes.
Creative Arts Team,
we went around all five
boroughs of New York.
We served every community.
I mean, I served communities
other New Yorkers don't go into.
People in Bed Stuy
don't go to Bensonhurst.
People in Jamaica don't go to
Astoria, you know what I mean?
They're just not, we don't
do that kind of mixing.
But I got to do that kind of exploration,
and just going and teaching in schools.
- I'm gonna interrupt you,
'cause I just want to ask,
how did Detroit prepare you for New York?
- I don't know.
(audience laughing)
I'm like, did it?
I don't know.
I always feel like a
sore thumb in Detroit.
But you know, I don't know.
Maybe just, and I have
strong foundation of self.
- Yes, okay.
- Big part of it.
- That is it.
- Detroit gives you a
very strong sense of self.
And so I think that it's
almost like that goes into,
that's like the, I don't know,
the big brother of the city
is strong self-identity.
- You grow up in a place
where your identity is not questioned,
and you can form and become who you want.
And you also grew up
in a time where you had
Ron Milner, you had Concept East Theater.
You had all these things that
were burgeoning in the city.
So you got to grow up in a cultural milieu
that I think helped you
deal with everything else.
- And my aunt, I mean,
growing up in Detroit also,
my aunt, Carole Morisseau,
owns a dance company,
Detroit Dance Center.
And I grew up dancing with her.
They used to come to New York and dance.
During my era of growing up,
they were very localized in Detroit.
And so I had a family
of artists and support.
- I'm convinced I saw you dance,
because I used to see
Carole Morisseau every year.
- You totally saw me.
- So I mean, I used to see that company.
I remember it doing those
things that were incredible,
and then connected with the
history and the culture.
Anyway, it was just fantastic.
- I feel like I don't give her
proper credit for influencing me,
because it's like she's
part of my indoctrination.
Kind of like I'm just
like, it's just in me.
I don't remember any.
It's just in me, the classical
music, the jazz music.
I mean, I listen to jazz songs
now or Brand New Heavies.
She was really big on them,
you know, and I remember.
I hear them now and they
make me feel a certain thing.
But I'm like, I think that this was
from dancing with my aunt.
And she was a visual artist, I
mean, she is a visual artist.
And so I was kinda surrounded by that.
So that, I think, also
was a big part of it.
But you know what, as was this.
I do want to say something.
I'm gonna tell a story about this.
It was first grade,
and we had a Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. essay contest.
And so we all had to, every grade had to.
The whole school, every
grade had to write an essay.
And I think each grade had a winner.
And so I remember all the
grades, we were all in the gym.
And I remember feeling like
they were announcing the
winner for each grade,
and I just remember looking
at all the kids in the gym
and going, there's a lot of people.
This is a lot of people.
I'm definitely not gonna win.
You know, the odds are so high at seven.
You know, it was like,
God, the odds are so high.
- Already competitive.
- I'm just never gonna win.
And as I was thinking, I'm
never gonna win, and I won.
And not only did I win, I won this.
(audience oohing)
This is what they gave
me, and they signed it.
Dudley Randall signed it.
And so I revisited all
these poems later in life,
and I found this book when I was cleaning
one day in Brooklyn, when
I still lived in Brooklyn.
And I saw it and I was like, it said,
Martin Luther King, Jr.
essay contest winner.
And I was like, yo,
this was proof positive
sometimes you can win
against the odds to me.
This was winning against odds.
- Seems to me, said Booker T.
(Dominique laughing)
I don't agree, said W.E.B.
Remember that one?
- I do, I do.
- That's a Dudley Randall poem.
Yeah, so you got to.
I connected you with your own past,
when you were in first grade.
- You did, you did.
- That makes me feel, and
Millery made me do that.
'Cause I didn't know he was gonna read
Dudley Randall's poem.
- You did.
- I guess everything is going off in here.
- You really--
- I'm gonna ask a few more questions,
then I'm gonna ask to open it up,
'cause I want the audience to be able
to ask you questions as well.
I just want to talk about,
there's so many, gosh.
Your husband, or your mom spent
40 years in the classroom.
- Yeah.
- So that influences the way think too,
to promote education in
the house as part of it.
- I did.
I mean, you ask me how
teaching influenced me,
my mother being a teacher, me
teaching out here in New York,
how I made my living.
That's how I think New York is magic.
People are always from other cities,
trying to come out here, and they're like,
oh, but I don't have a
job, I can't afford it.
And I go, stop thinking that.
New York's magic.
You come out here, nobody
can afford to pay their rent.
- That's right.
(audience laughing)
That's true, that's right.
- But they do, they pay it,
or they negotiate with the landlord.
Nobody can pay their rent out
here, you know what I mean?
So stop thinking about it.
I don't know how I paid
my rent all this year.
I don't know, things happened.
There's a lot of money to be made,
just doing random things like poetry.
I mean, there's just a
lot of ways to make money.
This is a hustler's Mecca.
- Yes, yes.
- You know, you can think of it
and you can make $5 in doing it,
I promise you.
