Madear: Dey hurt you too, dey did, didn’t dey? You got you a bad wound?
Raisa: You wanna see? (kneels, slowly opens her shirt exposing her mastectomy scar)
Madear: Oh. (Taken aback by the scar, but then tenderly touches it)
Raisa: I never thought I’d miss anything so much. The scar’s not very pretty.
Madear: Chile, you ain’t got nuttin to be shamed of. Some folks wear dey scars on de inside …you just wearin yours on de outside.
Raisa: I guess.
—from “Jar the Floor”
Cheryl West
In the American theater, Chicago-born and Champaign-based playwright Cheryl West is a prophet everywhere but her own country–which is to say, everywhere but Chicago.
In the rest of the nation, she has been a singular success. Her hard-look-at-life family dramas–laced with both bubbly and stinging comedic moments–have drawn standing-room-only audiences to Washington’s Arena Stage and receiveyd standing ovations and rave reviews.
A recent Arena Stage production of her latest work, “Holiday Heart,” was sold out, and drew large numbers of theatergoers to 12 after-curtain symposiums on her play’s inner-city theme.
She’s had similar responses in Seattle, Cincinnati, Rochester and Syracuse, N.Y., Detroit, Boston, Atlanta, Cleveland and San Diego.
Last year, Mirabella magazine called her “the most important black female playwright since Lorraine Hansberry.”
West has even braved hard-hearted New York City and succeeded. When “Holiday Heart” played the Manhattan Theatre Club last year, The Wall Street Journal said, “It would be hard to find a play more relevant to the world around us.”
She also has become a hot property in Hollywood. She is working on two screenplays–one for Paramount and producer Norman Lear, and another for HBO and producer/star Whoopi Goldberg.
But in the Chicago area, where her plays are set, she has gotten something of a cold shoulder. In 1992 Evanston’s Northlight Theatre staged her biggest hit, “Jar the Floor,” and it was well-received. But the Goodman Theatre’s 1993 production of “Puddin’ n’ Pete” got mixed reviews. And then last year the Goodman declined to stage her latest show, “Holiday Heart,” a hit elsewhere in the country and now being considered for a movie.
And West’s award-winning “Before It Hits Home,” which deals with the impact of AIDS on a black family, found no home in the Chicago area.
West is saddened by her hometown’s response, but still hopeful. It’s small but welcome consolation that the Illinois Theatre Center in Park Forest will be doing “Jar the Floor” Friday through March 3. It will star Chicago actress Irma P. Hall, who played in the original Northlight production of “Jar”–and who will also be appearing with James Earl Jones and Robert Duvall in the forthcoming movie “A Family Thing.”
“Jar the Floor” is set in Park Forest. It focuses on the relationships of four generations of black women: an almost mystical great-grandmother with roots in slavery and Africa, a grandmother from the deep South with a honky-tonk Chicago past, a middle-aged professional woman who has made it to the respectable suburbs, and her rebellious, college-age daughter.
West has been thrilled with “Jar’s” success–“it pays my mortgage”–but would like the same for “Holiday Heart.”
Goodman Theatre dramaturge Tom Creamer says West’s plays are strong on characters but suffer from awkwardness, hostility from local critics and a lack of enthusiasm for them on the part of conservative Chicago theater directors.
Reaching out
“I love her stuff,” Creamer says, “but `Puddin’ n’ Pete’ wasn’t a perfect play. It was a bit awkward here and there. There were a few bumps. What was great about it was Cheryl’s great strength–the wonderful characters she creates. The audience response to it was much better than the critical response. She’s able to reach out to an audience that we don’t often reach–an older black audience.”
Creamer says he wanted the Goodman to produce “Holiday Heart” because he was so taken with the characters of the drag queen and the drug pusher foster father. But it was rejected by the Goodman after a reading before staff directors.
“None of them expressed any enthusiasm for it or was willing to recommend it to an outside director,” he says. “Without that, plays aren’t done.”
Asked if West was welcome to try again, he says, “absolutely.”
“I don’t know what it is about the theaters in Chicago,” West says. “Someone once told me you’re never a chief in your own back yard. I don’t know if it’s that I haven’t earned my stripes yet (by Chicago standards). My work tends to get mixed reviews in Chicago. I don’t know why that is, because so much of my work has that Midwestern, Chicago flavor. `Holiday Heart’ is set in Chicago.”
