Outlaw blues

Robert Alexander's state of the union address

by Bill Rodriguez

It's awfully brave for Trinity Repertory Company, with a gulp and a knock on wood, to push Robert Alexander's A Preface to the Alien Garden out onto its downstairs theater. The world premiere of the play, which is the main event of Trinity's New Play Festival and runs February 26 through April 3, has more casual killings than a car bomb explosion, uses language that could damage hearing aids, and has nary a hero strut onstage.

The nihilistic world depicted is that of the murderous, misogynistic, foul-mouthed gangbangers that gangsta rap depicts. An L.A. street gang has set up a drug franchise in the heart of middle America. A 17-year-old female member makes her way toward the top of the gang chapter, challenged in her violent ways by an older Crips founder who prefers to fight with words.

Playwright Alexander, 45, has written 29 plays, ranging from I Ain't Yo Uncle: The New Jack Revisionist Uncle Tom's Cabin to the "erotic allegory" Freak of Nature, about a woman who marries an alien who has no penis. Writing for himself rather than for commercial appeal is not new to him.

Trinity has taken the rare step of scheduling post-performance discussions after every staging. Audience members, whether they are upset or fascinated, will get an opportunity to vent and encounter other reactions.

Trinity artistic director Oskar Eustis initially didn't feel that Providence was the right city to premiere Alien Garden, since the gang problems were not primarily African-American and "it would be very, very tough on my audiences here." So he did something he hardly ever does and shopped the script around to artistic directors around the country. But two years went by and no bites. It was up to him.

"The way that I was thinking about it was part of the problem," Eustis says. "America is getting far more subtly ghettoized than it has ever been. Namely, it is possible for people like me and people like most of my audience to live lives that never are touched by the experience of, say, the people who are in this play. We can separate ourselves out and think that this has nothing to do with our America. But I actually think that this is a portrait of an extremely important part of what America is."

The following conversation with playwright Alexander took place recently during a break in rehearsals.

Q: Alien Garden was written as a companion piece to Servant of the People, about Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party?

A: I wanted to chart the course of what happened with the guns in the '60s and '70s and what's going on with Black folks with guns now, with these young kids right now who are the descendants of these radicalized, revolutionary idealists who failed to pass the baton on to them, the next generation.

Q: You've also written and spoken about having written it for your son. How did he respond to it?

A: He went to a couple of public readings of it in the Bay Area. He liked the play. He thought that it was a very honest attempt to get the language down, in terms of trying to communicate in his native tongue, picking up the codes and the slang and the nuances of the slang that came out of hip-hop and that came out of street sub-culture in general, especially West Coast, outlaw sub-culture. He liked it, and I think he also appreciated it because it wasn't preachy, it wasn't overtly didactic . . . We're not going to hit you over the head, we kind of hit you in the stomach, giving you an experience that's very dark, very visceral, that does not have a lot of hope in it. We hope that people when they leave the theater, that it will be clear to them that this isn't glorifying the gang sub-culture. When you leave you see everybody dead, with blood on them, with blood on their souls.

Q: I had a long and loud argument with an African-American actor who said that the play stereotyped black urban violence. I said that it redeemed the subject matter by shaping it into art. Have you gotten much objection to the violence in the play?

A: I think when you write a play about the Panthers or try to reinvent Uncle Tom and Topsy, or you write about gangbangers from L.A. in a crack house in the Midwest, a lot of members of the Black community who want to see more heroes depicted, because there's a lack of heroes in our lives, get a little upset because they want to see something more positive. I haven't been that interested in doing celebratory, feel-good theater, in general. I have always been more interested in showing the underbelly, and as a result I end up introducing audiences to characters they may not wish to meet in real life. So I think the theater is the place to safely meet these people! And try to see what their world view is. I would much rather meet Lisa Body in the theater than in an alley, you know.

I live with the fact that there is always going to be some kind of objection to presenting these kinds of images, but I'm not interested in doing The Cosby Show and putting it up on stage . . . .

Sometimes the truth is a bitter pill that we have to swallow. So I view this art as an act of tough love. I really, really write this out of my love for America, out of my love for the African-American community in general, but to also show people that this the Other America.

Q: I was impressed in reading the play and seeing the reading last spring in how you clarify their desperate search for meaning. Whether it's believing in the Mother Ship, the Bible or her violent life, Lisa Body is trying to make sense, make meaning.

A: One of the reasons this play was a companion piece to my Panther play is a lot of those youth that joined the Panthers, that heard the rhetoric and were seduced by it, they were looking to identify with something and to belong to something. Same with people joining a gang. The gang becomes their extended family, their surrogate family, if you will. There's a sense of belonging: "I'm part of this, I own this." And they're willing to live with the consequences of everything that comes with that lifestyle . . . So to fight for the bragging rights of your neighborhood, your set, is a powerful thing to be caught up in.

It's a shame that we have a society that, you know, violence is very much a part of it, and part of the psychic debt of the country. This land was founded on violence. The Native Americans had the land taken from them. We fought a war here to escape being ruled by the British empire. We fought a civil war over slavery and other economic issues. So bloodshed is very much a part of the psychic landscape of this country. And bloodshed is definitely a part of the wild, wild West, the frontier. It's a frontier that Sam Shepard has written about . . . I see these Crips as being part of that same frontier, being part of that outlaw sub-culture. For them, it's the wild, wild West all over again.