...And Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi

By Nakissa Etemad

Nakissa Etemad is a San Francisco-based dramaturg, producer, and translator and the Resident Dramaturg for The Cutting Ball Theater. She served as dramaturg for Cutting Ball's The Bald Soprano & last season's award-winning production of Victims of Duty, and is the former Dramaturg & Literary Manager for The Wilma Theater, San Jose Rep, and San Diego Rep.

The Cutting Ball is in the final rehearsal weeks of Marcus Gardley's upcoming play ...and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi. This play that weaves poetry, myth and spirituality into a ‘gumbo' full of flavors and multiple story threads is about to set the Bay Area theatre scene alight.Marcus speaks with his dramaturg Nakissa Etemad about writing plays and how he creates his unique worlds, as they unlock the secrets to Jesus Moonwalks.

NE: How did you become a writer?
MG: I think I've always been a writer. I've always written poetry—I don't ever remember not writing poetry. So I feel like I've always been a writer as far back as I can remember. I became a playwright when I enrolled in a creative writing class at San Francisco State University. And in my poetry classes a lot of the professors were saying these are not poems, these are plays. And I would argue with them and say, ‘Oh no, you're wrong, these are poems—they're just different.' And they said, ‘But they have character names, and stage directions....' And so, they encouraged me to take a playwriting class, and I knew from the first class, this is what I was going to do with my life.

NE: How did you get involved with The Cutting Ball Theater?
MG: Amy Mueller at the Playwrights Foundation, who's directing this play, introduced me to a wonderful artistic director by the name of Rob Melrose. I think it's a great merging of this type of play and the esthetic of the theater—they do a lot of beautiful avant-garde work and a lot of work from emerging new voices in the theatre, and I think it's just a great fit.

NE: So do you consider yourself an avant-garde writer in some ways?
MG: I don't necessarily. I feel like this specific play could be considered an avant-garde piece, but I sort of align myself more with the school of magical realism, Tony Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, Lorca, that type of work.

NE: Cutting Ball has quoted you as calling this your signature play. What do you think is ‘signature Marcus Gardley' about this play?
MG: Well, you know, I think in all my work I try to weave in three elements that I'm really sort of obsessed with as a writer: poetry, myth, and spirituality. And I think, for the first time with this play, I was able to do it in a sort of a balanced way, and so in that way it's my signature play. I think this [is the] play I've worked on the most... I started it in 2003, and I feel like I've finally gotten to a place where it's complete. And so, in that way, it's a great example of my career so far. And my signature voice in dealing with these epic elements, and how they merge.

NE: What was the genesis of ...and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi?
MG: Well, I started to write this play when I was in my second year at Yale drama school. And I really wanted to write a play about my grandmother and her father. And when I was young my grandmother used to tell me this really amazing story about how her father freed himself. And she would always start the story with the lines: ‘This is the story of Madison Eden who freed himself from slavery.' And that was just really powerful. And as I got older, the story would change over time. She loved to have family gatherings where she would tell us stories, and she had this really powerful way of extending her hand over the family as if to bless them before she would tell these beautiful stories. She would also sing spirituals and pray. And so the story, over time, would progress. And when it first started off, it was really magical: her father who freed himself from slavery who befriended Abraham Lincoln and who wore a dress. Because during that time it was easier for an African American woman to travel up north than it was [for] a man. So when I decided to write this play, I called her and I said, ‘Can you please tell me the original story, the real, true story?' And I don't know if she could not remember it, or if she just chose to sort of pass the story down to me. Because she said [to me], ‘You know, you need to tell your own version.' And in that way I think she really didn't know the real truth anyway in that she was sort of making sense of her father's life from what she then could remember. And so that was my task. And I was really charged to take this story that she told me and add my own spin to it. And this is what Jesus Moonwalks asks of the audience in the beginning, it asks you to invest yourself, become an active participant in the telling of this story.

NE: You've called the play "the untold story of the Civil War from the slaves' perspective." Is that what you set out to do?
MG: I don't know if I set out to do that. But I do feel like we have so [few] accounts of how slaves felt about the civil war and about how it affected them—especially slaves that were in the south, and trying to find freedom, and trying to escape during that time. So what I did was I tried to take elements or fragments from what I knew about these people and put them into the play as a sort of way of giving an homage to who they were and their struggle, but also putting their voice into the play. And so it's poetic on purpose, because I think poetry has a really great way of speaking to the past but also being very present.

NE: This play is so rich and full of different threads, different sources of inspiration, different characters, that likely each person in the audience will connect with something different. But if there were 1 thing you wanted your audience to walk away with after seeing ...and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi, what would it be?
MG: I would hope that audiences leave this play feeling like they were a part of it. I would hope that they felt like they learned something, but also that they took away something that added to their daily lives and shared it with another person. In a lot of ways this play is a gumbo. And a gumbo in Louisiana is something that you share; you don't make it for yourself, you make it for a whole bunch of people. But it's also a soup that has a lot of ingredients in it. And it has a lot of ingredients on purpose because like community is complex and diverse and epic, so is the sharing of it. And so when you eat a bowl of gumbo, you share your stories, you share all of who you are. And we all share all of who we are. And so you leave—you come away with a very complex, delicious experience that lasts you a lifetime.

