Maybe it is her job as an associate director at the Black Ensemble Theater. Maybe it is the several Black-themed plays that she has directed. Or maybe it is the obviousness of her race, which enables her to poetically and accurately retell aspects of the Black experience on stage.
But like the Sixth Sense movie's tagline, every gift is not a complete blessing and for Ilesa Lisa Duncan her blessing can be seen at times as somewhat of a curse. 'People have a limited perception on the types of work that they think that you are able to do. I have a definite desire to tell stories about my own culture but I have the ability because I am an American to tell anybody's story. But the opportunities are not readily given. Does that make sense?'
Unfortunately, it makes perfect sense that in the year 2003 Black directors are still subjected at times to pigeon holing and stereotyping of the types of work they can do. Whereas non-Black directors are considered and even given directing jobs of the few Black stage productions.
Susan Lori-Parks' In the Blood, produced by Evanton's NEXT Theatre, tells story of a Black woman and her kids and the abuse they suffer at the hands of the system. It features a cast comprised of equal numbers of whites and Blacks. A non-Black director, Lisa Portes, directed the production.
'It is a running joke. Lisa Portes and I have become acquainted in the past year and she said, 'Well, I'm jealous because I wanted to direct Breath Boom.' And I said I'm jealous of you because I wanted to direct In the Blood. (laughs) She is not from Chicago; she doesn't realize how segregated the mindset is in this city. I don't know if it is just Chicago or if it is all over, but particularly here, more often than not, you see a non-Black person directing a Black show, but you won't see that many Black directors directing a white show.'
But to use Duncan's phrase, it is not all sour grapes. So let's get back to the blessings. For the past six years, Duncan has been telling moving and poetic stories on stage; so well, in fact, that two of her productions, Do Lord Remember Me at the Chicago Theatre Company and her most recent Breath, Boom (Pegasus Players) have been nominated and/or received the Joseph Jefferson Awards.
Of course there are others that she has left her mark on: Red Rain at the Lincoln Center Theatre in New York, Waiting To Be Invited at Victory Gardens, and Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery (Indianapolis' Phoenix Theatre).
Sharing her experience, her melodic voice has a rhythm and resonance that lets you know that maybe she did more than just direct, that she could hold an audience's attention on stage as well as from behind the curtain.
'I wanted to be an actor and I started as an actor; I had this theater company and my colleagues kept saying that you need to be directing and one day I just woke up and said OK.' Her voice's reverberates into an 'aha' voice. Luckily for theatre-going audiences, she received and acted on her epiphany. Here Duncan shares her latest production Breath, Boom, and why she wanted to direct this story of female gang violence, and how, after several years of working around the glass ceiling, she is reaching new heights.
WCT: I got a chance to see Breath Boom and it was very moving. It has been getting good reviews. How do you feel about its success?
ID: I feel good and I hope that a lot of people get to see it. I love the play and it doesn't offer any answers but it does offer a glimpse into a world that I think people need to be aware of.
WCT: What attracted you to the play?
ID: I saw it in New York a year and a half ago and I was so moved by the honesty of it. And that the playwright did not glorify this violence, it was just so honest and at the same time her writing is so lyrical in a sense that it does not take you totally out of the play, but you do have to get used to it. It is like listening to Shakespearean verse but in today's lingo. So she is able to capture a lyrical sense of this generation, and this really captured me.
WCT: How did you go about casting? The actors are right on target. Did you have a hard time casting?
ID: Yes, I did, but I knew that I would, just because the nature of the play. There are a lot of talented actors in this town, but I needed them to be very young. And many of them have to span 14 years, so they have to be young but have maturity about them and they had to be able to deal with the language. So I knew those would be the challenges. We had to do more auditions than people typically do.
WCT: Who was the hardest?
ID: Prix.
WCT: I wanted to congratulate you on being the recipient for the NEA 2002/2003 program. Has most of your experience been in Chicago?
ID: Thank you. I have done some regional work, but very limited. I hope that the grant will expand my horizons beyond the Midwest. Chicago is great but to be able to work full time as a director, to freelance, people need to know who you are and what your work is.
WCT: What has been so far the most challenging play that you directed?
ID: They all have had different challenges. But I would say Breath, Boom because of the language of the play and trying to make sure that I captured the story and the characters and the essence and the environment. It was a lovely challenge; it was one of those things that directors dream of making sure the context is clear and that you are being true to the text.
WCT: It seemed very real, the world of women and violence. I would imagine that would be challenging.
ID: The focus of the play and the subtext and her (Prix's) escape from that world is through fireworks. All of this planning was going on when pyrotechnics was in the news for that deadly Rhode Island fire, and we knew that we could not do real fireworks. So we had to figure out a way with the design team to capture the fireworks and I had an excellent design team to work with.
WCT: What characters are you most like, if any?
ID: I don't know if I am like any of them, but I could relate to all of them, and they all have certain aspects that I feel could be me. I feel like I could have gone down that road that Prix went down, certainly growing up a Black woman … most Black women in an urban environment have that opportunity, you know and know of gangs. I grew up around that, but I was not in a gang and for Prix her only escape is through her dreams, and certainly, I was a big dreamer and still am (laughs).
