S1.E17 | Caleen Sinnette Jennings: Crafting Theatre of Empowerment and Transformation

S1. E17. "I wanted to write the roles that I wish somebody would write for me."

Thembi talks with Caleen Sinnette Jennings about her journey as an actor, director, playwright, educator, and arts leader, including her memories of being introduced to Shakespeare in an international school in Nigeria, her motivation for becoming a playwright, her creative process, and why she believes she is "an everlasting learner."

Caleen Sinnette Jennings has had seven plays published by Dramatic Publishing Company, and her play Classyass appears in 7 play anthologies.  She has been nominated for 5 Helen Hayes Awards and has won awards from The Actors’ Theatre of Louisville and the Kennedy Center.  Plays in her Queens Girl Trilogy have been produced nationally and her children’s play, Darius & Twig did a Kennedy Center national tour in 2017.  She is Professor of Theatre Emerita at American University where she taught theatre for 31 years. Jennings has been commissioned to write for The Kennedy Center, Arena Stage, Signature Theatre, Imagination Stage, Roundhouse Theatre, Everyman Theatre, and South Bend Civic Theatre. She has been a faculty member of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Teaching Shakespeare Institute since 1994, and she is Senior Consultant to the Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library. 

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KeyBARD is produced, written, and hosted by Thembi Duncan.
Theme music by Sycho Sid.

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Transcript

Thembi (00:00:11): Hello, hello, and welcome to KeyBARD. I am Thembi and I am so excited to have with me to today, Caleen Sinnette Jennings. She has had seven plays published by Dramatic Publishing Company and her play Classyass appears in seven play anthologies. She has been nominated for 5 Helen Hayes Awards and has won awards from the Actors' Theatre of Louisville and The Kennedy Center. Plays in her Queens Girl Trilogy have been produced nationally and her children's play, Darius and Twig, did a Kennedy Center national tour in 2017. She's Professor of Theatre Emerita at American University where she taught theatre for 31 years.

She's been commissioned to write for The Kennedy Center, Arena stage, Signature Theatre, Imagination Stage, Roundhouse Theatre, Everyman Theatre, and South Bend Civic Theatre. She has been a faculty member of the Folger Shakespeare Library's Teaching Shakespeare Institute since 1994, and she is Senior Consultant to the Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Welcome, Caleen Sinnette Jennings!

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:01:16): Thank you so much. Happy to be with you.

Thembi (00:01:18): Yay! Okay, let's jump in. So the first thing I want to ask you is, what are some of your first memories of experiencing the performing arts?

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:01:27): I would say my very first memory is fifth grade public school, Corona, Queens. June, we had a theater troupe come to our school. We never had those kinds of events, and so this was really special, and I can remember them doing fairy tales or something, but I was completely enthralled and I just wanted to do what the people on stage were doing.

Thembi (00:01:56): So that got you started. I read that you were introduced to Shakespeare as a child in an international school in Nigeria. Can you talk about that?

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:02:06): Sure. Well, my dad was a physician, my mom, a librarian. Both of them were very active in the Civil Rights Movement in New York. And in fact, my dad was in the Audubon Ballroom the day that Malcolm X was assassinated, and he said, "I'm done. I'm done with America." He had long held an interest in tropical medicine and in Nigeria, and we went in 1961 just to sort of get a taste. It was only for three months, but my dad got a fellowship and we went, and that was heavily on my dad's radar. And once Malcolm was assassinated, he says, "We're leaving." So in 1965, we packed up and we moved to Nigeria. I ended up going to an international school. The headmaster was British, but there were faculty members from all over the world, and students from all over the world. And because Nigeria was newly independent, I think Nigeria got its independence in 1960, and we arrived in '65, so it was still fairly fresh.

(00:03:12): And my Nigerian classmates had gone to schools run by the British, and so they had started Shakespeare in first grade, second grade. There was no sense of any intimidation or anything. They were very familiar with it. And as an American who had never read Shakespeare before, I arrive in 10th grade. And the thing that I tell people that I think is really important, is that the English teacher who was British himself, he expected us to understand it. So we did. There was never any, "Oh, this is Shakespeare and this is..." and we read it aloud. That's the other important thing. We read it aloud because it was written to be done aloud. So I learned to understand it. I learned to love the language, and I picked up from my Nigerian and British classmates and Middle Eastern classmates, a sort of love of Shakespeare and appreciation of Shakespeare, and the school did a Shakespeare play, did one play every year. So I was seeing it fairly regularly.

Thembi (00:04:19): That's so interesting to think about children being introduced to Shakespeare and being able to grasp it because they were expected to grasp it. And it seems like here in the United States, we're not expected to grasp it, and therefore many of us don't. It kind of lays out that case for whatever you expect of young people when they're learning, that's what they're going to own up to, right? That's what they're going to live up to.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:04:43):

Absolutely. And if you as an educator, sometimes it's even subconscious, but if you communicate any sort of fear or concern or anything like that, kids pick up on that in an instant. And the other thing is, we are such a visual society. We're not wordsmiths. We don't talk a lot. I call America a nation of mumblers. In fact, we're suspicious of people who use language and who talk and so forth. So getting students on their feet, reading it aloud is something that for me is really crucial and critical. And once I stood up, once I was able to play a character and say the words aloud, I was hooked.

Thembi (00:05:30): So you hold an undergraduate degree in Drama from Bennington College and an MFA in acting from NYU Tisch. You're a Professor of Theatre Emerita from American University, also an award-winning theatre practitioner and published playwright. So what put you in the center of this Venn diagram of theatre and academia? How did you end up in the center of that?

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:05:54): Well, gee, I wish I could say, oh, it was all planned. I knew exactly what I was doing, where I was going. When I graduated from Bennington in '72, my parents were still living in Africa. So when I came back to New York City, I was living with an aunt, and I had the naive assumption that, oh, I'm a New Yorker, so of course I'm going to get acting jobs in New York. Well, that was an interesting surprise. To figure out I was one of thousands of young Black actors looking for work as an actor. Also, this was during the time of Superfly and all of those kinds of Blaxploitation plays and movies, and also a time in the theatre when the plays that were popular were about a rural African-American experience. Things like Home, and plays that the NEC were doing didn't genuinely feature roles for middle class black girls like me. So it was kind of hard to find where I fit in. I was actually told by somebody who was auditioning me that I wasn't Black enough. I said...

Thembi (00:07:04): Oh, come on...

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:07:05): Hmm...That's interesting. I looked in the mirror and I was plenty Black, but, you know, hey...

