Kim Euell (photo by Harry Wade)

Julia Mayes, contributing editor for KNOCK, interviews Kim Euell, playwright of The Diva Daughters DuPree, playing in Seattle through October, 2006.

Kim Euell’s play, The Diva Daughters DuPree, plays in Seattle at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center through October, 2006. Winner of the Theodore Ward playwriting competition, the play is the story of three African-American sisters who reunite and find themselves engaging in difficult, but sometimes humorous, conversations about not only their differences, but also their common bonds. Choices made by the sisters in lifestyle, jobs, and especially husbands are the backdrop of this story in which layers of race, class, age, and gender emerge.

Euell served as director of New Play Development at the Tony Award-winning Hartford Stage Company where she produced and developed several projects for the main stage. She began her career in theater as a production coordinator and has worked as a dramaturge at major play development programs including the Sundance Theater Lab, the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference, and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. An August Wilson Fellow, Euell was also a Macarthur Scholar at the University of Minnesota in 2004.

Euell talks to KNOCK about her extensive experience in theater and her inspiration for her latest play and explains why Diva Daughters DuPree might challenge opinions about roles and views in America.

Julia Mayes: What excites you about Diva Daughters DuPree? How did you come up with this family and their story?

Kim Euell: Basically, it’s the story about three women, sisters, who grew up in an upper middle-class, African-American family, but they grew up isolated from the African-American community. Their parents moved them to a wealthy, almost overwhelmingly white suburb, and it’s set in Chestnut Hill, which is a suburb of Philadelphia, near where I grew up.

I wanted to look at that whole phenomenon of people who grow up in that situation. One of the things that’s unique about the sisters is that there is a pretty good spread in age. The three sisters are Billy, Sarah and Abbey. They’ve been named by their father, after his favorite jazz songstresses.

Each one has had a very different experience, given where the family fortunes were at the time each one was born. For example, the youngest has only known this neighborhood and has only known privilege, because by the time she was born, the parents were well-established in their careers, and financially. Whereas the eldest was born at a much different time, so she’s had a much different experience.

JM: These women have one thing in common with a lot of women, especially black women, even in Seattle. They seem to live with a sense of duality, where they are part of multiple communities; they work in the white community, and they live in and out of the black community. How did that aspect of the play develop?

KE: Part of it has to do with my own observations about African-American people and where we are. One of the things that inspired me to take up playwriting in the first place was the fact that I rarely saw people that I knew on stage. While we had some wonderful breakthroughs with August Wilson and the generations that he represents and depicts, and with Suzan-Lori Parks, when I would go to the theater, I would look around and I would not see the people that I knew on stage. That’s one of the things that motivated me to start writing. In a way, I think of this play as a portrait, and in painting this portrait of these three sisters I was also seeking to paint a portrait of my generation.

JM: How do the sisters in The Diva Daughters DuPree reflect your generation?

KE: Each of them identifies herself in a different way. One of the sisters identifies herself more as a bi-sexual female. Another one of the sisters identifies herself more strongly as an African-American. The third sister identifies herself based on class. Then there’s the issue of the choices they have made as a result of their upbringing. The youngest sister and the eldest sister have both married men outside of the culture. That aspect of the play was inspired by the fact that one day I looked around and noticed that of my four closest African-American female friends, three of them had, in fact, married outside of the culture. I also noticed that this caused a shift in the conversations that took place, particularly at the dinner table—our primary mode of socializing. Suddenly, there were things that we couldn’t talk about, or we talked about things in different ways. That was one of the things I was really motivated to explore in this play—how that conversation shifts and how do we censor ourselves? What would happen if one day everybody stopped self-censoring? What kinds of things might be blurted out?

JM: African-American audiences are often very aware of class and generation gaps. How does your play touch on what we’ve experienced, and then reach deeper?

KE: Another thing that compelled me to write it was the fact that I did not feel that I was seeing lot of plays written that specifically spoke to the African-American community about some of our concerns that don’t get addressed. One of the things that has happened is the shift away from African-American theaters supporting and developing black playwrights. From what I can see, a lot of African-American theaters now are looking to regional theaters or mainstream theaters to inform their programming. The mainstream theaters, of course, when they select a play by a writer of color, it’s going to be a writer of color, who basically is writing for a mainstream, white audience—about people of color. It’s a lot different from when a writer is writing specifically for an audience of color, to be filtered through a different lens, different sensibilities. Just like those conversations at the dinner table that get censored, the plays, the topics, the themes are filtered.

JM: I know that you have worked as a consultant for the Seattle Arts Commission, so you’re familiar with the Seattle Arts scene.

KE: You’re going way back (laughs). That was over ten years ago.

JM: Well how did The Diva Daughters DuPree end up being produced in Seattle, at the Langston Hughes Center?

