3-31-06
The Sharp Eye of Lydia Diamond
Playwright Lydia Diamond currently has two plays running in Chicago.
That’s the way one character in Lydia Diamond’s new play, Stick Fly, sarcastically describes the first novel penned by another. But the one-liner, minus the sarcasm, is a propos for describing Diamond’s own growing body of work.
She didn’t plan it this way, but the playwright just had two world premieres open in town within a week of each other. Voyeurs de Venus is running at Chicago Dramatists under Russ Tutterow’s direction, while Stick Fly, directed by Chuck Smith, is up at Congo Square. (Both shows run until April 15.) And Steppenwolf will restage Diamond’s acclaimed 2005 adaptation of Toni Morrison’s novel, “The Bluest Eye,” next fall as part of their Steppenwolf for Young Adults (formerly Arts Exchange) program.
Taken together, the pieces reflect the broad range of style and subject matter that Diamond is capable of juggling. Voyeurs de Venus intercuts the story of Saartjie Baartman, a 19th-century African woman taken from her home and displayed as a curiosity in Paris under the derogatory nickname “the Hottentot Venus,” with a contemporary academic and writer wrestling with the dilemma of presenting Baartman’s story without further exploiting her. (Baartman’s buttocks and genitalia were deemed unusually large by European standards, and in addition to being put on humiliating display during her short life, her remains were also sliced up and preserved as medical oddities by French scientist Georges Cuvier. Her body was finally returned to her native South Africa in 2002.)
Daniel Bryant and Ann Joseph in Congo Square's production of Diamond's Stick Fly.
Stick Fly is what Diamond calls “a family parlor play” about a wealthy African American clan on Martha’s Vineyard (which has had a significant black population since colonial days) wrestling with interracial romances, sibling rivalry, and issues of class and racial identification and parental expectations.
Both plays contain echoes of the interpersonal and political complications that marked Diamond’s highest-profile show to date, The Gift Horse, which won the 2000-2001 Theodore Ward Prize for African American playwriting at Columbia College Chicago and was subsequently produced by the Goodman in 2002 as one of the first shows in the Owen Theatre. The Gift Horse traces the relationships over time among Ruth, a gifted artist, her gay Latino best friend Ernesto, who is a psychologist, and Ruth’s own shrink and eventual husband, Brian. The story is presented through the eyes of Ruth’s daughter, Jordan, a talented musician. In her review of the play for the Chicago Reader, Kelly Kleiman observed that the play “essentially moves Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles out of the world of privileged Jews and into the world of privileged African-Americans.” The Gift Horse was included in the 2004 anthology “Seven Black Plays,” edited by Chuck Smith.
It’s true that the world of the academy figures prominently in much of Diamond’s work, as it has in her life. Born Lydia Gartin in Detroit and raised by her mother, Beverly, who is a musician and professor, Diamond spent her years as an only child moving from one college town to another, including Carbondale, Amherst, and Waco, Texas, where she attended high school.
“My mother always took me to plays and musicals. When she was a student at UMass, she managed the fine arts center, and so I got to meet people like Jean-Pierre Rampal and Marcel Marceau. It was amazing. I guess that my mother’s being an artist just opened my world up, that it was possible.” Diamond studied piano for a time as well as violin, “which was unfortunate for everyone, because I’m marginally tone deaf.”
Cameron Feagin and Michael Joseph Mitchell in Diamond's Voyeurs d Venus at Chicago Dramatists.
Initially intending to be an actor, Diamond enrolled at Northwestern University in 1987. By her senior year, she had switched from theatre to performance studies, and she also took a playwriting class in her junior year with Charles Smith. “I found it very empowering. I was discouraged by the lack of roles for African-American women, so I was able to then write roles for myself.”
After graduation, Diamond stayed put in Chicago. “I never thought of it as a decision. It was just now where I lived. I think maybe because I’d never lived anywhere for more than four or five years, it felt like home.”
Diamond’s first post-collegiate forays into theatre came with her own company, which bore the prodigious nomenclature of Another Small Black Theatre Company With Good Things to Say and a Lot of Nerve Productions. “It was really me—a one-woman show with the support of a lot of talented and beautiful friends. I did several shows at Café Voltaire, and I also worked at Voltaire, as a cook and a hostess and a waitress.” (The now-gone Clark Street. basement theatre was home to many young companies in the early ’90s, including European Rep.) “My first play was a piece called Solitaire. I’d written it in college. It won a little award [the Agnes Nixon Playwriting Award] at Northwestern. I acted in it with a fellow student at Café Voltaire.”
Encouraged by the positive critical response to her first effort, Diamond followed with a play called Here I Am . . . See Can You Handle It, based on the poems and writings of Nikki Giovanni and initially produced with Bailiwick’s Directors Festival. The show put her in contact with Alfred Wilson and Ron O.J. Parson, who had just started up Onyx Ensemble. The now-defunct company eventually found a home in the Edgewater Presbyterian Church, in the space currently occupied by City Lit.
Still, even after joining Onyx, Diamond says “I hadn’t yet defined myself as a writer. I still thought of myself as an actor.” After “stumbling upon” Chicago Dramatists, Diamond went to one of the company’s Saturday meetings and met artistic director Tutterow, who “talked about the two different kinds of membership—the network, which you paid for and you got all this great stuff, and then there were the residents. I thought, ‘Well, I’m a produced playwright. I don’t have $85. So I’ll apply to be a resident.’ And I got it. And that was my coming into maturity as a playwright. That’s when I got to be around people who defined themselves as playwrights and the world opened up to me as someone who could think of herself as a playwright.”