Thembi (00:07:11): Right, right.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:07:12): So actually I started writing because I wanted to write the roles that I wanted to act in. I wanted to write the roles that I wished somebody would write for me. And I had never taken a playwriting class. And in my day coming through the theatre, you were either an actor, a playwright, or a director, and none of them, you didn't cross boundaries unless you were trained. And it was actually my husband, once I got married, when I graduated Tisch and I was married, my husband said, "Well, I don't understand why you don't write your own piece." I wrote poems and so forth, and I said, "Honey actors act, playwrights, write plays, directors direct." He said, "Yeah, but dancers choreograph, and musicians compose, so I don't understand." And it planted a seed. And the thing that the sort of tipping point for me was I went for an audition at the Public Theatre, which was my biggest audition that I had had to date, and it was a very badly written play with sort of a stereotypical Black role. And on top of it, they didn't cast me. That was the ultimate insult. But I said, I need to write a play that I would like to be in, and that's really what got me started. So I've been on a lifelong mission to tell actors and directors and designers, if you have a compulsion to tell a story, tell it. Tell it. Put it on paper.

Thembi (00:08:44): And you've published eight plays, so you know what you're talking about, but you've written more than 80. So what did you come to understand about playwriting between play number one and play number 80? You talked about how your husband planted that seed for you and you came to decide, You know what? I'm tired of auditioning for roles that don't reflect who I am and what I know about the Black experience in the United States or just in the world, right? So, okay, I'm going to start writing my own plays. So what did you learn over the course of writing so many plays?

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:09:15): I would change your question to "What am I still learning?"

Thembi (00:09:18): Oh, okay!

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:09:20): Okay. As I said to you, the inspiration for that first play was that bad audition, and it came at a time when I was completing up my grad degree and my wonderful Theatre History teacher offered us the option of writing a full research paper or writing something creative, and I asked her if I could write a play to fulfill my final assignment and God bless her, she said Yes. And she said, "Will you have enough time?" I said, "Sure!" Said by somebody who's never written a play before, but I wrote it. I had such fun writing it. It was semi-autobiographical. And then I had a chance to get together with some friends and have them read it out loud, and I was just amazed and I was hooked, and there were a series of wonderful opportunities that were presented to me. I got the job at American, and I was hired to teach playwriting, although I had never taken a course and I had never taught it before, so I had to get up to speed really fast.

(00:10:30): I happened to get into a wonderful workshop with the playwright Susan Zeder. She used a book that really changed my life called "Writing the Natural Way." You know what they say in education -- you stay two chapters ahead of your students. That's basically how I taught that first playwriting class, discovering as I was teaching. And through the years, another important person in my life has been Suzan-Lori Parks. I met her back in October of, ooh, wow, it might've been as early as '93. And we were having lunch, and she said to me, she had just won some important award. It wasn't yet the Pulitzer, but it was an important award. I was congratulating her. She said, "You know, I'm writing a play right now that just has me completely flummoxed. I don't know what I'm doing or where it's come from." And I said to her, "I'm kind of discouraged. I just got back a rejection letter from a competition that I sent in. I'm really discouraged." She said, "Caleen, the only thing that you control is how much you write. You don't control anything else. Who hires you, who commissions you, who produces you. So you need to let that all go and just write because you have to write." And I keep her picture up in my office to remind me of that. I also keep August Wilson's picture up in my office because he said, pencils are free, and they have erasers.

Thembi (00:12:06): There you go.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:12:07): So what's stopping you?

Thembi (00:12:08): Right...

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:12:08): So I just...I made up my...and the other influence. I read an article on Neil Simon and the author said that Simon wrote a play every year. And I said, you know what? I'm going to do that. It doesn't matter whether they're good or bad, I'm just going to produce. So I had a very, very productive time in my late thirties, early forties, writing as I was teaching full time and being a mom. But that taught me that nobody, you say, oh, I'm going to -- this summer, I'm going to write a play. No, you're not. There's never going to be a magical time where you'll set aside time to simply write a play. Life is going to continue to come at you fast. You're going to be writing in the little cracks of time. Just make that part of your method.

(00:12:59): So over the next years, I wrote when I could, so much so that when I finally, very late in my writing career, I got the opportunity to do a writer's retreat and went up to Connecticut. I had 15 days in this beautiful surrounding to do nothing but write. The first two days I was panicked. How do I spend my whole day writing? I'm so used to doing laundry and grading, so learning how to stay productive to write. When I felt compelled to tell a story, to always have my ears open for a story that'll come to you on the bus or I wrote...the play that got me to the Humana Festival was because I overheard a snatch of conversation with two colleagues in a hallway...to always say, I'm always listening. I'm always ready. I'm always in the process of storytelling. That's kind of how I've continued my journey because I taught so much and because I've done so many workshops, sort of my specialty has been how to get started, how to talk to those negative thoughts in your head, and how to overcome writer's block.

(00:14:25): And in 2020, I got a huge commission to write a play. The most money I'd ever been offered to write a play about a very famous character. And I panicked. I panicked. I said, so this is interesting. I have all these techniques and exercises that I've been teaching, but there's a whole psychological level to this that I haven't been paying attention to. So somebody asked me what I wrote, what I learned from writing this big play. I said, I learned to be humble about writer's block because I used to say, oh no, there's no such thing. Oh yeah, there is such a thing, and you need to acknowledge it and then figure out the best strategies for coping with it. So when I say I'm still learning, absolutely. I'm writing my first book to a musical. Oh my gosh. Talk about learning.

Thembi (00:15:19): Wow, that's awesome. I love that you're continuing, even though you have so much experience, you're not just resting on your laurels and doing the same thing over and over. You're still seeking new ways to excite your mind and try different projects. And that's really amazing. I love that.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:15:38): Well, part of my teaching career was the humility that I gained in terms of how much I learned from my students and how much I learned about acting and directing and playwriting by trying to teach it and by trying to make it accessible...

Thembi (00:15:57): Okay...

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:15:57): ...to different styles of learners and learners from different cultures. So I just sort of chuckle in terms of that phrase, laurels, because I really don't think about the laurels, or I don't...everybody I've known who've had serious laurels are always in process. Like Suzan-Lori Parks was telling me that afternoon at lunch, she says, "I don't know where this play has come from. It's sort of taken me over. I don't know where I'm going. It's sort of kicking my butt and..." That play ended up being Top Dog/Underdog.

Thembi (00:16:31): Oh my gosh. Wow.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:16:35): And the actors that I love and admire always talk about getting better, and always talk about what the next thing is to learn and the challenges that they're looking forward to. So I think we as artists and aspiring artists have the opportunity to approach life in a really invigorating way by saying, "I'm still incomplete and still learning."

