- OTHER MEDIA
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- 'Jesus Moonwalks' looks at race, identity
Regan McMahon, Special to the Chronicle
- Thursday, March 18, 2010
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- Marcus Gardley was aware of a number of plays about the Civil War and
slavery, but found very few from the slave point of view. So the award-winning
32-year-old poet and playwright from West Oakland decided to write one
of his own.
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- "... and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi" is the story of
a freed slave in search of his daughter at the end of the Civil War. A
provocative swirl of traditional storytelling, gospel music, Christian
spirituality and American history, it explores perplexing issues of race,
identity, forgiveness and redemption. It opens Friday at San Francisco's
Cutting Ball Theater in residence at Exit on Taylor, in a co-production
with Playwrights Foundation.
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- Gardley got the idea for "Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi"
from a story his Louisiana-born great-grandmother used to tell about her
father, who freed himself from slavery but gave her up to another family
after her mother died of tuberculosis. Later, riddled with guilt, he traveled
the country until he found her.
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- "It was a powerful story, in which she described him searching
'as if he was a mother,' and that led me to the Demeter/Persephone myth,"
says Gardley.
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- With a man turning into a woman, the Mississippi River as a character
and Jesus as the slave's daughter's imaginary friend, this is one bubbling
supernatural gumbo. Gardley credits the influence of his three favorite
writers, Toni Morrison, Federico Garcia Lorca and Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
who use magical realism in their work.
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- Gardley says when he was young, Jesus was his imaginary friend until
his father, then a pastor in the Four Square Gospel Church, disabused him
of the idea.
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- "My grandmother, who is 96, always told me, if you're going to
tell a story, you have to add your own piece to it," Gardley says.
"My own thread is Jesus as an imaginary friend."
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- Bay Area audiences may be familiar with Gardley's work from Shotgun
Players in Berkeley, which commissioned "Love Is a Dream House in
Lorin" (2007) about South Berkeley and "The World in a Woman's
Hands" (2009), about women who worked in the Richmond shipyards during
World War II. His 12th play, "On the Levee," set during a 1927
flood in Mississippi, opens July 1 at New York's Lincoln Center. And he
was recently hired by Chris Bensinger, who is producing "American
Idiot" on Broadway, to write the book for a new musical called "The
Princess and the Black-Eyed Pea," set during the Harlem Renaissance.
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- Gardley loves confronting American history in his work. In October,
the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., will produce "Every Tongue Confess,"
about Alabama church burnings in the 1990s. And next year, "The Road
Weeps, the Well Runs Dry," the first in a trilogy about the migration
of Black Seminoles from Florida to Oklahoma, will be produced, "hopefully
in New York," says Gardley.
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- Gardley earned his bachelor's degree at San Francisco State University
and his master's at the Yale School of Drama, taught playwriting at Columbia
University and now divides his time between New York City and Amherst,
Mass., where he teaches a course on playwrights of color at the University
of Massachusetts. He says the Bay Area remains a big influence in his work
as a writer and as a person: "the sense of community, the celebration
of diversity, and equality. They exist in other places, but not in such
a profound and celebratory way. That's why I always call myself a Bay Area
playwright, and why I am very proud of where I'm from."
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