Like all of West’s plays, “Holiday Heart” focuses on a family, but what a peculiar, cobbled-together-from-odd-scraps family it is. Peculiar, but nowadays all too common in the hopeless back streets of Chicago–and most American cities.
The mother, Wanda, is a crack addict trying to go straight. She dotes on her 12-year-old daughter, Nikki, a still innocent school girl, but is not above selling her child’s doll–or herself–for money to buy crack.
The girl’s actual father is long gone, but this family has two father figures–both are wildly improbable at the outset but by the end audiences cheer on both men. One is a drug seller, Silas. The other, bearing the stage name “Holiday Heart,” is an immensely overweight professional drag queen.
It bothers some that there’s an unhappy ending–that for all the zingy humor, this is as ravaging a tragedy as “Medea.”
“One of the theaters that produced the play made me change the ending,” West says. “They wanted a happy ending. I did it. It didn’t work. I did it to show them that it didn’t work.”
“People try to change the endings,” says New York stage director Gilbert McCauley, who came to Washington to direct “Holiday Heart.” “People often do not trust Cheryl’s vision. Perhaps because I’m also from the Midwest, and have an understanding of the very specific character base she’s working from, I find a way into her work and understand the sensibilities she’s trying to get across.”
It was St. Louis-born McCauley who initially urged West to become a playwright, when both were at the University of Illinois.
“We had a very long conversation about theater the first time we met,” he says. “We even got into an argument, that first time we talked. It was very intense. It was obvious she had real strong feelings about what she wanted to do.”
West was born in Chicago at Cook County Hospital, attended city public schools and then went off to Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, where she acquired a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and a master’s degree in social service and rehabilitation administration. She worked for several social service agencies, taught a college remedial writing course and acquired a second master’s degree–in journalism–at the University of Illinois in Champaign. She has remained in Champaign because of her friendships there, the intellectual and cultural stimulation of the university and the town’s convenience.
“You can go from anywhere to anywhere in about eight minutes,” she says. “Now that I’m traveling so much, I really appreciate that.”
West’s intense feelings about the need for family arise in part from her own circumstance. Though she has never married, she has a 6-month-old daughter, Skylyn, and describes her mother, Mary, as “a single parent, too.”
“I don’t know where my father is,” she says.
She says that her mother and her brother, Abraham, an airline employee in Minnesota, come to all her openings and she rejoices in a wide circle of relations in Chicago. Her extended family spans five generations–much like the one in “Jar the Floor”–from her daughter to her great-grandmother.
“Families are so fractured now,” she says. “Even for people with no close blood relations, it’s important that they establish a network of people for support. It can make a terribly important difference in a child’s life to have someone who can be family for them.”
“Jar” proved an immediate success when it was first produced in 1989, and West became a full-time writer in 1990.
Searing slices of life
She writes from her experiences growing up in Chicago and as a social worker. “Holiday Heart” came from heartbreaking real-life stories.
“One woman had a cousin who was addicted to crack,” West says. “When Christmas came the family had given her five children presents. She took the presents back and took the money and bought crack, so the children had no presents for Christmas.
“That troubled me, and then I heard a story about an elderly woman who had shot her daughter at close range. She said she put her daughter out of her misery. Her daughter was addicted to crack, and had done so many horrendous things that her mother just shot her. I thought, what could drive a mother to that?”
Though the play is about love and everyone’s needs for the ties and refuge of a family, the ending chills the bones.
“That’s the beauty of it,” says McCauley. “It’s not contrived. She’s not trying to contrive the story. She’s trying to allow the story to be.
“We watch any event not because we are sure of the outcome. It’s the attempt, the participants, their struggle, that compels us–what it tells us about them, about ourselves. The situations could be dealt with in a more surface way but she’s managed to go beneath that by being true to the characters.”
“Jar” continues to be produced around the country, and her ambitions include turning the play into a movie.
Her plays share a distinction with Pulitzer Prize-winner August Wilson’s in drawing large numbers of both white and African-American audiences. A large part of that, says Illinois Theatre Center artistic director Steve Billig, has to do with the humor in them, but also their honesty.
“Comedy’s a wonderful gloss over real-life situations,” he says, “but this is about real people.”
West has won Helen Hayes and Audelco awards and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for her work. She’s represented in Los Angeles by the powerful Creative Artists Agency and is constantly receiving offers for writing jobs.
“I get a lot of work,” she says, “because they think I have such a unique voice. I think that has to do with the fact I don’t live on either coast.”
Says Billig: “I think Cheryl West is ahead of her time.”