WCT: What would you like people to get out of the play?
ID: I would like for people to just relate, even if this is a world that you are totally unfamiliar with, that the choices we make dictate the future we have. That is basically how I see this world and why the playwright created it. We don't see victims; we see people who are victims of circumstance, but they are still able to make choices about their future. I want people to see how these young girls make choices and some lead them down a path of destruction while others can lead them out. You are empowered to make choices, they may not be choices that you would want but you still have choices. Do you know what I am saying? Instead of saying, this is what society did to us. This play wants you to take responsibility for your choices. A colleague of mine brought his teenage family member to the show who has been involved in gangs, and he said that he really could relate to the show, and what he walked away with is that he doesn't want to be flipping burgers at 30.
WCT: That is interesting because you see people on the streets and you wonder what choices they made to get there or what events happened.
ID: A certain set of circumstance can put you in a position where you are making those kinds of choices. And certainly, Prix does not become violent in a vacuum. She is a product of society but she makes the choices to continue that.
WCT: In most fields there is a glass ceiling around Blacks, and in the theatre world, this seems especially true. One of the things that I really enjoyed about the play was seeing so many women of color on the stage and having the opportunity to work. What do you think is one of the biggest challenges of Blacks in theater?
ID: There are a lot more opportunities out there. The thing is making sure that we are in positions of power to choose what types of images are out there of us because there are a lot of images out there about Black culture and not all of them are positive. The challenge for us now is to make sure that we can tell as many different kinds of stories about ourselves and not just limiting and putting them into certain boxes about what the experience is.
WCT: There are more opportunities but there is still a double standard in terms of how directors are critiqued. Like I was shocked that a WCT reviewer gave Breath, Boom a bad review. Were you surprised?
ID: Theatre artists want to get good reviews, but that doesn't always happen, and we would drive ourselves crazy if we always thought about how the critics will respond to us. We will never do anything out of that fear of how they are going to respond. And there is this disconnect between how do you take critics, because most of us don't understand them. I wouldn't want to be a critic.
There are a lot of good critics out there, but I don't always agree with them. So how do you … take a good or bad review when sometimes you don't agree with the way that they have critiqued other work. There is a particular play that was done last year that most of the critics across the board thought was the best thing since sliced bread, and most of the theatre artists that I talked to—and I talk to quite a few—thought that it was the worst piece of shit seen on the Chicago stage.
WCT: That is interesting because I am torn with what my colleagues consider good. There is not enough diversity in reviewers/critics. So, I think that people are approaching things from a limited perspective in terms of, they may not know of certain lifestyles and they may not care to know.
ID: Right. they don't know and they don't care to know like the two negative reviews that I read from WCT and the Trib. neither of them liked Kia Koran (the writer), the way she writes or her style. and they felt like she didn't make this world accessible, and they blamed me for not helping it either. but what can you do?
WCT: And some people didn't like hip hop and rap until Eminem became popular and Eminem is a good rapper, but it is unfortunate that some people can't see the good in things unless someone they can identify with is doing it.
ID: On one hand, the play was recently JEFF (The Joseph Jefferson Award) recommended and from what I was told those judges were white men. They recognized what they consider excellent. And there is always some controversy around how often Black shows get nominated for awards. So these guys were there on the same night that [reviewers were]. On the one hand, you can make that comment, is that certain people don't want to access other worlds and have a limited knowledge of the Black experience and from a position of privilege feel that they should be able to comment on what that experience should be. That is certainly true, but equally important is that the show was recommended for a JEFF Award by white men. And at the end of the day, what is important to me… I surely love the great reviews that we have gotten ... but more important than any of that is we have had teenagers thanking me for directing this show.
WCT: I noticed that among the majority of the Black theatre-going audience, there seems to be more of a draw to productions like A Good Man is Hard to Find, combinations of musicals and plays. And these plays do very well, but there does not seem to be a large Black audience for plays of August Wilson and Susan Lori-Parks. Do you think they are just not interested, how do you think we could reach a larger set?
ID: That is a discussion that has been going on in the Black theatre for many years, about how to draw audiences to certain shows, and there is a place for all kinds of theatre, and certainly there is popularity with those types of plays. The derogatory phrase for those plays is the chitlin circuit. But there also is a market for high-quality Black theatre. I can't answer the question about how to do that, but there is certainly something to be learned from their marketing, like Shelley Garret markets his plays very well, and you must have the marketing dollars to place radio and TV ads. Most Black theatre companies do not have the money. So we have to find a way to reach the population that might be faster to listen to the radio than to pick up a newspaper, although the people who are trickling into Breath, Boom saw it in the paper, and we know that Black audiences read the Sun-Times. We are also getting a lot of street traffic. We are trying to learn from guerrilla marketing, you know how the clubs have people to hand out flyers, that is what gets the buzz going.
Breath, Boom Runs through April 13, Pegasus Players, 1145 W. Wilson, (773) 878-9761.
