Spanish, the French, and so multiple languages were
spoken on ships because sailors were an international crew.
And so when Africans were enslaved they came into
contact with numerous European (as well as African)
languages, which they ingeniously fashioned to meet their
needs; I wanted the play to have a feeling of the hybrid, of
exchange, adaptation, appropriation. The docks of Bristol,
In a word, the play is about graft: hard work,
illicit gains, a nautical interweaving,
a hybrid fusing.
Rhode Island would have been, like all ports, worldly places,
international portals.
S: While the background of the play involves the slave trade,
it has a number of other layers as well.
NW: The play is about the Atlantic world, and the bodies that
moved through that tremendously violent, productive, anarchic,
experimental and fluid world. It’s really about how disparate
people, from vastly different cultures, worked together across
lines of demarcation and made these bonds – bonds that
are mostly overlooked in mainstream history. The play,
S: The Liquid Plain has an international cast of characters,
and the dialogue includes several languages.
What is the thinking behind that?
I hope, also gestures toward early capitalism and resistance to
NW: The Atlantic slave trade was an international endeavor,
to regiment and exploit labor. I wanted to show the resis-
younger cousin perhaps to the multinational corporations
tance—whether through sex, alliances, language—to this new
of today who ruthlessly pursue the most exploitable, most
order from the “many-headed hydra,” the labor that gener-
profitable labor, resources, and markets. There was the
ated untold wealth. In a word, the play is about graft: hard
involvement of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the
work, illicit gains, a nautical interweaving, a hybrid fusing.
this economic order. The port, the plantation, and the ship of
the Atlantic world were the templates and laboratories of how
S: In The Liquid Plain, as in all your plays, we see how
history is actually built by the masses, rather than
by powerful individuals. How does this alternative
reading of history inform your work?
NW: The best and most democratic institutions, the
best and most democratic dreams that we have for
ourselves as Americans, were forged by the people
who had only partial rights to citizenship. And at the
very center of these democratic dreams were former
slaves, many only newly freed, who proposed and fought
for, during the time of Reconstruction, free schools,
libraries, indigent rights, labor rights. Historian Robin D.G.
Kelley has written brilliant, critical studies about these
histories of resistance, and his work has been a guide for my
own for many years now. So in terms of looking at history from
the bottom up, the best of what we have, and what we are still
defending today, has come from those who had or still have the
least. The agency, the creative thinking, the intelligence of ordinary,
above: Naomi Wallace at
the first rehearsal of
And I and Silence.
poor, and working people is something that has been and is continually buried, in exchange for the myth that we are powerless and
left: Kimberly Scott, Danforth
Comins, and June Carryl in
The Liquid Plain at Oregon
Shakespeare Festival, 2013
that we need to look to those with wealth and power for leadership.
opposite top: Danforth Comins
in The Liquid Plain at Oregon
Shakespeare Festival, 2013.
S: The Liquid Plain takes place during a transformative social and
economic period, but the characters all have very individual wants
and needs: love, sex, freedom. What role do these small acts of
personal desire play in shaping the larger drama of history?
opposite bottom: Roslyn Ruff
and Delroy Lindo in Things of
Dry Hours at New York Theatre
Workshop, 2009.
NW: Well, I see individual desires or the suppression of desire as inseparable from the social and economic order in which that individual lives.
If you are reduced to being “hands” on a ship or, even more miserable,
“hands” on a plantation, and that occupation is unimaginably brutal, then
any expression of desire – for sex or freedom – is a revolt of sorts. And it
is in that expression, however small, that hope lies for radical change. n
In terms of looking at history from the bottom up, the best of what we have, and what
we are still defending today, has come from those who had or still have the least.
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