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Leslie Lee Journeys into the Past
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Growing up in West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, Leslie Lee originally intended to pursue a career in medicine, but playwriting turned out to be his passion. In 1975 the Negro Ensemble Company produced his play The First Breeze of Summer at the St. Marks Playhouse, directed by NEC Founder Douglas Turner Ward. The first of many of Lee's plays to be produced by the NEC (others include Colored People's Time, The War Party, Here in My Father's House, and Blues in a Broken Tongue), The First Breeze of Summer received an Obie Award and moved to the Palace Theatre on Broadway where it garnered a Tony Award nomination for Best Play. Lee has also been produced regularly by New York's La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, the Black Rep in St. Louis, Missouri, and Crossroads Theatre Company in New Brunswick, New Jersey, among others. He currently teaches playwriting and screenwriting at New York University and heads the Negro Ensemble Company's Playwrights' Unit.
Shortly before rehearsals began for The First Breeze of Summer, Leslie Lee sat down with Signature Edition to talk about his path to playwriting, his evolving understanding and knowledge of the play, and his enduring relationship with the Negro Ensemble Company.
Signature Edition: How did you come to playwriting?
Leslie Lee: Well, it's an interesting story. Actually, I haven't always wanted to be a playwright. I wanted to be a doctor. I had contracted a virulent bone disease when I was about six years old, osteomyelitis, which is now easily eradicated by massive doses of combinations of antibiotics. I was in the hospital for five months and wasn't expected to live, so I conjured up in my mind that when I grew up I was going to cure all of those who had contracted this awful disease. So, then I went to the University of Pennsylvania, and wanted to become a doctor. But something began to happen. I didn't want to go to medical school. I was always writing - mainly short stories. In fact, my sister reminded me that when I was five or six years old I used to write little plays and force my brother and her to be in them. In any event, I brooded the summer after graduation. My father began giving me dirty looks because he (and the rest of my eight brothers and sisters) had helped pay my way through school. I realized I'd better do something, so I became a medical technician doing medical technology in tuberculosis, then I did research in bacteriology, then cancer research, and then research in endocrinology. During my spare time, however, my need to express myself through a microscope was being surpassed by the need to write. And, when a friend said, "Have you ever thought about writing plays? Your dialogue is excellent," I knew what I wanted to do. Villanova University had a fledgling graduate theatre program. I applied for admission, and to my complete surprise, I was accepted. The late Dr. Dick DuPre, head of the program, saw my potential and let me in on probation, and that's how this journey began.
SE: Was Villanova a good experience?
LL: Yes. It opened up a completely new world for me. And yet it opened up certain elements of confusion about who I was - like Lou [in The First Breeze of Summer]. As much as it opened me up to another world it also confused me in terms of my past and my family.
SE: And is that what spurred you to start thinking about The First Breeze of Summer?
LL: Yes. The First Breeze of Summer is semi-autobiographical. My grandmother did have children by several different men. If my father had been alive I don't think that I would have let them do the play. So it did inspire me. When I was at Villanova I wrote this one-act play, The First Breeze of Summer, and it was slanted towards Lou and how he's a victim bemoaning the fact that his grandmother had betrayed them all. Then about two or three years later I took the play down and I thought, "Wait a minute, she's got to be more interesting than he." So I re-wrote the play and tried to discover who she was, to understand and ask as many questions as I could about her and her life. And so the play was born out of a need to really honor her and to find out who she was.
SE: Did your family see the play?
LL: Yes. I didn't want them to see it because it was a skeleton locked in the family closet. But they came in anyway. Two busloads came up of not only my family, but members of the church. I didn't go into the theatre that night, I stayed in the lobby, frightened that I would be ostracized by the family. I have to admit that I had a couple of drinks to bolster myself. When the play was over, upon exiting, my family thanked me for unlocking the closet door. They no longer had to carry the secret to their graves. That's why I wrote the play, so that people could be free to express themselves. We are all past and present as well. She was a Christian woman, a good woman, a pillar of the church, and had a right to be and be seen.
SE: Did you move to New York after Villanova?
LL: No, I moved to Connecticut because I got a job teaching community college in Middlesex, Connecticut, and from there I moved to New York. And I continued to work on the play. A friend of mine gave the play to Woodie King, Jr. of the New Federal Theatre. Woodie recognized its value and importance and took it to the Negro Ensemble Company, and Douglas Turner Ward decided to do it.
SE: Did The First Breeze of Summer go through any development at the NEC with Douglas Turner Ward?
LL: The story was there. What Douglas did was to enhance the play, to embolden it. Some of the scenes were not sequentially the same. Douglas placed the scenes at various juxtapositions, which hadn't been there before. I developed a greater insight into the characters and the work itself. Those things that I thought I knew, I knew not. Douglas helped me to stretch my mind as a writer and to strip away character façades and render them naked and vulnerable. I also realized despite the personal nature of the story, the play was not curiosa but universal in its scope. The late [theatre critic] Walter Kerr confirmed this when he said that The First Breeze of Summer was the first African-American play that invited him in as a white person to share the experience.