Thembi (00:17:01): So that said, what themes and ideas tend to push their way to the front of your writing?

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:17:07): Oh, wow. Well, I'm interested in the fact that human beings still can't figure out how to get along. And whether that's on the marital level or the family level or the corporate level, in the classroom, in the church...I look at all these adorable YouTube videos of the duck being in love with the cat, and the donkey kissing the sheep, and I said, You know, we're supposed to be the smart species and we can't figure out how to make this happen. And of course, at the heart of that is conflict, which is at the heart of drama. So I kind of leave myself open to whatever I catch, but I know because I'm a Boomer and I grew up in the time of the Civil Rights Movement, racial harmony and disharmony is particularly interesting to me. Generational differences. The older I get, the more interesting generational differences become. But I would say those are the themes that drive me. 

And I would say my overall code is that if somebody is going to come to see my play, and pay for parking, and pay for a babysitter, and pay for dinner, I want to have that person leaving the theater feeling uplifted. If only uplifted to think hard about what I said. I'm not a Pollyanna. All my plays don't have happy endings. But if they can say, Wow, it stretched my head, it made me think about things. I can use this in my life, or I want to talk to somebody about this, that's my kind of code. It's easy to write a play that is depressing. It's far harder, I think, to write a play, particularly a play that deals with tough issues, but sends people off happy that they came to see it and happy that they had to wrestle with things.

Thembi (00:19:19): In 2001, you conducted this wonderful interview with the icon August Wilson, who you mentioned earlier. You said you had a picture of him in your wall. Of course, he shared tons of gems during that conversation. But I'm very curious over the time that's passed since that interview, are there any moments from that conversation that still stick with you?

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:19:41): Very much so. The first thing isn't literally in the interview, but we arrived at the venue...quite foolishly, I wore a very heavy dress, so I was sweating like crazy because, oh my God, August Wilson had been one of my idols forever. And here I am, live with him in the room, and we are live with a high school, with an audience of high school students. Plus we had call-in, people calling in. So I had a lot to sort of juggle, and we finally sit down and we get mic'd up, and August says to me, "I'm nervous." And I felt like saying, "Buddy, you think you're nervous?!"

Thembi (00:20:20): Right!

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:20:22): But I said to him, "You're nervous? What are you nervous...?" He said, "I know what I need to do." He took his mic off, he went out into the audience, and he shook hands with every single high school student. "Hi, I am August. What's your name? Glad you could be here." And when he sat down, he says, "Okay, now I feel better." And that was his whole thing. It's about people. It's about relationship. It's about communication. And it's about finding ways, particularly when the stakes are high, to break through whatever layers of time, status, class, race, whatever that is, to break through that so you can have a genuine communication. And he won the kids over immediately. Their questions were beautiful, and they just sort of fell in love with him. So that's the first thing I learned. The second thing was that quotation -- pencils are free, and they have erasers.

(00:21:21): He says, you don't have to go down to the store and ask for a bucket of words. You can just make them up in your head. The other is a very poignant story he told, which sort of links back to that discussion about laurels. Early in his career, he was getting a lot of sort of press and a lot of whispers of, oh, maybe Pulitzer Prize, maybe this prize, that prize. He got a letter from a little theatre group somewhere in the South, just saying how much they appreciated his work and how they wanted to give him an award. And he said, this was a little tiny sort of no-name theatre group in the South, and I had so much on my plate. I wrote them back very politely just saying, I'm sorry I can't visit, but I thank you so much. They sent the award.

(00:22:05): It was a little...you know, you could see it was a theatre that didn't have a lot of means, but they sent this award and August said, "I looked at it, I appreciated it. I put it in a drawer." And he said, "That year, I didn't win the Pulitzer. I didn't win this prize, that prize. I was struggling with a play." And he said, "At one point I said to myself, I opened that drawer and I took the award out. I said, now these people cared enough to write to me to pay for this award to send it to me, and I'm busy looking all around the award at something bigger coming without really appreciating what this means." He said, that was the only award he ever traveled with. That's the award he kept with him to remind him that it's not about anything else but the laurels and connecting with people on a deep level and being able to appreciate that.

Thembi (00:22:59): That's so powerful. I love that connection and that real experience with him who had, as you mentioned, experienced so much success but still understood the baseline, the foundation of the craft, and not to get so caught up in all of those big awards. Glad you learned that lesson.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:23:20): And he took great pleasure in being able to disappear. We were at a big Kennedy Center event honoring him, and people were milling and so forth. He was a good friend with my husband. So we were standing and talking to him. I was on my way to the restroom and I saw a colleague, I said, "Do you want to meet August Wilson?" She said, "Oh, he's not here." I said, "Yeah, he is." She says, "I've been looking for him. I haven't seen him." So I said, "No..." and brought her to him. So I said, "August, my friend had been looking all over and hadn't seen you." He said, "I love that." He says, "I'm able to make myself invisible almost anyplace." And he really valued that because all the hoopla and all that stuff -- he appreciated the effort, but that wasn't what he was about.

Thembi (00:24:07): So now I want to talk about a couple of your pieces. I want to sort of get into your work. One of your pieces is called Playing Juliet/Casting Othello. And this play calls for a multiracial cast, and explores many issues including race, class, and gender. And it's against the backdrop of a company producing Shakespeare. So why did you decide to write this play?

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:24:29): Wow. So these are two One Acts. The first act was inspired by a friend of mine who had written a play with a strong Black female protagonist. It was going to be directed by a very dear friend of hers who is a white male, and the white male director cast a woman in the lead role who was large and dark skin and a very powerful presence. And my playwright friend, who is a champion of women and a feminist in many ways, really objected to the casting choice and really objected, said, "No, she needs to be beautiful. She needs to be..." And I could see she was talking about what was beautiful in her eyes, and the director saw somebody who was beautiful in his eyes.

And so this idea of what is beauty and the play talks a lot about beauty. And so I said, I'd love to write about this casting dilemma that happens and what do you do with the language in Shakespeare that talks about light and dark and has negative things to say about blackness and so forth? So that was the first play. And then I said, well, now since I've created this multicultural theatre company, what might they do in the second act? And that particular year, I was teaching at the Teaching Shakespeare Institute at the Folger, and we were studying Othello. So I said, wouldn't it be interesting if this same theatre company decided to put on Othello? What kinds of issues of race and class and gender would they have to confront trying to put on Othello? So that's how those two plays came into being.

Thembi (00:26:12): Okay. So it was the two One Acts that you sort of followed on just exploring this world that you created and what happens in this situation? Have you thought of...have you considered, okay, what if they were casting something else? Have you considered maybe writing another One Act with the same group?

