“Six Characters” just completed a successful run at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theater. A new work by Phillip Howze, the work featured a phenomenal cast of actors that included CG, Will Cobbs, Seven F. B. Duncombe, Claudia Logan, Julian Robertson, and Seret Scott. “Six Characters” is a gripping play that delved deeply into the racism, devaluing, and disrespect Black people face in society every day. It told many stories of Black struggle through the characters’ different relationships, and made the audience ponder our plight as well as our resilience.
Howze took the time to speak to the AmNews about this stunning, affecting new work.
AmNews: What inspired you to write this play?
Phillip Howze: Oh, so many things. Inspiration for me can come from anywhere. I’m like a forager with a wide net. A bunch of curious stuff gets gathered or tangled up and I discover it by writing through. Inspiration and understanding isn’t a given, you know, you have to work for it. Writing and reading and watching plays isn’t meant to be easy work. It’s tough stuff, but also joyful. It took me several years to write “Six Characters” and despite how demanding it’s been, I’ve also enjoyed the excavations. Inspiration sometimes feels like being in the trenches. It’s not for nothing that the characters of this play all enter from the edges and dusty corners of the stage. It’s how they arrived into my creative process, uninvited. I rarely know who or what will take center stage. Typically, though, my artworks center folks who have been de-centered. I’m inspired to celebrate people and communities who are historically underrepresented.
AmNews: “Six Characters” starts off as a zany comedy, but then turns into something very deep. Why take this approach to the subject matter?
PH: Thank you for that! I agree the play is deeply funny and more. It invites a lot of feelings, including wild fun and private moments of quiet intimacy. It feels unwieldy and expansive and contradictory. We might just call that the human condition. As a Black artist, I’ve always taken this approach to my craft. I love that gifted actors and curious audiences have appreciated the depth of this play. Unfortunately, some miseducated folks choose to see us as monolithic. Such audiences love putting Black people inside of boxes and checkboxes. But this play literally explodes their boxes wide open. In this play we misbehave and bewilder. Audiences expecting a neat and tidy Black play have left confounded or even inflamed. But I’m okay inflaming certain people if it means we get to celebrate our expansiveness onstage. In this play, we get to see our whole selves honored onstage, including our complicated interior lives. AmNews: What did you want the audience to get from this play?
PH: I hope they get their life. Because this is a stunning play. That’s just what it is. I believe in the virtue of acceptance as opposed to the harm of intolerance. With this play we’re honored to share it with whoever is willing to accept it on its own terms. Embrace it for what it is and it may gift you something unique.
AmNews: Why is it important that as Black people we put this truth of the disrespect and racism that we face out in public view?
PH: In America, Black artists and artists of color have historically been the ones to speak truth to power. I don’t know why, but I do know how. We’ve done this beautifully through our paintbrushes, or through poetry, or our dancing. Among my favorite quotes of Beyonce’s is “I twirl on my haters!” And don’t we? We tell our truths with a twirl. Or as the great Ntozake Shange wrote, sometimes “we gotta dance to keep from cryin.’” My play “Six Characters” speaks to some quite awful truths of the world around us, yes, and it does so with brazen splendor and a smile.
AmNews: Why did you also choose to have the character, The Director, who is upset with a system of theater that he also accepts?
PH: I didn’t choose it, it just appeared to me one bright day and I wrote into it. I asked myself the same question as the characters in the play ask each other: Why have you chosen to participate in these systems? That’s a bold inquiry for anybody Black! I’m doubtless we have all come face-to-face with a character like Character 1 (aka, The Director). Or maybe some of us even are that character? I’m fascinated by how Character 1 is self-anointed into leadership and thirsty to fix the problems that other people created. They hunger for some kind of recognition. It’s so human and utterly heartbreaking. But the outstanding actor Julian Robertson has taken the character to a whole new level, imbuing him with such humanity. Julian’s craft of humor, sincerity and authoritarianism speaks so powerfully to the fun contradictions that pervade this play.
AmNews: Why does his character idolize Mussolini, the dictator?
PH: Character 1 doesn’t claim to idolize Mussolini, but they know their history. The characters in this play are very smart and curious, including Character 1. As I was writing the play, I do a lot of historical excavation which unearths all these tiny gems. Like, I’m doubtless most people are aware that Mussolini wrote a play. It wasn’t a very good play I’m guessing which is probably why we don’t know it. He was also a journalist who wrote, among other things, theater criticism. Imagine that! All to say he was a person who knew how to use certain words to seduce and attract other people into doing awful things on his behalf. There are many people alive today who use the rhetorical tactics of dead dictators to seduce others into doing their bidding. It spans the gamut from the people in power right down to regular folks. Different audience members see different reflections gazing back at them in the Mussolini moment.
AmNews: What do you want the audience to get out of this Black man recreating Mussolini’s speech, in Italian, and doing it with such a tyrannical energy that he scares the other five Black actors on the stage away?
