Leo K. Theatre
Birdie Blue
by Cheryl L. West
Directed by Chuck Smith
November 15 – December 16, 2007
Running time: 80 minutes, no intermission

Live Like Somebody Loves You

By Christine Sumption

Cheryl L. West Shares the Journey of Birdie Blue

Two years ago, when playwright Cheryl L. West ventured backstage at Seattle Rep to express her gratitude to those who’d taken part in a tribute to August Wilson, her presence turned heads among the actors. Someone called out, “African American theatre royalty!” But the noted author of Jar the Floor, Holiday Heart, Play On!, Addy: An American Girl Story, and Birdie Blue wears the mantle lightly. Although her plays have been produced on every kind of stage—from the grandest of Broadway houses to the funkiest of storefront theatres and every size regional theatre in between—West is warm, easy-going, and down-to-earth, as much at home in her role as an artist as she is in her roles as mother, daughter, and friend.

One feels this warmth immediately in the way West talks about language, family, and her Chicago upbringing. “I love the poetry in vernacular speech, the music in it,” says West. As a child, she recalls, “I never tired of hearing my grandmother and great grandmother tell stories. I loved to hear grown folks talk.” She was a mimic from an early age, “a human sponge,” to quote a character in Jar the Floor. “I soak up everything in the world and squeeze it out in a new way.”

West grew up in Chicago, surrounded by family. “My grandmother had many sisters—my great aunts—who lived within blocks of each other,” she says. “They talked three times a day. They were very close.” When West’s great grandparents came to Chicago from Mississippi in their nineties, their children, who were in their seventies, became caregivers. “Even though they were elderly,” says West, “they bathed them, did everything. That’s what you did. You might think, ‘This is not what I signed up for.’ Well, life signs you up!”

Watching her relatives worn down by the strain of care-giving had a profound impact on West, who saw them calling on the deep recesses of their love for one another. “Love has many gifts,” says West. “What happens when that stops, or appears to stop? My great aunt used to say, “Keep a-livin’. We all gon’ sit there someday.’ She’d ask me, ‘Are you living each day like somebody loves you?” That insistent question became the seed for Birdie Blue.

“I write so I can understand, get clear, make sense of,” says the playwright. “I’ve worked as a teacher, social worker, and a writer. I know that what you see is not always what is. Nothing is as simple as it looks.” West drew on her personal observations and her ability to ask “What if…?” to create Birdie Blue, a woman who has known great love, great joy, and deep disappointment in her life, and who faces it all with frank openness and delightful spirit.

“Profound humanity and compassion at the basis of everything Cheryl writes,” says ACT Artistic Director Kurt Beattie, an early champion of West’s plays. “Her writing is incredibly generous and sometimes frighteningly honest.”

Birdie Blue had an in-house reading at Seattle Rep, then premiered at Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2002, with Cicely Tyson in the title role, and went on to production at New York’s Second Stage, where S. Epatha Merkerson (from TV’s “Law & Order”) brought joyous vitality to her depiction of Birdie. Wrote Michael Feingold in the Village Voice, “[Cheryl L. West] has one of the most intriguing sensibilities around, offering a sharp eye for detail, a wide-ranging compassion for human eccentricity, and a sense, rare in contemporary playwriting, of moral curiosity. She is interested in the many ways in which good people make bad and even self-destructive decisions. Up against it in a harsh urban world, Birdie is a character who lives for betterment: her own, her family’s, and her neighborhood’s. Yet, far from being a Pollyanna, she is a fallible (and lovable, and understandable) woman who hinders as often as she ameliorates.”

Despite the play’s success, West wasn’t satisfied. She wanted another crack at it. So she was delighted when Seattle Rep Artistic Director David Esbjornson called with the news that he planned to produce Birdie Blue in the Rep’s 2007-08 season, and grateful for his support of her desire to revisit the script. “It’s wonderful to be able do this,” says West. “I met [Director] Chuck Smith years ago at the Goodman, and he has already brought an elegant simplicity to the project. Plus, we have great designers.” (Seattle designers Carey Wong, Christopher Walker, Frances Kenny, and Greg Sullivan make up the team.)

Cheryl L. West has lived in Seattle since 1999, having eyed the city as a potential home since she made her first trip here in 1989 when Before It Hits Home, her drama about a jazz musician with HIV/AIDS, won top honors at the Group Theatre’s Multicultural Playwrights Festival. The play not only brought West to Seattle, it brought her to the attention of the professional theatre community. Tazewell Thompson, then an artistic associate at Arena Theatre in Washington, D.C., heard the play and quickly declared his intention to direct it. Beattie, who was the artistic director of The Empty Space at the time, was similarly impressed.