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:26:31): Thank you for putting that idea in my head. I wrote those plays in '96. Oh my gosh, things have changed so much in the theatre and in our societal conversations about race and gender. It would be really interesting to revisit that theatre company. Yeah...

Thembi (00:26:54): Mmm hmm...I think so...

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:26:54): Thank you.

Thembi (00:26:55): Yeah, you're welcome. I'm here to help. I'm here to support. So I've read that you said in the past, I will never refer to myself as a Shakespeare scholar. I'm a Shakespeare student. Do you still feel that way today?

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:27:12): More with each passing day. I have been so lucky to interact with and get to know people whose scholarship I admire so profoundly. And the thing that I admire so much about them is they're always ready to say, gee, I don't know, or, I never thought of that. Or Isn't that a wonderful thought? I'm borrowing that...you know, the scholars who I know who are worth their salt are everlasting learners. And Shakespeare is so thick and rich, and I don't know anyone who has ever said, I know Shakespeare. I know all there is to know about Shakespeare. And--I take it back. I've heard people say that, and I'm instantly suspicious because the cool thing about teaching, I teach a Shakespeare play, and my students would have all these new insights, and there's so much there that you have to consider yourself a student.

Thembi (00:28:21): I wonder, I mean, you talk about teaching your students Shakespeare and what you get back from them. I would assume that with each passing year, whatever the students are focused on, or whatever's happening in society, whatever's happening with them is going to continue to impact that conversation. So I certainly can understand how you know certain things about Shakespeare, you keep feeding things back into your teaching practice, but then also they're bringing new ideas each time. So it seems like a really rich exchange.

Now, the Queens Girl Trilogy. I want to move on to Queens Girl in the World, Queens Girl in Africa, and Queens Girl: Black in the Green Mountains. Who is the Queens Girl, and what led you to create this beautiful, beautiful trilogy?

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:29:05): So in 2005, I met a gentleman who wrote a book called, "You Can't Do That on Broadway." His name is Philip Rose. And he produced A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway. And he came to DC to give a series of lectures, and we ended up serving on a panel at Arena Stage. I think the panel was called The Black Family on stage or something. And when you say Broadway producer, I think of a big barrel-chested guy with suspenders and a cigar and so forth. We're standing in the lobby. He's this little tiny man with wire rim glasses, very, very humble. We begin to chat and he says, "Will you sit next to me on stage because I'm scared." And I said, "Phil, if it weren't for you, and if it weren't for A Raisin in the Sun, we wouldn't be having this discussion." He says, "But in case you haven't noticed, I'm not a Black woman."

(00:30:02): And it was true. The rest of the panel was Black women, and he was the one male. So we struck up a friendship, and he was a wonderful supporter of my work, and he wanted to do a second book following up this story of how he brought A Raisin in the Sun to Broadway. And in the course of our working together and him finding out more about me, he said, "You know, you really need to write your autobiography." I said, "Phil, nobody cares, seriously...and I don't write narratives, so why would I do that?" But Phil was like a dog with a bone. That's how he brought A Raisin in the Sun to Broadway, because all the odds were against him. He had never directed anything, much less produced anything. So when he had an idea, I mean, he nagged and nagged. And when I got the retreat that I just told you about, the first time I'd ever been invited to a writer's retreat, I got there the first two days. I panicked not knowing what I wanted to write. And then I said, I should show Phil that I can't do this. I just need to give it a shot. Let him see how awful it is. And so I started out writing Queens Girl to show him that I couldn't do it.

Thembi (00:31:15): That's an interesting way to show somebody that you can't do something.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:31:18): Started out writing my autobiography and what I say to students, the first thing that came to me was an image of me sitting on my stoop. So I tell people who are writing and people who are writing their memoirs, what's your earliest memory? Just start there. You don't have to start in the beginning. You don't have to start anywhere. There are no rules here. Just start writing. And that's what I did. And I discovered the more I wrote, the more dialogue was in it, 'cause I think in terms of dialogue. And I said, Hey, you know, somebody could do this on stage. So during the next 10 years from 2005 to 2015, it was in various stages. I would perform parts of it, I directed other people in parts of it...Did you and I collaborate on staging a part of it?

Thembi (00:32:11): I think we did...

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:32:13): Was it you playing Jaqueline?

Thembi (00:32:15): I was trying to think, because when I was thinking of all the women who had touched it, and I was like, I don't feel like I was in the fully produced part, but I feel like I read for, I played her in early iterations at the reading level. That's what I feel like...

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:32:33): It was for "Fresh Flavas"...

Thembi (00:32:35): Yes! Yes...

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:32:36): And Liliena Blain-Cruz directed you.

Thembi (00:32:40): Oh my gosh, yes. Thank you for closing that loop for me because I was like, I know that I had touched that piece. I know that that piece has touched me, but I knew I wasn't in the full productions and so many of us, just to say so many of my colleagues, Black actresses who got to touch this role as well. I'm just so grateful that you created this beautiful character for us coming from telling your own story.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:33:11): Well, a series of happy accidents. I have been so blessed to have actors like you, and Dawn Ursula, and Erika Rose, and Aakhu, and all these beautiful Black women, highly skilled and talented Black women, help me develop this character over time. It got staged again by accident. I was invited to do a workshop...AU partners with the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, generally older people who come and take a course, and so forth. And I was invited to give a talk on playwriting, and about the work that I was doing. The afternoon was so hot, and I said, oh, God, do I have to do this? But I had said I would. So I did. In the audience was a woman on the board at Theatre J, who then went to the artistic director and said, we have to do this play.

Thembi (00:34:13): Wow. And that's how that happened.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:34:15): That's how that happened. And it just so happened that year was the Women's Voices Festival.

Thembi (00:34:20): Yes!

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:34:22): So Queens Girl became part of that again--and again, you know, opening night, I'm sitting there, and I've always -- when you write autobiography, there's a risk number one, of, because you are the protagonist of your own story, there's the risk of making you sound way more important than you are. There's a risk of spending time on stuff that people really don't give a darn about, and nor should they. So I was really very, very nervous, and I did not know how the audience was going to respond. And I especially didn't know how young people were going to respond because it starts in the 60's. And when I got such a wonderful response, I was overwhelmed. I was so emotional. And in the talkbacks, people would say it was meaningful and so forth. It was such a gift to me. And people kept saying, "So what happens next?" And I said, "Well, you're very kind, but no." And then I got offered money to write...I said, Ooh, well that could convince me..."