KE: I was seeking dramaturgical input from different people and one of the people I gave the script to was a director named Julie Eber who’s based in Los Angeles. She liked the play and passed it on to a Seattle-based dramaturge named Maime Hunt. She in turn, passed it on to director Jacqueline Moscou. I was actually out of the country doing a workshop when I got an e-mail from her saying she wanted to produce it. So that’s how it happened. I really had no knowledge of the fact that the play was on this route (laughs).

JM: Your work has taken you from San Francisco where several of your plays were produced at the Lorraine Hansbury Theater, and as far as Kenya, where you instructed workshops for playwrights. Can you tell us about your experiences around the world and how they have led to what you are doing in theatre today?

KE: When I first got out of college, I went to work for a presenter of touring Broadway and off-Broadway plays and musicals, a man named Don Thompson. I was in charge of productions arrangements, so I was the person that had to baby-sit productions when they were in the theater. And we would block-book. Sometimes they’d book a show and we’d present it in five different cities in northern California. Sometimes we’d have a show running for eight or ten, or sometimes twelve weeks. That meant that I would get to see these shows over and over. That’s when I first started to develop a grasp of dramatic structure and also that’s when I first started to think I’d really like to write a play and I think I could write a good play. After that, I got a chance to work on the national tour of A Soldiers Play, which was the Pulitzer prize-winning play that was produced by the Negro Ensemble Company. That was a big revelation because I thought, ‘Oh, I can do it, and I can do it black.’ That play was written by Charles Fuller, who, in terms of American playwrights, is one of the master craftsmen. His work is really under-produced, but I was very interested because he was telling stories that had not been told on the American stage. He also was someone that came out of the black arts movement, so his work had a certain breath in terms of its commitment to social content and its commitment to being work that empowered African-American communities and addressed important issues. So, I would say that he actually became a really big inspiration for me and having the opportunity to see his play over and over definitely was educational, as well.

JM: The play originally debuted in 2002 in Detroit. When did you start writing The Diva Daughters DuPree? How long does it usually take you to write a play?

KE: I started the play in the late 90’s. My plays usually have a long gestation period because of the way I write. I really spend a lot of time getting to know my characters.

JM: How do you develop your characters and your story?

KE: It’s almost as though the story already exists, but initially I can only catch it in glimpses. I might hear certain voices. Then, I give myself creative time and I start writing things down. Another thing that I do is make collages when I’m gestating a play.

JM: What kind of collages?

KE: Visual collages. I go through and find visual images, photos, things from magazines, tarot cards, whatever. Anything that in some way seems connected to the characters or the world of the play. I put them up on my wall and by the time the wall is full of images, I’m hearing the character voices pretty clearly and I start to write down snatches of dialogue in a journal. Then once the journal is full, I can sit down and start to craft it into a play.

Diva Daughters was the first play I had written in a while. I had this idea that I was going to write a play about a history professor named Sarah, but the first character that showed up was Billy. At first, I thought she was Sarah, but then I realized, ‘no, this is somebody else.’ Then Sarah showed up, then Abbey was the last one to show up, which is kind of the order they arrive in the play on stage (laughs).

JM: What do you hope audience members will take away from the experience of seeing Diva Daughters?

KE: It’s not so much that I want them to take a specific thing away from the play. I’m hoping they will really be engaged and entertained while the play is on stage, but then afterwards, they will really want to talk about it. I hope the audience will really be motivated to discuss it. To be honest, in a lot of ways, my plays are like the appetizer and the main event is the discussion that happens afterwards.

JM: Can you tell us something about what you are focusing on currently in your writing?

KE: I’m actually working on a cycle of plays that explore relationships between Africans and Americans, African-Americans and also Anglo-Americans. There’s a theme of forgiveness that runs through all of these plays. So far, I’ve completed one and I’ve got two more in the works. In each of the plays, there is a situation in which there has been exploitation and abuse. The way that the situation is ultimately resolved is that somebody is called upon to forgive.

JM: That sounds so different from Diva Daughters. But, when do these plays take place?

KE: Well, this probably sounds abstract, but I can tell you two of the plays have something to do with South Africa. The one that is already completed actually takes place out of time. It takes place in Limbo. The setting in my play is a weigh-station for souls that are in-between lives. It’s based on actual historical characters who meet up. One of the characters is stuck in Limbo, because of her inability to forgive the past. Although she doesn’t see herself as stuck, she sees herself there as a matter of choice.

I’m also working on a companion piece to Diva Daughters about a group of four friends, former roommates, who met at an elite college and formed a very deep bond although they came from very different backgrounds. Now they’re all successful women, and their friendship is threatened when three of them discover that the fourth has a South African woman who is working for her and living at her home. They find out that she is cruelly exploiting this woman and it creates a crisis for their relationship.

JM: Where can we find more of your work?

KE: Diva Daughters is being published in an anthology by Northwestern University Press called Best Black Plays and it should be out within the year. Otherwise just Google me and see what comes up (laughs).

Photos from the play by Luke Walker