PH: First and foremost, I want the audience to enjoy the incredible technical craft of these six actors. All six are top-notch and they set fire to that stage every single night. As it relates to Julian Robertson’s impeccable Italian speech— which, by the way, he learned in only two weeks! — I want them to listen and to feel whatever it is they feel. Like I said, it’s going to be different for everyone and I love that. For some folks that moment is horrifying. For others, it’s exhilarating. I guess you get what you get. As an audience, when we all see different pathways into what something might mean, that’s when we’re truly participating. When we’re in the trenches together at intermission or post-show we get to have some juicy conversations. This play demands conversation. There’s nothing singular to be gotten from it. It is multiplicities. Choose your own adventure.
AmNews: What is the meaning of the relationship between the cleaning lady and The Director?
PH: The second half of the play is a trio of duets. You’re referencing the final duet which is between Character 3 (aka, The Maid) and the Director which has been quite moving for many in the audience given the generosity and intimacy of these moments. But it’s also due to the stellar performance of the legendary Seret Scott who has not performed in over 35 years! Can we talk about that please? A dash of history: Ms. Seret Scott, who plays Character 3, is renowned for many things including starring in the films of Kathleen Collins, as well as for originating the role of Lady in Blue in the original 1976 company of Ntozake Shange’s “for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf” at The Public Theater. The rarity and generational resonances that are alive onstage in this production are humbling. In rehearsal, Seret said to us that Character 3’s words feel like speaking an ancient language. Character 3 says “You don’t have to misshape your mouth into a pretense. You know there are other things you can do with your mouth?” These timeless inquiries are invitations both to the younger Director and to the entire audience. We get to sit with these. In this sitting and quietness, the invitation to ask ourselves these timeless questions holds a bewilderment of meanings beyond merely something singular.
AmNews: What does the relationship between Sassy and the Man in the Police Outfit represent about the struggles that Black men and women can experience in relationships?
PH: I love that you call him the Man in the Police Outfit! It’s too true. Yeah, the contemporary nuances of interpersonal relationships are of great interest to me. Throughout this play there is a lot of fact and cultural artifact for audiences, especially Black audiences, to celebrate. That’s just with everything I write. When people of color and queer people come to my plays we see and hear and taste the play differently. To me, the depth and complexity of Black love also mirrors the depth and complexity of Black life. We have wide-ranging emotional lives. That’s just real. That’s just reality unfolding onstage. But again, my work is hard for some to swallow because it destroys any notions of monoliths. It’s not just about Black men and women; it centers Black folks that are non-binary and trans who also have the exact same complex emotional realities as everybody else. That’s also happening in “Six Characters,” unapologetically. This play honors a spectrum of relationships and personhoods within Black culture. I adore that we get to see that expanse represented onstage and celebrated.
AmNews: How do we as Black people get past being made to feel inferior and always being the ones to clean up the messes of others around us without any type of recognition?
PH: I love that question. I wish we could print that question in big letters on a billboard and post it up somewhere in Times Square. Everyone needs to ask everyone else that question, and all the time. They should do it right now. Turn to somebody, please, and ask them that question. I will say that we as Black people have historically held so much dignity. We hold dignity for ourselves and for others even if they don’t deserve it. We hold dignity without reciprocity. That’s the quality of our collective character. Poetically, you could describe Black culture in just two words: dignity personified.
AmNews: What do you want the audience to feel as they come away? PH: Well everybody’s going to feel lots of feelings because this play is fully alive. And I hope audiences will feel alive along with it. If you don’t feel something from this play, I don’t know, you might just be dead inside. Perhaps a good pulse check upon leaving the theater is did you laugh? We hope so. Also, are you contending with the actual questions the play is asking? If not, maybe try that. Questions are the soul of curiosity. As the character called Road in the play says, “Listen and keep quiet a little while.” Questions evoke feelings which some people find uncomfortable. But if we sit with something long enough, we begin to familiarize ourselves with it. I love being in a theater because it forces you to have some patience to sit still a little while. As James Baldwin once said: “Patience and shuffle the cards.” Kaaron Briscoe, who is one of our producers and also a Black artist, as well as the Interim Artistic Director of LCT3, phrased it to me this way: “Six Characters” is a true work of art and you have to sit with a work of art to notice its brushstrokes, its angles, its shapes and colors.” I like that! Indeed we invite the audience to do that please. See this work of art and sit with its angles and edges. Maybe notice your own angles and edges, too. Sit and simply enjoy being alive. Participate. Live with the art. It’s a vibe.
Howze is a graduate of Yale School of Drama, currently writing new play commissions for the American Repertory Theater, Playwrights Horizons and Lincoln Center Theater. He is a trustee at BRIC Arts-Media in Brooklyn and is the Associate Senior Lecturer in Theater, Dance & Media at Harvard University. His previous plays have included “Frontieres Sans Frontieres” and “Self Portraits.” He is definitely a fresh, dynamic writer.