Thembi (00:35:25): That's different.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:35:26): So I wrote part Two again with the same worries and even more worries because the first one had been successful. So now I'm saying, oh God, people are going to compare them and blah, blah, blah. All that negative stuff that goes on in your head and so forth. Wrote that one, and people are saying, "So what happens next?" So that's how I ended up with the trilogy. And the last line of the final play is "Tell your story. Someone is waiting to hear you." Because that's what I learned, and that's what I want the audience to go away with. So since that time, I've taught a lot of classes on memoir, and I love teaching playwriting and finding people discover that they can tell their stories.

Thembi (00:36:12): That's so beautiful. And I know for Black in the Green Mountains, that was about your time at Bennington, right? I think that's the one that Felicia Curry was...

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:36:20): Yes.

Thembi (00:36:21): Okay. I hadn't read or seen that one, but I just love...I feel the same way. I'm like, okay, well, what happens after that? Got to go to Tisch. You got to, you know what I mean? You got to go to AU, or do you imagine, let's just say you were to continue this. I'm not saying that you are, but what if you were, do you think that you would start to, would you stick with memoir or do you think you would start to go off into other branches that may not necessarily have been your experience, but can continue the story on and on and on?

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:36:56): Thembi Duncan, I'm scared of you, 'cause you got magical powers. I've been thinking about this. Absolutely. I put my foot down firmly because Vinny at Everyman asked me, he said, "Could I induce you to..." I said, "No, no, no. This story is told and done." But what struck me-- recently, my 99-year-old aunt passed away, and it was up to me to clean out her closets and to pack up her apartment and so forth. And she led such an incredible life. I said, oh, Queens Girl, Norma's Turn. So this is going to be Norma's story because she grew up in Queens. She was a huge influence in my life. This is a woman who in 1952, I was two years old, she was a single Black woman raised by a very traditional Trinidadian household, and she and her girlfriends went off to Europe.

Thembi (00:37:52): Wow.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:37:53): My grandmother almost died. My grandmother being very dramatic herself, you know, "You can't, you're a single woman..." My aunt had more fabulous adventures. She also, in her later years, taught for three years in Kenya, lived by herself. She made her way in the world in a way that a sort of protected Trinidadian Catholic school girl didn't do back in those days. And I realized how much between she and my mom, how much I grew up with these role models of Just do it. If you have an idea, do it. What's to stop you? So I want to tell her story. And that has come to fairly recently. So it's interesting that you're...

Thembi (00:38:40): You were sending out those waves. I just was repeating what came to me from you. I love that. I mean, it's so, so important for us to have these stories that center Black women, Black girls, and -- these different unique experiences. And I think back to when you talked about going into an audition and not feeling seen and feeling like, you know, okay, I'm going to audition for this because it's a Black woman, but it's not really, you know what I mean? I'm just doing it because it's what's available. As opposed to now having these other roles that you've created. Now, Black women, Black girls, can see themselves in these different stories that are so much more expansive and not so limiting and suppressive. And I'm just grateful for you and for your decision to do that. So thank you.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:39:28): Well, thank you. It means so much to me. And I recently had a former student who is now a teacher, send me a note that she sent one of her students off to the library to get a book and find a monologue for herself, and her student came back with my collection of plays. That's what means the world to me. As you just said, we as Black women of all ages need to be able to go places and see ourselves reflected and know that we are part of the world's story.

Thembi (00:40:00): Yes, yes, absolutely. Not being on the periphery, but being in the center. And you write so beautifully with us in the center. So speaking of, Wanda's Way is a one-woman play that centers a Black female police officer. I read that this play was born inside of a conversation that you had with a wonderful DMV-based actor named Jefferson, who served as a police officer earlier in his career before he became an actor. Is that true? And can you talk about that conversation and how that play came to be?

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:40:34): It's absolutely true, as you do, I love Jefferson. He's a wonderful actor, and it's hard for me to imagine him as a police officer because I realized I had some stereotypes about police officers. Jefferson is incredibly gentle, incredibly communicatively savvy, incredibly able to see the big picture, all the qualities and skills that we want all of our police officers to have, but sometimes the system mitigates against it. So when he told me he was a police officer, and in Baltimore, which is not an easy city to govern, I wanted to know his journey, and I wanted to see if there were overlaps between the tasks and roles and mindset of a policeman and an actor. So I did six hours worth of interviews with Jefferson, didn't know exactly how I was going to craft it and frame it. And again, an image appeared to me of the January 6th and of a Black woman police officer with her locks in a bun at the back of her neck with her hat pulled down looking like she was taking care of serious business.

(00:41:58): And I said, Oh my God, to walk into that danger as a Black woman, she's probably a mother, she's a daughter. She's a...so what must that experience be like? So I did interviews again with several Black women, police officers, with a Black man who had been in the FBI, trying to find out where Black, how does it mean to be Black in those white systems? And then specifically, what does it mean to be a Black woman and have a family, and be in that system? So I wrote this one-woman play where again, why one-person plays? Because I am still fascinated by the fact, and I think audiences are fascinated by the fact that they can watch someone transform into someone else in front of their eyes. You don't get that in film. You don't get that in a museum. You don't get that anywhere else but theater.

(00:42:56): And I've seen what happens to kids go...you know, when they suddenly see a different person. How is that possible? So I want it to show off what we as Black woman actors can do, and I wanted to use that almost primal experience of watching transformation happen. And the wonderful thing that happened, we did it at a 1st Stage, and I was able to reach out to a Black police woman's organization, and some of the officers came, and they said that they felt seen, and that I was telling their story. And it was, oh boy, that's the kind of stuff a playwright lives for. But there's also the irony of particularly growing up as a Boomer and what we thought about as in terms of "pigs," and here I am able now to look at it from a whole different point of view. The theme that came through in all of the interviews that I did with law enforcement officers is that they got into it because they wanted to help. That was the number one word that kept coming back, coming. I wanted to help. I wanted to help. I wanted to help.

Thembi (00:44:12): And the actor who played the role was Deidre Lawan Starnes, right? And so you have a longstanding relationship with her. And I wonder, in creating this work, with her embodying this character that you wrote, did that impact in any way your views towards officers? Did her presence in that role play into your evolving view of police officers?

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:44:40): Usually, if I have an actor in mind and I'm writing a piece, it helps tremendously and it shapes my writing tremendously. I did not have her in mind. I actually had someone else in mind. But what was very cool is I had a wonderful director who was able to shape the piece on Deidre seamlessly. And of course, Deidre's a wonderful actress, so she was able to...ideally any good Black actor should be able to play that role. But in part, your question is, do I imagine the person that I'm writing it for? And frequently I do.