- That's right.
- And so because of that,
I say that doing that
and moving out here from Detroit,
I was sort of always focused on teaching.
But my play, Pipeline, I
could've never written,
I could've never written that
without all the teaching
experience that I had.
I could've never written it.
I could've never written
it, and it's about hearing.
And I couldn't ever write New York
without all that time
I spent in a classroom,
because to write New York
by living in Manhattan,
so I have a sense now
of staying Manhattan,
I'm like, oh, you don't know these people.
Manhattan people that live in the,
I lived in Hell's Kitchen one year
and I realized the only interaction.
I didn't know this was
possible in New York,
'cause I lived in Brooklyn
for all of my life
and I worked in the
Bronx and Staten Island
and in Queens my whole New York existence.
And then one year I got
the PoNY Fellowship,
the Playwright of New York Fellowship,
and I lived in Hell's Kitchen for a year
while we subletted our Brooklyn spot,
and it was such a different New York.
And you would've never
told me, 'cause I'm like,
New Yorkers, what are you, it's the most.
You can't really be racist in New York.
There's too many, you're
up against too many people.
And then I realized in
Manhattan, if I just wanted to,
I don't have to interact
with people of color
except in a position of service.
(audience murmuring)
And I didn't know that.
My doorman was a Black man.
The guy at the bodega was Latino.
But I didn't, people that would pass
in the building were Asian.
None of us had to deal with each other.
If you're not catching the subway,
you really don't have to deal.
Now, when you're on the subway,
and it's basically the
Middle Passage, you have to--
(audience laughing)
We are like this sometimes, you know?
(audience laughing)
It's like this, you know,
like a stranger's sweaty elbow
on my back.
- That's too funny.
- And so we know each other
intimately on the subway.
But there is a level in which you can live
out here and not have that.
And that's how Trump can be a New Yorker.
'Cause I'm like, how does he?
You know, I'm like, oh, I get it.
He stayed in the middle, you know?
- That play was really a
powerful, riveting story
of a mother trying to protect
her son from the pipeline,
going from education
into the prison system.
And what's interesting about it, to me,
is there was so few characters,
but they were all at each other
and learning from each other.
And one of the things you did
that was really interesting in that play
was the way you put the
father in the family,
but not in the family.
I'm just wondering, that
choice, help me understand that.
- Pipeline was actually
inspired by an incident
that happened in Detroit,
that I'm actually closer to
than I could talk about at the time.
But it was a very close
friend of my family
whose son that was.
- Oh, wow.
- And it was the Omari in
Detroit, it was a real person.
And he came to school one
day, to my alma mater,
and he was like a prize
football champion kid,
getting scholarships out the wazoo.
And he came to school one
day, and the security guard,
the younger white male security guard
asked him to do something,
like maybe take his hat off or something.
He didn't do it or he
didn't want to do it,
and the security guard grabbed him,
and he grabbed the security
guard and body slammed him.
And kids took video of
it, and it went viral.
And what happened from that going viral
was so many people online saying,
it's a lot of Detroiters weighing in
and saying that he should
be, throw him in jail,
and he should be punished,
and take all his scholarships away.
You know, do all these things.
And I thought, well, if you want to ensure
that he keeps doing that kind of stuff,
do all those things you're suggesting.
That is absolutely gonna
keep him on the track.
And what I knew about that kid
before he went to school that day,
because I know his family,
I know what he went through
before he got to school.
I knew that some people
would say, beat his butt.
He needs his butt beat.
And I'm like, do you know how
badly he got his butt beaten
a couple of days before he
walked into that building?
You would never say that if you could see
what happened to him before
he came to school, you know.
And so there's that idea of
compartmentalized humanity.
We don't see you.
We see you, but we don't see your story.
I think you came in the
building as that today,
and I don't know what's before that.
And if I'm not considering
what could be before that,
I'm not seeing your humanity, period.
And so for me, that came from a moment
of actually something
that happened in Detroit
that made me say, I think we're
not seeing what we're doing,
what we're doing when we hunt them,
instead of finding ways
to shift the environment
so that doesn't happen again.
- That's why your
characters are so humanized,
because you see them in
ways that other people
don't even take the time
to think about seeing.
So that really came through.
Again, this kid in the story,
the father who was
present but not present,
which a lot of us experienced.
- I knew his father.
- Okay, a lot of us experienced it.
- I knew that kid's father,
and I knew he was present.
But I do want to say
something about that too,
because the father in Pipeline
is a tricky navigation of
that character, 'cause he is.
He's not the absentee.
I didn't want to do absentee father.
This is a father that's available,
that's doing everything he knows to do.
He's not emotionally available to his son.
- Right, that's right.
- And I thought, you know,
the trickle-down of lack of emotionality
between Black men, that's generational.
It's a cycle, right?
And so the real-life Omari that I know,
his father was not able to
be emotionally available.
I know his father's mentality
'cause I know him very well.
And I know his father.
