Dael Orlandersmith
When Milwaukee Rep Artistic Director Mark Clements spoke to Dael Orlandersmith about commissioning a new play, Orlandersmith was approaching 60.
“That was something she wanted to write about,” Clements told me during an interview in his Milwaukee Rep office. “She was thinking about women and aging, and about all that women put themselves through as they continue seeking approval while growing older and living in a man’s world. I said to her, ‘that could be a really strong play.’”
With robust support from Milwaukee Rep’s John (Jack) D. Lewis New Play Development Program, Orlandersmith’s vision became her play New Age. Under Jade King Carroll’s direction, it will receive its World Premiere in Milwaukee Rep’s Stiemke Studio, in a production running from March 22 to May 1.
Evincing the striking lyricism that Milwaukee Rep audiences have witnessed in productions of Orlandersmith’s Yellowman (2011), Until the Flood (2018), and Antonio’s Song/I Was Dreaming of a Son (2022), New Age is a choreopoem featuring four women whose unfolding stories are braided together through music.
“I hear music all the time,” Orlandersmith said to me in a phone interview, during which she described herself as a “frustrated musician.” “The music in this show is very intertwined,” noted Blair Medina Baldwin, who’ll be on stage playing guitar as Liberty, one of Orlandersmith’s four characters. “In every moment, there’s a word to be said but also a riff to be played, a chord to be struck.”
“You don’t often get to see something this poetic and lyrical in a theater,” noted Milwaukee Rep Literary Director Deanie Vallone, speaking to me by phone from a new play festival in Denver. Vallone also helms Milwaukee Rep’s New Play Development Program.
From 18 to 80
At 18, Liberty is an aspiring musician and the youngest of the play’s characters; her riffs alternately underscore and counterpoint the stories of 45-year-old Candy, the 70-year-old Cass, and 80-year-old Lisette. They’re white, Black, and mixed race. They were born and have lived in wildly divergent places all over the country. They come from and have occupied different class backgrounds.
In short, Orlandersmith’s four women are distinct characters. But as she made clear to me, they’re also embodiments of some of the many multitudes that exist within every woman, each of them what Orlandersmith describes as an “outsider,” living in a world she never made.
That transcendence of individual circumstance and story is par for the course for this trailblazing playwright and performer, who has spent her career fighting her way free of others’ efforts to pigeonhole who she is by labeling her as Black. As a woman. Or, now, as someone over 60.
Orlandersmith is all of those things and also so much more, as Milwaukee Rep audiences saw for themselves during her tour-de-force, one-woman performance of the eight characters she’d created in writing Until the Flood. They were Black and white. Young and old. Teachers and students and cops.
“There are parts of me that are 18 and can still go back to the way Liberty feels,” Orlandersmith said, “and I never want to lose the curiosity that she has and that I had when I was young.”
“There are also parts of me that are 40 and parts of me that are 60. While these four women may have unique and specific trajectories, the things they’re experiencing are simultaneously universal. I’m looking at the woman within every child and the child within every woman. All of this goes beyond biological age. These four women are aspects of each other.”
Orlandersmith noted that each of her four characters refuses to be bound by confining stereotypes that reduce complex and conflicted women to caricatures.
“As you age, especially as a woman, you become more aware of stereotypes people have involving age and gender. It can leave you feeling stuck in others’ expectations and preconceptions. Will you stay there? Or will you – can you – risk further self-invention and growth?”
From Page to Stage
Fostering such growth is integral to Milwaukee Rep’s New Play Development Program, which provides playwrights with the resources they need to write, while also receiving valuable feedback and workshop time as their ideas evolve into full-fledged, stage-ready plays. The evolution of New Age into the play Milwaukee Rep audiences will see is illustrative of how this process works.
Orlandersmith began with field work, by interviewing women about their experience of age; her four characters are composites reflecting those women’s lives. The resulting first draft arrived in Milwaukee in the summer of 2018.