Thembi (00:45:20): Okay. And so now I want to ask you about a more, well, I kind of want to ask you about another play, but I'm going to save that. Okay. So The Welders is a DC-based rotating playwrights collective of which you are a founding member. And I would love to know how you feel about the value of playwrights collectives in our theatre ecosystem. I guess we could say regional theatre because that's where that's based, and why you decided to participate in a collective such as this.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:45:49): Again, another accident. Again, another thing that I almost resisted, and I say this so that your listeners will know that one of the things I like to share with people is beware of what you resist and why. And sometimes it's good to take the risk anyway and to examine why there are things that are frightening to you that you don't want to do, and maybe that's exactly what you need to do. When I was approached by this group of playwrights, and we had our first meeting, I had never self-produced, and the idea of it just terrified me. I had a full-time teaching job, which was keeping me really busy, and I was the only Black person in the group. And I said...and I was the oldest...do I want to get involved with this? Do I have the time? Will these people understand who I am and what I want to do?

(00:46:48): All the questions came up and something told me. And here again, I tell folks, listen to your intuition sometimes. Something said, Caleen, I don't think this opportunity is going to come around again. It's something else you can learn. This seems to be where the field is going, that you're going to have to have the chops to get your own work done. And one of the images that was used in our early discussion is, do you want to be a playwright with your tin cup going around, "Please produce me." Or do you want to be able to say, "I'm going to find a way to do this myself." So I told them that I would join on a couple of conditions. One was that we bend over backwards not to present ourselves as a clique and as some exclusive club. I want people to feel that we are part of this community, that we are learners, that we we're not about showing off or setting ourselves up for some kind of...the other thing that we agreed to as a group, which was awesome and really helpful, is that we would do this for three years and then turn the organization over to the next round of people.

(00:48:06): In researching playwrights collectives, we had found that a lot of them implode over time or are torn apart by artistic and personal tensions. And we said, why not create a collective that has a specific goal? And when that goal is done, we hand it over. So our motto became Three Years, Five Plays, Pass it On. And we put up our five brand new plays, and we passed on to the next. We passed on our bank account, we passed on our website, we passed on everything that we had learned to the next round of playwrights. I think we're in welder's Version 4 coming up. But it felt like a contribution to the community. It felt so good to do that. And the other thing that the six of us came up with is that we were going to put up a problem play. Instead of taking a play that we felt good about or whatever, let's take this opportunity to put up as our one new play a problem play, and bring all the members of the team together to help the playwright make it better.

(00:49:20): So I had this play that had been in a gazillion workshops and so forth, and I was wrestling with this thing, I just couldn't see...So the first thing we did was we had a reading with my fellow Welders. And to be in a room of people who want only the best for you, who want you to have your individual voice, who want and expect your play to bring honor to them as well, it was incredible. And that was our culture. Those were our core values. So each time it was somebody's chance to go up and produce, we all did a read-through. We all worked on building the sets. Girl, I was so sore by the time I finished welding, because I was--

Thembi (00:50:06): You were doing everything!

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:50:07): Hauling flats, and one of my real aha moments putting up my play, which was the second play to go up, and the tech director had been a former student. So he's teaching me how to build flats, and I'm saying, Oh my God, I taught him freshman year. But that's what felt great, this sense of community, this sense of everybody seeing how the playwright doesn't just sit in an ivory tower. The playwright is connected to community, the playwright is connected to the whole cast and crew. It's a big commitment. And I worked my tail off. All of us did. We still meet, we still email. We're still very close. I'd walk into hell for each of those people because we put our money where our mouth was in terms of, we were all in for everybody's work. And Ally said it best. In that first meeting, she said, "You know, if we do this right, I'm only going to spend one fifth of the time on my work."

Thembi (00:51:12): Exactly...

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:51:13): Yeah.

Thembi: (00:51:14): As an audience member, I tried to make sure that I came to as many, if not all of that first season. And I remember the, I don't know whose was first, but I know I was at the first one, and I remember seeing you were moving really fast through the lobby doing something, and I was just looking like Caleen is like, what is she...? It just was so odd for me to see you working the front of house and then handling things. And I was just seeing all these playwrights in these different roles front of house, and then knowing what the model was and coming to understand this. And I was so intrigued by the idea, because you say this now, and I feel like people hearing this now may feel like, oh, okay, wow, that makes sense. But when you all did it, it was revolutionary because like you said, a lot of people wanted to stick with their roles, even though there were certainly people who wrote, and acted, and directed.

(00:52:08): But for the most part, people were known as X. I'm known as an actor, I'm known as a director. And people were not necessarily going to just jump into the support of another person's piece, but you all demonstrated a level of community and collaboration to the DC theatre community. That I think was, it did achieve, in my opinion, what you talked about in terms of not putting yourself out there as a clique, but as an example of what's possible. And I would venture to say that a lot of the multi-level or sort of multi-person leadership teams that you're seeing in theatre now have studied your model. They have to have,

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:52:50): Wow...

Thembi: (00:52:50): I just feel like that, because it comes from that ethos of, why are we making things harder for ourselves when we can collaborate and make things easier? And then at the same time, we're all contributing in these different ways that are enlightening and enriching us. So again, thanking you for that as well. Just all of these things. I love how you talk about things that you're initially resistant to that you don't allow the resistance to block that opportunity for you. You go in knowing you're resistant and you're like, okay, these are the conditions. So I think that's important too, that people understand if your resistance is something, you set boundaries and you can say, I will do this under these conditions because this is how I can bring my best self to the role.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:53:33): Yes.

Thembi (00:53:34): So yeah, just very powerful lessons.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:53:37): Well, you also raised an important point about setting boundaries, because I also said sort of as a condition of my joining, I drew up a contract because I said I'm at a place in terms of my age and in terms of my career, that there are certain kinds of plays that I find to be embarrassing and provoking for no reason, gratuitous violence, gratuitous sexuality, and so forth. And while I would never want to censor my fellow Welders, I have feelings about what is put forward under the Welder name. So we set up a system whereby we could talk about things and ask things to avoid censorship, but yet also to be aware of the fact that we all have a stake in how we're being represented. And that contract talking about, well, so what if one of us gets a huge commission in LA for a film and has to peel off?

(00:54:36): So we set guidelines, says, this is what you have to do, this is what you have to...so we went into this feeling really solid in terms of what we had agreed to. And then one of the most important discussions we had, and it was right after signing that contract and the contract was a little sort of left-brained and made you think, oh wow, we talked about money. We talked about a whole that hard stuff. And then the person facilitating said, I want us to go around the room and talk about the playwright who has made the most difference in our lives and who we cherish. And once again, that brought us again into an artistic understanding of where we...and hearing my fellow playwrights talk about who they read and who moved them, and what they were trying to do, and everything, once again, brought us back to an artistic discussion that was like the glue that held us together.