“It was immediately apparent to me,” says Beattie, “that there was something immediate, truthful, and human about the way Cheryl observed her characters and articulated them. She had a very shrewd eye and the ability to ‘kiss with one eye open,’ which is pretty rare. Beyond that, her writing had terrific heart.”

At the festival, Beattie pulled West aside. “You have a great voice,” he told her. “If you ever have anything else, let me see it.”

“That had a big impact on me,” says West, who until that time had done theatre on the side while holding down a full-time job as a social worker. “I wasn’t calling myself a playwright,” she says. “I was just someone who did plays.” In fact, she was working as an HIV counselor in Champaign, Illinois when she wrote Before It Hits Home as a way of getting the word about AIDS out to the black community. Armed with degrees in criminal justice, rehab administration, and journalism, but no drama training, she did what she jokingly refers to as “jackleg theatre.” “All my education prepared me to be a playwright,” says West. “I was a social worker, so I knew how to be an advocate, how to coordinate, how to get things done. And I had a master’s degree in journalism, so I knew how to get information.” She rehearsed the play in the evenings with a group of friends (“all working people”), rented trucks on her credit card, and spent weekends touring the play to East St. Louis and other communities in the region. “I would get home at 3:00 a.m. and have to be back at work by 7:00 a.m.,” she remembers. “We didn’t know jack about what we were doing, but we learned by doing that.”

Buoyed by Beattie’s encouragement, West sent him a copy of the play she’d just finished, Jar the Floor, a comedy about four generations of black women who gather for their matriarch’s 90th birthday party. “The play said something about African American women that hadn’t been said, in a way that hadn’t been said before,” recalls Beattie. “It’s so rich, so funny. It’s about women who hold a family together through wry and exceptionally smart survivor skills.” Beattie gave Jar the Floor its first professional production at The Empty Space in 1991, and the play became West’s first big hit, with subsequent productions at the Arena (directed by Tazewell Thompson, who also championed West’s writing), the Old Globe, South Coast Repertory, Cleveland Playhouse, and many other theatres across the country. In 1999, Marion McClinton staged a major revival of Jar the Floor at Second Stage in New York, with veteran actresses Lynne Thigpen and Irma P. Hall in performances the New York Times described as “the triumph of a lifetime.”

“Cheryl writes loving investigations of people in difficult situations,” says Beattie, “and at the same time she’s probing larger questions about family, society, and African American life.”

Seattle Rep opened the 1998-99 season with West’s Duke Ellington musical Play On!, and this city caught the playwright’s eye once again. “Seattle had so many theatres, a good school system, a sense of culture, and it was beautiful,” says West. “I thought it would be a great place to raise kids.” As the single mother of two daughters, making a home in a livable city was particularly important.

“I think I bonded as much with Cheryl as a fellow mom as I did her as an artist,” recalls former Seattle Rep Artistic Director Sharon Ott. “We shared our thoughts about the beauties and difficulties of raising children and continuing our high-powered careers in the arts when she was in Seattle with Play On!, and by the time we produced Jar the Floor in 2000, she had moved here.”

“Sharon made me an associate artist at the Rep,” says West. “She told me, ‘This is your home.’” And along with the vote of confidence came support for her work. When West came up with an idea for a gospel musical, SRT provided her with a commission to write Rejoice! and produced a workshop of an early draft with a full gospel choir.

“Cheryl is delightful to work with,” says director Kenny Leon (Radio Golf), who helmed the Rejoice! workshop and introduced West to J Michael, the talented composer, arranger, and musical director who brought to glorious life the play’s gospel music, traditional and hip hop alike. (The three collaborated on a standing-room-only production of Rejoice! at True Colors Theatre in Atlanta, and are currently exploring the play’s commercial options.)

“Cheryl’s work is filled with pain and joy,” says Ott, “and she’s particularly astute in her portrayal of mothers and other caregivers, and the wondrous and sometimes difficult emotional ties that bind humans together.”

This fall at Seattle Repertory Theatre, Birdie Blue explores those “wondrous and sometimes difficult emotional ties” and invites audiences to contemplate how to “live like somebody loves you.”

Christine Sumption is a freelance dramaturg and director who makes her home in Seattle.