In a recent New Yorker essay on Charles J. Shields’s new biography Lorraine Hansberry: The Life Behind ‘A Raisin in the Sun’, Blair McClendon notes that the editors of The Ladder, the first national lesbian publication, tried to persuade the playwright to publicly come out after the success of her Broadway play. “Hansberry said that, as a Black lesbian Communist, she had been forced to decide ‘which of the closets was most important to her,'” writes McClendon.
Two plays by Black queer artists now making their local debuts—Donja R. Love’s Fireflies, which opens tonight at Northlight Theatre, and travis tate’s Queen of the Night, which begins previews Saturday at Victory Gardens—center queer Black lives in ways that Hansberry apparently felt she could not. (Of course her early death at 34 means that we will never know how she might have addressed her queerness in later works.)
Fireflies
Through 2/20: Wed 1 and 7:30 PM, Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2:30 and 8 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; also Tue 2/8, 7:30 PM and Sun 2/20, 7 PM; Northlight Theatre, North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie, 847-673-6300, northlight.org, $30-$89 ($15 students, subject to availability).
Queen of the Night
1/29-3/13: Tue-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Sun 1/30, 7:30 PM, Sat 2/12 and Wed 2/16, 2 PM only, no shows Tue 2/1-2/15; Victory Gardens Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln, 773-871-3000, victorygardens.org, $29-$62.
Love’s play, set in the early 60s, shows the effects of homophobia as well as racism on a couple involved in the civil rights movement, while tate’s is a contemporary look at a father and his queer son trying to get closer during a camping trip. But while the timeframes are different, both playwrights have created worlds where two people in settings somewhat isolated from the public world (a kitchen in Love’s play, a distant campsite in tate’s) have to be truthful with each other, no matter how painful it may be.
Love’s play is part of a trilogy called, appropriately enough, The Love* Plays, each set during a different era in Black American history. Sugar in Our Wounds, produced locally by First Floor Theater in 2019 (directed by Mikael Burke, who also directs Northlight’s Fireflies), traces the romance of two enslaved Black men during the Civil War. The third play, In the Middle, which hasn’t yet been produced in Chicago, is set during the Black Lives Matter movement.
“I started with Sugar in Our Wounds, which explores queerness during the time of enslavement. And I thought that would be its own piece, right? A standalone,” says Love. “And I remember I was actually talking to my husband. He literally reads every draft of everything of mine, God bless him. And so we were walking to the market not too far from where we live and we were talking about Sugar in Our Wounds, just the characters, the world. And I remember I stopped in my tracks and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh. I actually think that this piece is in conversation with other pieces that are holding space for love during pivotal moments in Black history.'”
The inspiration for tate came in part from an episode of NPR’s Code Switch. “I was listening to this story, and they were talking about Blackness in nature and this group that started to encourage Black communities to participate in hiking, and foraging, and camping, and other activities that are mostly white spaces. So I just felt like that was a cool idea and it kind of sparked something in general,” they say. “I kind of wanted to write a play where two people were from different generations that may be starting from far away from each other but have to cross a plain to get to a little bit of understanding between each other.”
In Queen of the Night (directed by Victory Gardens artistic director Ken-Matt Martin), father Stephen and son Ty—the former recently laid off from a factory, the latter an artist—go on their camping trip before attending the wedding of Stephen’s ex-wife and the mother of Ty and his brother, Marshall, who is a successful corporate lawyer. This isn’t a play about coming out and being disowned by family, but rather a story about the two men trying to find ways to connect despite their differences. (One of the issues is the lingering resentment Ty and apparently also his brother hold about their parents’ divorce.)
They fish, they drink, they argue—but as tate notes, “I was interested in a story where two people are fighting to get to understanding, rather than maybe destroying each other. Kind of going in a different direction from the more traumatic or tropes that involve lots of trauma or violence.”
Violence is present in the background of Fireflies. Olivia Grace stays home writing speeches for her minister husband, Charles, who is a leader in the civil rights movement. It’s 1963, right after the murder of four Black girls in the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, and Charles’s own safety is threatened every time he goes on the road. Olivia is also pregnant, and doesn’t want to be. As she writes in a letter to God, “Please take this baby back. It has no place in this world. I wish it did, but it’s colored so it won’t. So you have to take this baby back. You have to.”
Tensions between Olivia and Charles ratchet up when she receives an answering-machine message from the FBI, playing recordings they made of Charles having sex with another woman. (This plot development mirrors Coretta King receiving a package containing an anonymous letter and tapes of her husband’s alleged affairs.) Charles finds the letters Olivia wrote to Ruby, another woman in the movement, which make it plain that her desires are for women (or at least one particular woman), not her husband.
Though it’s set nearly 60 years ago, Love thinks that Olivia’s isolation will speak to audiences now. “I find myself thinking about Olivia. She’s spent so much of her time in the house, which we all know about now. Like a few years into this pandemic, we understand being in the house and what that does to one’s mental state.”
The isolation in Queen of the Night is one of the things tate finds to be key to their characters’ opening up. “They’re in the middle of nowhere, maybe, or in a campsite far from where they’re supposed to end up. It pressurizes, but I think nature—all the elements of sound, and trees, and the other animals there—that helps to reflect the emotionality of the characters and helps to also really create the story too.”
For his part, Love, who is living with HIV, has found a way to create community with his Write It Out! workshop, created in 2020 for other playwrights with HIV, and with his Learning to Love playwriting fellowship, which put four Black queer playwrights between the ages of 18-35 together in an intergenerational collaboration on a one-act play about self-acceptance and love, with mentorship provided by an older queer writer.
“What I think about is, one thing we know for sure is that there are individuals in this world who do not see themselves reflected. There are individuals in this world who just by the very nature of the cards that they’ve been dealt, the identities that they exist in, will have a harder time existing than others,” says Love. “And so with that being said, I firmly believe that if you have the access, if you have the resources, if you exist in a space to shift that in any way, we absolutely have to.”