(00:55:27): So I actually wrote a little handout that I give to workshop participants when I do workshops about things to look for if you're forming a collective. I think they're very important. It's so much easier to, there is the lone wolf model of playwriting. It's hard. It's hard. And having a group of people that you can bounce ideas off of who have your best interests at heart, who you can learn from and grow with, who will hold your feet to the fire, all that kind of stuff is so important. So I have some suggested things in terms of if you're thinking about forming these kinds of groups, groups are always better.

Thembi (00:56:10): Farther together. What is that? It's like farther faster together. So speaking of your workshops and teaching and things like that, you've taught many, many courses. You've taught acting, playwriting, voice and speech, of course you've taught Shakespeare. What are some of the things that you've learned from your students over the years? And you talked a little bit about this earlier in the conversation, but I'm curious if there are things that stick out for you that you've discovered from your students?

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:56:37): Wow, so much. I'm trying to think of individual...Okay, so here's a good example. One that blew my mind. I retired in 2020 after 31 years, and my last semester was the first semester I'd ever taught online because the university lockdown for Covid. So here I -- I told people, I came in in 1989, thinking I knew nothing about teaching, and I'm leaving in 2020, thinking I know nothing about teaching! So one of the courses I was required to teach my last semester was Acting Shakespeare -- online. I said, how the hell am I going to do this? Not only did I do it, my students' final exam was one of the finest final Shakespeare exams I've ever seen. And I said to them, what enabled you to provide this caliber of work for your final? And they said, almost to a person, the fact that I was in my own house. I was in my own room, and there was nobody looking at me. And I said, My God, these are theatre majors who are most comfortable when there's nobody looking at them. What am I doing?

Thembi (00:57:52): Wow...

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:57:53): What am I doing here? And I realized then, very starkly. Now I had realized this sort of along the way, but this was the starkest realization I had about how this generation is different, and the kinds of things that this generation struggles with, and the terrible price we pay for social media. This idea of the gaze, who is looking at me, who is judging me, and worse, who is going to make public the worst things about me? Actors always have that. Who's looking at me? Who's judging me? But what we have now is within the blink of an eye, hundreds and thousands of people can see you and know you at your worst. Can come to know who you are based on a lie. Can have your image and your words distorted in such a public, hurtful way. So I've had to rethink how I approach teaching performance and how I approach the fact--I've always told every student--class I've ever had, I've always said, "I cherish the shy people." People think that actors are so extroverted--I said, the best actors I know are shy. I said, "How often do you see Meryl Streep do an interview on late night?"

Thembi (00:59:18): That's true.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (00:59:19): There are actors who still throw up every night before they go on stage. It is tremendously high-stakes. It's tremendously soul-bearing and makes you vulnerable. So how do we acknowledge those things? How do we develop coping strategies? How do we respect those things and how can we use those things to actually make us better performers? It's like my playwriting. Students say, Oh my God, I can't reveal that. That's so personal. Or if I write how my family really is, people will think it's dysfunctional. And I tell 'em, "Look, if your family isn't dysfunctional, then you have to worry."

Thembi (00:59:57): Right? That's not realistic.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (01:00:01): I said, we wouldn't have had any of the Greek playwrights at all.

Thembi (01:00:05): How about that?

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (01:00:06): And what I appreciate about what the younger generation has taught me and what my students have taught me are things like before you launch into rehearsal or a warmup, do a check-in. How is everybody feeling tonight? Is there anybody who has an injury or a place on their body they don't want to be touched? Is there anybody who would rather not hang out in the hallway and --getting the personal stuff out and shared before the work stuff begins. That I've learned from my students. How much it means to them to have people say positive things about them. In my last two years of Acting, I started a practice in my Acting class. I don't like people to applaud for scenes. I say, "I want you to think of this as a laboratory. And if we walked over to the chemistry building, there's nobody pouring stuff in beakers and having people behind them. This is an experiment and I don't want to conflate it with performance, so I don't have the class applaud." But what I started doing is having written feedback for each scene. But instead, I'm the only one who says, "Here's what works, and here's what you need to consider." The rest of the class writes, I really appreciated X, and that's all they say. Something that they appreciated. It changed the whole tenor of the classroom because they knew their classmates were looking for something to appreciate as opposed to looking for something to criticize.

Thembi (01:01:48): That's powerful. And putting them into the practice of doing so in general. I wonder, I can only imagine that they would go out into the world hopefully looking for things to appreciate and thinking about what they learned about that. Like, oh, I can look for things to appreciate, and getting away from the looking for something to criticize, and knowing, Don't worry, if you have criticism, it'll be covered. Don't worry about that.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (01:02:10): Well, my playwrights, I told them in your first draft, circle the things that you are curious about, that surprised you, that worked. So when you see red circles, it's not "Bad playwright." It's "Ooh, this is exciting." And you have a page full of red circles that's good news, rather than bad news.

Thembi (01:02:30): I love the adjustments you made to what you learned about your students and how they're able to be successful. Such a sign of an excellent educator, of course.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (01:02:42): Still learning. I have to say, I'm talking to an excellent educator. I've also seen you in teaching and leadership positions where you did so splendidly. So another reason why it's an honor to be with you.

Thembi (01:02:57): I'm grateful for you, beyond grateful. And so I want to know, I contemplated asking you, what are you doing next because you retired. And I was like, I don't want to be like, well, what else are you doing? That thing that we do? Right? What projects are you working on? And so I wanted to ask you what you were reading or writing, or what's holding your interest, but you are working on projects, so I'm just going to leave it out there. What's occupying your creative energy right now?

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (01:03:26): Well, I'll share this. This is tremendously valuable. The wonderful playwright Susan Zeder, who introduced me way back in the day to Writing the Natural Way. When I told her I was retiring, she says, "Oh, no, no, no. That's not the word you use. What you're doing is you're graduating." And that was a wonderful way to think of my leaving AU, is that I was graduating, and a whole new life now was coming, post-graduation. So, first thing I did the summer I retired was panic and say, Oh my God, I'm not going to have enough to do. I'm going to go crazy. Within a year, I had taught five courses online, and I was...

Thembi (01:04:08): Oh wow.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (01:04:09): I was fried because I was so scared that I wasn't going to have enough to do I over-committed.

