Jacqueline E. Lawton
Jacqueline Lawton’s plays are richly varied and always revelatory. Whether the setting is a Nigerian refugee camp, 1920s Paris, or the rapidly gentrifying streets of Southeast DC, her work is incisive, funny, ethically complex and always relevant. Her plays are peopled with witches, artists, spies and soldiers, and among her characters you’ll find John Wilkes Booth, Shirley Chisolm and devil himself. They play as if she’s channeling Octavia E. Butler, Yoko Ogawa and Edgar Allen Poe… all at once.
“ I actually don't think theatre is a tool for social change. I think theatre is a tool for building community that can then create empathy that can impact individuals. Because if you can open someone's heart, you can change someone's mind.”
Magical, timely and keenly focused on race, gender and personal authenticity, Lawton’s plays have been developed and presented at Arena Stage, Classical Theater of Harlem, the Kennedy Center, Woolly Mammoth Theater Company and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Today, in addition to writing, she is a tenured professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches Playwriting, Play Analysis, Theatre for Social Change and Dramaturgy.
Although Jacqueline Lawton’s theatrical bent began in childhood, writing plays to entertain her little sister, it was as an undergrad at the University of Texas, Austin, that she found the mission that would become the cornerstone of her career as both theatre artist and educator. “Once I got into college, it became very clear that the roles for Black women were few and far between. It takes like a 19-20 year old to sit in all of their arrogance and say, ‘I'm going to change that,’” she laughs.
But, under the mentorship of playwright Amparo Garcia-Crow, Lawton began to do just that. By the time she’d earned her MFA, Lawton’s thesis play Blood-bound and Tongue-tied (conceived at the Kennedy Center Playwright’s Intensive) was accepted into the World Interplay Festival in Australia.* An auspicious start.
“I started off with where my work is now, which is — how do I address a narrative of omission and exclusion” Lawton says. “And how do I create space for those stories to be told?”
Lawton settled in Washington, D.C. — one of the premiere regional theatre and new play development hotspots in the U.S. — and began building mythic, textured plays that grappled with justice, inequality and the endless complications of love. Developmental workshops and productions soon followed, and Lawton also built a reputation as a dramaturg and consultant, working with the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Woolly Mammoth and PlayMakers Repertory. While working professionally as a playwright and dramaturg, she also taught for theatre companies and universities, ultimately landing at UNC Chapel Hill.
Our conversation took place the day after UNC cancelled on-campus classes on the heels of a near-immediate COVID-19 outbreak to kick off the Fall 2020 semester. Lawton, who had already chosen to conduct her classes online, faced little disruption. “It feels like I'm still able to do it, because collaboration is really about how are you in dialogue with each other,” Lawton explains. “And how does that dialogue move forward with action and ideas. … We still write the scripts, we gather in smaller groups or work in groups of three instead of six, because that allows them each time to talk and process and engage, and they can cowrite together so that the only real thing that's actually different is that we're not in person. And we're not sharing it in person, we're sharing it online, so we're still gathering as community. We're still engaging conversation, we're still addressing an issue that matters to us.”
We immediately focus on the state of theatre in the time of COVID. What is theatre when it’s not live? How can it serve its mission? What will it look like on the other side of all this?
“I think that's the good thing about us humans — we learn how to adapt fairly quickly,” she says. “I think we can place judgment on things, but I just don’t find that useful. Like even Zoom theatre. Is it theatre or is it not theatre? That’s actually not the question that interests me about that. For me theatre is being in community, being in conversation around a story and idea, a moment in time, and that’s theatre whether that’s us on Zoom live or that’s us shoulder-to-shoulder in a room.”
She adds, “I have a world premiere of a play. Do I want to introduce that as a a Zoom video production? No, not necessarily. Because the play is set in the 1920s, you know the technology wasn’t even in the imagination. But I do want to have it read. I do want to get a group of experts around to hear the play … I’m talking specifically about my play XIX, which looks at the 19th Amendment in North Carolina. I do want to talk about how we’re still fighting for voting rights currently.”
As the pandemic drags on, Lawton has found that the life of video conferencing, while fatiguing, does foster community if the participants are willing to put in the work. “I have to say that I've been leading anti-racist, anti-bigotry, anti-oppression trainings, as well as teaching, and to even to my surprise, we've reached a level of intimacy and sharing that shows up even we're in the room together. So something is still happening — that idea of being together and community still exists … It's still happening in a really beautiful and surprising way.”
One of the most valuable developments of putting art online has been an exponential increase in accessibility. “What I appreciate about what this medium is forcing on us is, it’s actually making theatre accessible to people who don't have access to it, whether that's because they don't have the money, they don't have transportation to get there, or it's not in their community. And that I'm always going to love. I'm always going to love things that are going to make theatre more accessible.”
Digital accessibility doesn’t stop at national borders (with a few glaring exceptions), and Lawton has found collaboration and exchange of information to be an increasingly international affair. “I've been in conversations with African playwrights and African teaching artists,” she says. “They’re currently in Uganda, in Nigeria, and I’m here on Zoom, listening to these amazing, extraordinary artists talking about what are the values in their country right now, or their particular city right now. And what are they hoping to extend out, what are they facing, how COVID is impacting them. And the only other time that would have happened is if those folks had been brought to the Kennedy Center … not just on my morning walk, being able to listen to this powerful conversation happening live, able to ask them questions.”
“It's blowing my mind what's available right now,” she adds. “I don't want it to go away, because the minute we're back, the minute we're able to land again, and geography becomes the placement through which we engage, then it's about access, which is about finances. It's also about time, too. So who has the time to do this, who can travel, who has the money to do that … how can we make sure that this kind of work, kind of engagements, kind of community gathering continues to happen in a way that it's not privileged to the elite, and it's not privileged to those who have who have money.”
A crucial element to the effectiveness of Lawton’s work lies in its deep-seated humanity and its appeal to self-examination and empathy. “When I teach theatre for social change, I always begin with the premise that I actually don't think theatre is a tool for social change,” she explains. “I think theatre is a tool for building community that can then create empathy that can impact individuals. Because if you can open someone's heart, you can change someone's mind. Ideology, in and of itself, is pretty hard to adjust unless someone's heart has been opened to an idea and they've been impacted through through empathy.”
As Lawton looks to the future of theatre in this powder keg American moment of unrest, political posturing and COVID-19, she displays the optimism that is necessary for an artist who digs so deeply into our society’s rickety foundations. Optimism that is required to do the hard work of rebuilding.
“I do think theatre is going to survive,” she says. “I do think this thing we do, this gathering of people, telling stories, will survive. I don't think there's anything too unique about the coronavirus that makes it different from the [Spanish] flu, that makes it different from the plague … human beings on the other side of it are still going to want to gather around stories.”
*(Full disclosure, I took part in a developmental reading of Blood-bound and Tongue-tied at Rorschach Theatre in 2007 and worked on other of Lawton’s plays)
Learn more:
Jacqueline Lawton’s website
XIX coming soon and another great interview with her about it
Intelligence at Arena Stage