SE: Is that an intention that you put forth in all of your work?
LL: I would say that ninety-five percent of the plays I write involve characters who are African-American. The characters, however, are spokespersons for the whole of society. I love uncovering all of these people, many of whom have been buried under anonymous mounds of time and considered unimportant. But they are significant as windows into the past and chroniclers of history. They represent another viable aspect of the American experience. Each of us who has trod upon this earth is important. Let no one's story be wasted. Let each life be a testimony to the journey we all must make.
SE: What was it like to be working with the NEC in the 1970s?
LL: It was great, it was really great. Samuel L. Jackson was in a play of mine, Colored People's Time. Angela Bassett was an understudy. Morgan Freeman. Adolph Caesar, Denzel Washington, all of these people came out of the Negro Ensemble Company. There was a wonderful energy there. There was a purpose. We had more to rally around than today. We had so many social issues that our plays were by nature political because the characters, through their circumstances, were victims of those social and political situations. It was dynamic. We took chances. We took risks. Political risks. Rehearsals were very exciting. You asked someone like Moses Gunn a question and twenty minutes later he'd finish the question. That's the period of time that was most exciting for me because it was about something immediate, relevant and life-altering. The plays really were intended to condemn the system, to help us evolve as a race of people and to unite us politically. We became spokespersons and interpreters for a disenfranchised people who didn't have a national voice. It was sometimes dangerous but terribly exciting. I miss it.
SE: How did being there impact your playwriting career?
LL: I think I learned the meaning of courage. [Theatre critic] Michael Feingold once criticized my writing - I like Michael, I just didn't understand what he meant. He said, "Leslie is too nice a writer." He was right. I was being too nice. I was afraid to go to the edge. I wanted to be liked. Now I'm at a place where you don't have to agree with me if you understand what I'm saying. I think the NEC has helped me find the truths of the characters independent of my truth, independent of your truth, independent of the truths of other people. But what are these characters' truths? That's what I'm seeking in terms of telling these stories. The NEC taught me that.
SE: They were a home.
LL: Yes, exactly, and I think it's important to have that home where you can perfect your craft, where you can fail without being banished from the kingdom. The NEC certainly provided that. All playwrights need to have a home. Unfortunately, that's not the case today.
SE: As a teacher, what is the situation like for emerging African-American playwrights now, compared to when you started out?
LL: I think that because of the tenor of the time, because of the "novelty" associated with that kind of writing, there were more opportunities then than now. There were more homes for African-American writers, because those homes were African-American. But because of the economic situation in which we find ourselves, because the arts are less funded and less urgent to those who have the money, some African-American theaters have been forced to shut down. It's difficult for African-American playwrights to find enough venues, making them dependent on tokenism. That's why I appreciate theatre companies like Signature, the Goodman Theatre, and the Court Theatre in Chicago, who are doing more than a token black play each season or a play by the dear departed August Wilson. Things have changed, however. Writing by black authors, out of some necessity, has become more eclectic, less political, less strident, less condemning, but very creative and imaginative. Despite the nature of these emerging works, an appropriate amount of venues for these writers is sadly lacking.
SE: What do you think is the reason behind the lack of issue-oriented work?
LL: I think that people shy away from controversy. Like I said before, I don't seek agreement, I seek understanding. And I think the whole nature of theatre has changed too. People want to be entertained, they want to come away singing the eleven o'clock number. Even the producers don't want to be a part of plays that are too serious. So much of what people spend their dollars on is very important to them and they don't necessarily want to hear stories about conflict and pain. I can't blame the audiences to a degree. You can't blame people for wanting to laugh. George Bernard Shaw said, "If you want people to listen, make them laugh." Broadway, however, is an illusion for the serious playwright, whose true venue, I believe, is Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway and regional theatre. This is where his or her voice can truly be found and respected. This is where issues, conflict and characterization still rule.
SE: How does it feel to be revisiting The First Breeze of Summer?
LL: It really feels good because I think the play's still relevant. My knowledge about the play has widened; I think the play is about more things than I thought. It's about race. It's about youth's perception of age, it's about being ashamed of one's ethnicity, and I still think that happens today. It's also about the past and the present and how the past informs the present. And I think it's about identity. So I see the play in a much broader sense with a much wider point of view. Before I saw it as an experience that began my journey but now I see it as something more important than that.
SE: What are your thoughts on Signature's Negro Ensemble Company Season?
LL: I think it's great, it's really fantastic. Signature Theatre Company has provided the NEC with a way of restoring their sensibility. If the NEC is going to regain its place in history, I think that it's important for previous works to be done. Although its future rests on the younger people, the younger actors and directors coming up, its restoration depends on these classic plays. That's why it's important. I think having a whole season will make people more aware that the NEC is alive. This helps to establish the fact that there is still a Negro Ensemble Company and that we're doing things now. It's really an important shot in the arm. These are our plays, this is our history and by having three plays and the reading series you see a family - the NEC family.
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