As her writing career grew, acting gradually fell by the wayside, though she did score roles in shows like Four with About Face and Mary Zimmerman’s Eleven Rooms of Proust, co-produced by About Face and Lookingglass. Her performance in Faith and the Good Thing with City Lit and Chicago Theatre Company won her a Black Theatre Alliance Award, and her performance in her own show, 1998’s The Inside, also won a BTAA nomination. Still, says Diamond, “I never felt I did it enough to do it well. I’d get one plum role a year and then feel like I was struggling. It took me a while to figure out that acting requires that constant flexing of muscles. So in a very organic way I segued into just doing my writing. And that feels good.”
Diamond exorcised the frustrations of black actresses all vying for unflattering roles in Stage Black, a comedy that sends up the conventions of the dysfunctional black drama (complete with the requisite “Momma on the Couch” and “Angry Young Buck”). Diamond describes it as “actually my favorite play, and I’m anxious for it to one day get a big production.” The play took third place in the Theodore Ward competition and has since been produced by the Cincinnati Arts Consortium.
“All of my work is very close to me, in terms of my own psychological or political and experiential development,” maintains Diamond. She also notes, “There was much that was autobiographical in The Gift Horse.”
Chuck Smith, who directed the Goodman production, says “The Gift Horse was one of those plays that once I started reading it, I couldn’t put it down. It was special mainly because of the style she put it in. It wasn’t done in a realistic fashion, but it was very contemporary and dealt with several issues—AIDS, child abuse, adoption, and homosexual relationships.”
The Goodman production of The Gift Horse led to the next leap forward in Diamond’s career. Steppenwolf artistic director Martha Lavey and Edward Sobel, the company’s director of new play development, saw the show and offered Diamond a commission. That commission turned into Voyeurs de Venus, though that piece was placed on a back burner when the idea of adapting The Bluest Eye came up.
The Bluest Eye received raves from Chicago critics (including this writer), and Hedy Weiss of the Sun-Times mentioned it in her “best of 2005” column. The show, which was originally meant to be a one-time production for Chicago-area high school audiences, will, in addition to next season’s revival at Steppenwolf, be seen at the Alliance in Washington, DC (not to be confused with the Alliance in Atlanta).
Voyeurs de Venus is not the first play by an African-American woman to tackle Baartman’s story. Suzan-Lori Parks wrote about her in Venus, a play that Diamond didn’t know existed until she began researching her own play. “I didn’t let myself read [Parks’] play until I’d written my first draft. Then I read the play and was immediately relieved because it’s just very different. It’s just not what I’d written.”
She began writing Stick Fly around the same time as Voyeurs de Venus, and it received several staged readings, where it caught the attention of her longtime friend and colleague at Congo Square, Derrick Sanders. Sanders offered the job of directing the play to Smith, a decision that pleases Diamond. “I have a very nice relationship with him, and he’s easy to work with.” For his part, Smith says that working with Diamond is “like talking to a niece. We don’t pull any punches. If there’s something that doesn’t fit right, I’ll run it by her and if she can’t explain it in a way that makes sense, she’ll fix it to make it work. And if she’s in a rehearsal and sees a moment that she doesn’t like, she’ll let me know.”
Diamond, who has been married for nine years to sociologist John Diamond (“I had to take his name because I’m a playwright and how great a name is ‘Lydia Diamond?’”) had just given birth to the couple’s first child, son Baylor, right before getting the nod for the Morrison project. The couple now lives in Cambridge and her husband teaches at Harvard’s school of education. She is still figuring out how to incorporate motherhood into a burgeoning writing career.
“I’m so in the middle of it that I haven’t been able to find my way into being able to articulate what my new process is. My style was procrastinative. I didn’t write and didn’t write and didn’t write, and then I wrote a whole lot, all at once, for days and days and days. I can’t do that anymore, but I haven’t stopped procrastinating. The cramming just has to come in smaller fixes.”
Next up for Diamond is another Steppenwolf commission, Harriet Jacobs: Incidences in the Life of a Slave Girl, based on a slave narrative. Diamond has also recently been named as a fellow at the Huntington in Boston, and she has continued to teach playwriting (she was an adjunct instructor at Columbia College, DePaul, and Loyola) part-time at Boston University.
“It almost feels like there are two different parts of my career,” observes Diamond. “There’s the part that was very satisfying, which was me being a theatre artist. And now there’s the part where people call me a theatre artist because it’s been acknowledged by larger institutions.”
Says Smith, “Lydia Diamond is going to be a voice that is heard nationally. The only reason that she isn’t in [the same tier] as Lynn Nottage is that she doesn’t live in New York City. But I think maybe in another year or two, she’s going to make it there. One of these two plays is going to be done somewhere else.”
Diamond remains keenly interested in bringing underrepresented aspects of African-American life to the stage.
“I notice that America has a real comfort zone with seeing African-Americans in certain ways. Not ways that are not important, too, but that are limiting just because it’s a narrow perspective of a very complicated, huge part of America. It’s just interesting that you see lots of images of black people in historical contexts on stage, often dealing, directly or indirectly, with the wrongs that white people have inflicted upon us. Or if it’s contemporary, it’s often in an urban environment dealing with some of the same struggles. What I think is interesting, and what Stick Fly explores, is that the struggles don’t necessarily change because the environment does. But the environment can change, and black people in those environments are black, too.”