And I know that you gonna
have to go digging back
a lot of centuries and
a lot of generations
to find the source of that trickle-down.
And so we have to look at that too.
♪ I've had the time of my life ♪
(Dominique laughing)
♪ Why am I singing this song ♪
What is this coming from?
- Oh Lord, I know.
♪ I'm gonna let you talk about it ♪
- You playing games.
- But I won't.
I'm gonna let you do it.
- You play games.
You talk about--
- No!
Okay, so in doing my
research, I went online.
And does anyone know why
I'm singing this song?
You know what that's from, right?
- [Audience Member] Yes, Dirty Dancing.
- Dirty Dancing.
Well, you should go online and look
at the wedding reception of
this lady and her husband,
and the eight-minute routine they did.
(audience laughing)
To not only Dirty Dancing, but a couple,
what were the other songs you used?
- Ledisi.
- Yeah, okay.
- Best Friends.
- Okay.
- Bagalina, lots of songs, Heavy D.
- You will have a whole different idea
of Dominique Morisseau's
work and spirit and plays.
But I have to say, it was so much fun.
- It went viral.
- It went viral, it was spectacular.
And she was married in the Charles Wright
Museum of African American History,
or I should say that's
where the reception was.
- Yeah, that's where it was.
It was where the wedding reception was.
- Yeah, exactly, it was beautiful.
I had to tell you.
- Thank you.
- I was sitting there, mesmerized.
- It's like you were
there, thank you so much.
- I was loving it.
- And everybody was there,
500,000 people were there,
apparently, on YouTube.
- I would've sent a
gift if I'd have known.
But you know, it was quite lovely.
And then this month, the
American Theatre Magazine came.
I gotta pull it up for you.
You haven't seen this
since I pulled it up.
I want everybody to see.
This just came.
Dominique Morisseau, we are
going to need a bigger table.
You're talking about
the table in Hollywood,
but this is about
African-American playwrights
being voiced now, getting
productions everywhere, you know.
I may have to leave the offices
here and get my plays done.
But anyway.
(audience laughing)
Black stage report.
This whole issue is really
talking about African-Americans,
the state of Black theater.
There was a conference up at Dartmouth
that was quite wonderful,
quite incredible.
Now, you're part of this whole revolution
that's happening in the theater.
And you talked about the fact
that there were those who went before you.
But you're still forging the way.
That wasn't a question.
- Which is kinda scary.
- Yeah, I know, I know.
- 'Cause the way should be forged.
- Yeah, 60 years ago.
- How many people does
it take to forge a way?
(audience laughing)
Let's see.
- The first, the first.
- Generations, you know what I mean?
- That's right.
- Right, right.
And I'm excited about
that there are so many.
I'm excited there are so
many Black playwrights
being produced right now.
That's great.
I also worry that we are being
a little hot topic-ed right now,
and things that are hot go cold.
So you know, it's like, wait
a minute, what's happening?
I don't want to be your--
- Your moment.
- Let me just look in my scene and see,
oh no, we don't have one.
Let me see.
- We need one more.
- Who's at NYU right now, who's at Yale?
Who's at the emerging
writers of the public?
Grab one, grab one, grab one.
I don't want that, you know,
because that's being
fetishized a little bit.
But I do want to see us.
Obviously also believe
in equity in production.
And there's several, I mean,
there's never been a standard before.
Why start with us? (laughs)
But I do think that's
there's, I'm concerned
about being just, I just
don't want to be hot topic-ed.
I don't want to be moment.
We want to be a movement, right?
And leave forward motion
and never go backwards.
And I think the same for
where are my Latinx writers?
Where is their productions?
You know, where are the Native writers?
Where are their stories,
where are their productions?
Asian-American writers, where's
their visibility onstage?
I'm concerned.
I don't want to be the
hot person of color.
I want us to be very clear
about what holistic change looks like,
and not let ourselves be shiny.
- Well, you know, you made me think of,
I wrote down what Sade Lythcott
from National Black Theatre
said in an article, and it just really,
and she's the CEO of
Dr. Barbara Ann Teer's
National Black Theater.
She's also the daughter.
This company's been going
for nearly 50 years now.
You had a production there, Detroit '67.
And but what she said was, she said,
"For so long, Black people
have been in flight.
"Ever since we set foot on this continent,
"we have never been able to
make a real sense of home,
"so we make it mostly through our art.
"Our vision is to be a home away from home
"for Black artists who want to lay down
"the burden of this experience."
So when you talk about this idea
of you have to keep recreating
and restarting this engine, I just feel,
my dream is that it's started now,
that we're really in a place
where you can't go back.
We're in the 400th year now.
Teresa Eyring does a piece on it
in the American Theatre Magazine,
about the 400th year of commemoration
of the first Africans
brought here, to Jamestown.
Before the Mayflower, I'd
like to say that, 1619.
And so it's very important to honor that,
which you do with your work.
And it's very important
for me to stop talking
so people can ask questions.
(audience chuckling)
So there's a microphone over here.
(audience applauding)
(gentle guitar music)
