Historians Respond to The Liquid Plain
THE LIQUID PLAIN WAS PARTLY INSPIRED BY THE GROUNDBREAKING WORK OF A NUMBER OF HISTORIANS
AND SOCIAL CRITICS. HERE, TWO OF THESE WRITERS SHARE THEIR THOUGHTS ON THE WORLD OF THE PLAY.
Marcus Rediker
Author of The Slave Ship: A Human History
Q: The events of The Liquid Plain took place several centuries
ago. Why is it important that we engage with them today?
A: America – and indeed much of the world – is haunted by the
ghosts of the slave trade and the slave system more broadly, no
matter how much we try to deny this fundamental truth. We live
with the consequences every day: racism, poverty, discrimination,
deep structural inequality, and racialized incarceration, to give a few
dramatic examples of lingering effects. In this new post-Ferguson
era, we now more than ever need provocative works of art to foster
broad public discussion about our violent and painful history.
Q: The Liquid Plain dramatizes a transformational moment in
American history. What role did these characters—sailors,
former slaves, pirates—play in building the Atlantic economy?
A: Multi-ethnic sailors and enslaved Africans were two of the most
important groups who built the Atlantic economy. As the great
Trinidadian scholar-activist C.L.R James noted, the Atlantic slave
system created the greatest planned accumulation of wealth
the world had ever seen. Enslaved workers mass-produced
commodities such as sugar, tobacco, and rice, and maritime
workers moved them around the world. Without the seamen
whose labors linked the land masses of the globe, there would
have been no Atlantic economy. The Liquid Plain explores the
history of the “motley crew” in a deep and compelling way.
POETR &
Y
POLITICS
An Interview with Director Kwame Kwei-Armah
Signature: This is your third time directing Naomi’s work.
What is it that keeps you coming back to her writing?
learned the first time through [at Oregon] was that it’s a very
Kwame Kwei-Armah: The magnificent thing about Naomi’s writing
vestigate things that are certainly not linear. Part of the challenge for
is that she marries politics and poetry—politics with a small “p”
me is trying to make sure that, directorially, my hand is light enough
and Poetry with a big “P”—and she investigates the human
to not get in the way of the storytelling, but firm enough to be sure
condition through these two lenses. That just stuns me. I can never
the pieces that are nonlinear are clear enough to audience members.
get through a page of her writing without thinking, “Where did that
word come from? How was that sentence constructed? What was
it that touched her that allowed her to explore it with such
Robin D.G. Kelley
Author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Q: What were your thoughts on first encountering
The Liquid Plain?
My words always fail me when it comes to describing my first
encounter with this magnificent play. As a descendant of
enslaved Africans and an historian who has spent far too much
time reading about the Atlantic system of bondage, exploitation,
and surplus, I was shocked by just how visceral and authentic it
was on the page. Naomi displayed a better understanding of,
and sensitivity to, how the system of slavery pulled everyone
into its bloody fold: Europeans as well as Africans, children as
well as adults, women as well as men, the rich as well as the
dispossessed. More shocking is how she completely destroys
the myth that slavery created “slaves.” She grasped immediately
what most historians have yet to understand—that slaves only
existed in the white imagination, and that Africans refused to
become slaves. And yet, while no one became a “slave” in the
sense of a salable, docile commodity ready and willing to
create surplus for an owner, everyone in the system was
bonded together. Better than any work of formal history,
The Liquid Plain captures what historians Peter
Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker call the “Revolutionary
Atlantic,” the kidnapped Africans escaping bondage,
the sailors resisting impressment, the laboring women
fighting concubinage, the masters and owners and
managers wrestling with their own dehumanization.
Naomi tells this story in rich, vibrant colors, capturing all
of its complexities, contradictions, and cultures in flux. n
17
Director Kwame Kwei-Armah’s collaboration
with Residency One Playwright Naomi Wallace
goes back to 2007, when he made his directing
debut with her play Things of Dry Hours at
Baltimore’s Center Stage, where he is now
Artistic Director. Their partnership continued in
2013, when he directed the World Premiere of
The Liquid Plain at the Oregon Shakespeare
Festival. Between casting sessions for the play’s
New York Premiere, he sat down with Literary
Fellow Nathaniel French to discuss Wallace’s
poetic politics and the challenges and
opportunities of bringing this epic play to life.
profundity, but yet such political specificity, as well as poetry?”
That’s what brings me back, that I adore almost every syllable.
difficult play, in that it is complex, that it seeks to say things and in-
S: How do you think the play resonates with audiences?
KKA: I think it’s always very difficult to work out how a play resonates with an audience. I can only think about how it resonates with
me. And I think the treat of being a director is that you are the first
audience member. The play resonates with me because it asks such
S: What are some of the challenges and opportunities of
bringing this play to life?
big questions about America. It investigates what Condoleezza Rice
KKA: Every new play is fraught with challenges. I think what we
And the Industrial Revolution—which America and, of course, Europe,
called one of America’s “birthing defects”: slavery and its inheritance.
were built on—was born out of the investment wrought from the
slave trade and the profits from that. So that’s what I take from it, and
I think it’s a huge question that will vex many generations to come. n
left: Kwame
Kwei-Armah.
right:
Steven Cole
Hughes and
Erika LaVonn in
Things of Dry
Hours at Center
Stage, 2007.
...it’s a very difficult play,
in that it is complex,