“Mark and I read the script and provided big picture feedback,” Vallone recalled. “In the early part of a script’s development process, my job is to be a set of eyes and ask questions. I responded to things that excited me, while asking Dael what questions she herself had about where she wanted her play to go.
“Dael provided additional drafts in 2019, and we then workshopped the piece over four days at the end of 2019. We had each actor read through all of her character’s lines at one time, without interruption, to ensure that each character’s dramatic arc made sense and that we weren’t missing any pieces.”
Then the pandemic struck.
But Orlandersmith’s script was in such good shape coming out of that 2019 workshop that she could continue working on it remotely during the pandemic; Zoom meetings allowed ongoing dialogue with Clements and Vallone as she did so. Milwaukee Rep also arranged a Zoom reading. And, as with all new work at Milwaukee Rep, there’s been an additional week of rehearsal, during which Orlandersmith and dramaturg Janice Paran were in Milwaukee.
The Language of Art; the Power of Hope
Throughout the development process, a major focus involved incorporating Orlandersmith’s great love for music into the story of these women. New Age invokes and celebrates numerous pioneering female guitarists, from left-handed legend Elizabeth Cotten to blues icon Memphis Minnie.
“The more we worked on the piece, the larger the role of music became,” Vallone said, noting that New Age not only has a stage director, but also a music director (Robert Monagle).
“Sound takes you to a place that transcends language and is universal,” Orlandersmith said. “Even someone who is an outright bigot can be changed by music. And it allows you to connect with others, even when you can’t always understand their words. When I first heard Edith Piaf’s voice, I didn’t understand the words. I didn’t need to.”
“I want a new language on a guitar riff,” Liberty says near play’s end, encapsulating Orlandersmith’s dream of a common language.
It’s no accident that for all their differences, it’s through music and dance that Orlandersmith’s four characters speak best and most fully to each other, crossing the divides that might otherwise separate them.
It’s also no accident that each of those characters has a longstanding relationship with a specific art form. Liberty is an aspiring guitarist. Candy pursued a career in theater. Cass is immersed in painting and sculpture. And Lisette is a writer who, even as she wrestles with what it means to die, fiercely continues to write as an expression of all it means to live.
“I’m always writing about art in some way, because it’s art that will save us,” Orlandersmith said. “I wouldn’t be in a world without art.”
Much as Orlandersmith’s plays consistently challenge us to transcend confining labels involving age, race, and gender through which we limit ourselves and constrict others, New Age also asks us to embrace a more expansive, all-inclusive understanding of art.
Her play begins amidst the classical Greek and Roman statuary in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; it ends with the aptly named Liberty playing the Troggs’ Wild Thing, in which the frozen images of a classical past give way to the joyous abandon of a song making everything groovy while allowing the heart to sing. The classical age – and classical idea(l)s of female beauty – make way for the new age promised by Orlandersmith’s title.
“Dael’s title and play are a reclamation of what’s possible at any age,” Vallone said.
“Her characters push back on what’s expected; they exhibit joy and pride about where they are. Yes: they acknowledge the pain and hurt they’ve experienced. But the play is also very hopeful. It suggests that it’s never too late to become who you want to be. A lot of our audience members – men as well as women – will see aspects of themselves embedded in these stories.”
“What does it mean to age?” Orlandersmith mused, as our conversation drew toward its close. “Beauty doesn’t go away as we get older. It transmutes.” Clements agreed. “Dael’s play makes clear that age is just a number,” he said. “There’s always so much more that defines us.”
“Sometimes the biggest obstacle in our way is ourselves,” reflected Baldwin on the first day of rehearsal. “To hear other people talk about that will help us all heal, and move forward as liberated people,” continually making ourselves (a)new even as we grow old and play on.
Mike Fischer wrote theater and book reviews for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel for fifteen years, serving as chief theater critic from 2009-18. A member of the Advisory Company of Artists for Forward Theater Company in Madison, he also co-hosts Theater Forward, a bimonthly podcast. You can reach him directly at mjfischer1985@gmail.com.