NE: Music often plays a part in your plays. This play is filled with spirituals and musical expressions of people's desires. Why and how does music find its way into your writing?
MG: The way music works in my writing and in particular in this play is that it weaves together many elements in the play. And I think I use spirituals specifically in this play because spirituals have a profound effect on who we are as citizens of the United States of America. I think we all relate to spirituals in a very profound way. I think we all have an attachment, an emotional attachment to spirituals. And so whether there is some part of the play you don't understand, there may be some character that you're not quite grasping, it is the spirituals that help you, that guide you through the play, that weave and thread through the different parts of this play as if it's a quilt. And what I hope [happens when] audiences come to this play is that they sing along with us—this play is meant to be active. It's meant for you as an audience member to become an active participant in the telling. And that's what music, these songs [are there for], they're meant to be sung by all who hear them. And that's why spirituals are perfect for this type of play—sort of a community or a group play in that the audience is an active participant in the telling of the story. And so at the top of the play, the narrator Mississippi River will invite you to sing along, to add your own thread to the play—and that means take what you can, and, as my dad says, leave the rest to the garbage men.

NE: So in this play some characters are supernatural, some are real people, and some transform from real to supernatural. How do you create one world in which they co-exist?
MG: I think the world of this play allows for both supernatural, natural, and those elements that exist in between to work cohesively. I also I don't see the world's certain elements as being supernatural—for example, the Mississippi River [character] is both a woman and a river. So I think, she can be seen as supernatural, but in some ways she's the most natural thing in the world. So I guess one way to explain [it] is I grew up in the church, and in the church I think what's more real is the supernatural, that the way in which people express themselves is more supernatural than natural. And so that's always [been a] part of me. And what I love about theatre is that theatre works in the same way; that people are open and excited about a form of expression that is different, that is unique from their own. And I think people come to theatre to sort of get outside of their bodies, and also to explore what is supernatural about who we are as Americans.

NE: When I asked you this in the coffee shop, you described this as "theatre can't be real; it's always surreal. And I grew up in the church, so it's the most natural thing.” Can you talk a bit more about that?
MG: [In general], I think theatre can't be real. I think theatre is supernatural at its core. I think the very act of sitting in the audience and experiencing a story and watching it unfold, there's something very supernatural about that, you know. And so I love that about theatre, and I think we go to theatre to sort of get away from the real everyday mundane-ness of our lives.

NE: Your play has a lot of mythology in it. What inspires you about mythology?
MG: Well, when I started to write ...and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi, I knew that I wanted to base it upon a Greek myth because I thought this event in history is so epic, and [I knew] the play is going to be epic. And I didn't want it to overwhelm the audience. So what's great about adapting—or loosely adapting a myth is that we already know a story within the story; we already know the core of the story. We already know the weight of the Demeter myth which is the myth of a Goddess longing for her daughter [Persephone] whom she lost. And the weight of a slave whose child was taken from them is that huge, if not bigger. And the great thing about using this myth is it's already in our conscience, it's already in our history, and we know how huge that is. So that's why I use the sacred story of the Demeter myth.

NE: If this is the story of Demeter, why do we never meet Persephone?
MG: We never meet Persephone because I feel like Persephone is the part of the story—at least in terms of this play—that you never know the truth about. You never know her side of the story. When I read the Greek, the Demeter myth, I never felt like Persephone's opinion of Hades [who takes her from her home and makes her his wife of the Underworld] was ever explained. Did she really want to be with him, or did she not? And that's what I think is so powerful about that myth; it's open to interpretation. We know that her mother [Demeter] longs for her, but we don't know if she is mourning her mother when she's away, all that time. And so in this way the Persephone part of the story is left out, it's open to interpretation. But all of the characters in the play have opinions about Persephone [whom the play calls "Po'em”], and all of them want her.

NE: Was this writing process different from the writing process of your other plays?
MG: Very different than processes I've had to undergo writing my other plays. What's really unique about the writing process of ...and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi is that I really had to listen to the voices. I really had to let go of the history, not hold so tight to the myth or the music. And then just really let the voices speak to me, let the voice of my grandmother, the voice of the people that experience this story speak to me. And more often than not, the way I write is I do research, I sculpt like I'm creating some type of sculpture with clay; I cut and then it's done. And this has been a long process. And I've shelved this play quite a few times, and it never let's me forget it, it never leaves me alone, you know what I mean? A theater would call and say, ‘Look, we heard about this play, we want to do a reading.' And for one reason or another I said okay, I have to get back to it. And I would read it and I would realize, ‘Oh no, there's some good stuff here.' And I would go back to it. It became an obsession. And I feel like when I was able to get out of the way and listen, and stop trying to impose my own craft elements, my own traditional sort of ways in which a playwright should write a play that the play started to reveal itself. And I noticed that with this complete draft, I got back to the original impulses from when I started the play.

NE: You grew up in Oakland, received an MFA in playwriting from Yale, now you live in NY and teach at UMass Amherst. You've done a lot of readings in the Bay Area, worked with Bay Area Playwrights Festival mostly, Cutting Ball's Risk is This, Shotgun Players.... Do you notice a difference between east coast and west coast audiences? Do they respond differently to your work?
MG: I think for the most part, east coast and west coast audiences respond very differently to all work, and to my work as well. I think what I find here in the Bay Area which I really love is that audiences tend to be more open to new forms of expression. They tend to look at a play as a unique world, and I think they are more open to the ways in which the rules of this world work, that each play is a new experience. And in this way it allows for writers who are speaking into the void, who are trying to explore new forms of expression, it allows us to play and explore. I think that exists in the east coast as well, but I think here, [that openness exists] because of the environment, the progressive and liberal way in which I think theatre artists express themselves and speak and some of their passions.... I think with the east coast, they appreciate the work for its intellectual value, and that they're more obsessed with the history and the ways in which the myth works in the play. And I think in the Bay Area, all those elements are exciting [to these audiences], so, you know.... It's a give and take.