Thembi (01:04:16): And you taught through a variety of platforms.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (01:04:20): Yes, Dramatists' Guild invited me to teach a course and I had participants from Costa Rica, from Texas, from all...so that was really exciting. And it was a very traditional sort of playwriting class, like how do we construct family in a play? Then Theatre J asked me to teach Memoir. I had never taught memoir per se, but because I had written the Queens Girl plays, I taught that. And then I taught, what else did I teach? And of course I was fried, 'cause I was also learning the technology as I was...

Thembi (01:04:57): And I was going to say, it's different. It's not the same. So you had to learn all that and whatever...I'm guessing everybody didn't use the same technology. Everybody didn't use the same platform, so you had to learn each way and then however people connected, you had to navigate that. So that's a lot.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (01:05:13): And what was most important to me was how do I a community on these screens, how do I create a culture where--cameras on, and if cameras have to be off, there are certain exceptions to the rule that have to happen. How do we take that? How do we think about that? How do we give positive feedback? How do we keep from interrupting one another? All of those things that I would do in a live classroom, how do we make that work in screens? How do I give feedback? What was great is I didn't have to grade, but I wanted to make sure that I gave the people who were creating stuff, I gave them my feedback, and how do I enable other members of the class who maybe have never ever given feedback before? How do I help them structure it in a way that's positive?

(01:06:15): So I'm aware of all of those communication dynamics in addition to how do I make the subject matter available to people on screens? I sort of have a rule when I teach playwriting, everybody writes and everybody acts. So people will send their scenes to me. I'll cast them among the class members and send out the scripts. So you get an experience of what it's like to be an actor of somebody else's words. And I think that makes you a better person who puts words on the page for actors. But I had to sort of figure out all of those systems. And so I learned after that year when I was fried crispy, I said, you know what? Do a workshop here or there or do whatever, but you can't teach that much online. I also unexpectedly got commissions, which was really wonderful and nice. I had to turn down so many projects when I was teaching full time that it was nice to know people hadn't forgotten me, and I got some really cool projects.

(01:07:21): And this Marian Anderson project...So here's another example of not resisting and taking a risk. I got a call from a former student of mine who I hadn't been in touch with since 1995. It wasn't a call, it was an email saying, Hey, I'm working at City College in their events venue, and my colleague is tied up with a group of women who are forming a theatre company and they're looking for an African-American female playwright. And I told them about you, would you be interested? He gave me the stuff. And so I contacted them and they said, we've gotten permission from the Marian Anderson estate to write a musical on her life, and we're looking for a book writer.

Thembi (01:08:04): Oh my gosh...

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (01:08:05): I have never written a book to a musical, okay? My last three plays are one- woman straight plays, right? So at first I was going to say No, well, I don't do that. But I thought, you know, what can it hurt? And they have my resume. I'd been really upfront. I said I would be learning. In fact, the two producers had never produced before, because...we were all coming to this new. So they sent me a song which was absolutely gorgeous. They said, I want you to write the scene coming into this song and the scene that comes out of this song. So I did that. I sent it in. They loved me, I loved them. It began at what's now a five-year relationship. During Covid, we would literally do 15-hour Zooms, taking breaks, but doing 15 to 12-hour Zooms to create this. We've been through various stages of readings and public performances, and we're now on our 20th version of the script. So I've learned patience. I've learned how to write collaboratively with musicians and producers, and again, I'm struggling with the story of a woman who was fiercely private, wrote her autobiography, mostly in third person, and who never talked about how she felt even when she was being hounded through the press.

(01:09:34): She'd have a smile. "No comment." You can pull up a clip of her. She was on, do you remember that show "What's my Line?" The old quiz show? If you pull up Marian Anderson on "What's My Line," she appears on the show as the celebrity. All she says is her name. She says not one word. She was desperately shy and didn't believe in...and that was sort of the era also where you didn't share your feelings or talk about your private life and so forth. So how do you create a protagonist that grabs the audience's feelings? How much permission do you give yourself to imagine what she was thinking and feeling versus what the historical record says? So again, another enormous challenge that I hadn't anticipated, but I'm so glad that I did, and other things that have rolled along that, wow, I'm very grateful.

Thembi (01:10:32): That's so incredible. Your story makes me think about...there's a portrait of her, I know you know this, in the Smithsonian, the Portrait Gallery, a really beautiful portrait. I do not remember who the artist is, but I've looked at that portrait so many times and been just so moved by what you're describing of her. There's this quiet dignity about her and this sort of gentle sense of knowing. But yeah, she's really very reserved and it was always fascinating to me how a piece of visual art could express that. And I wonder, in the process specifically of writing about her and trying to uncover things about this very elusive person, did you find yourself looking at other sources of inspiration such as a portrait, such as some other art form that maybe could unlock things for her?

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (01:11:25): Great question. Yes. I know that portrait, we had the great pleasure of interviewing her nephew's wife, who is the executor of her estate, which started out to be a two hour interview, ended up being a six hour interview, and she talked about her aunt Marian, who used to come to her house and put on a mumu and eat hot dogs. And so we were lucky to have that side. Also, we also knew that the night before the Lincoln Memorial concert, she told her -- Sol Hurok, her manager, she said, "I'm not going to do it." She had a mini-breakdown. She was terrified. Terrified. So again, humbling to understand that what we do is really hard and requires such a great risk, requires humility, requires ridiculous confidence.

(01:12:27): She was severely criticized as not being political enough, yet she defied the Nazi. She sang in Austria and created quite a stir in Nazi Germany. So yes, you're right. She had this quiet strength and dignity. She also had a profound fear and vulnerability. She also got away with a lot of murder. She toured the South as a single Black woman with her partner. They were not married. And this is in the thirties. Yeah, so very complex, very sophisticated, tough and vulnerable woman. And there's not a day that I wake up and don't say, Ooh, am I the right one to tell this story? Am I doing her justice? Will it be...? But that's what we live with as artists. And I think when you're not asking yourself those questions and dealing with self-doubt, that's when you gotta worry.

Thembi (01:13:44): Wow. I wish that this conversation could be six or 12 hours long because I have six or 12 other questions to ask, but I'll be respectful of your time. And I'm so grateful that you took this time to talk with me today. I'm just so honored to be speaking with you. I admire you so much as you know, I've told you many times and I've sought out your advisement in so many ways over the years, but got to give you your flowers yet again. You're so amazing, and I'm grateful.

Caleen Sinnette Jennings (01:14:17): Thembi thank you so very, very much, because we've known each other for such a long time and in so many different roles, and I'm not aware that you aware that when we knew each other at AU, I was doing a job...I was Chair of the department, and I was doing a job that absolutely terrified me, and I spent more time crying that year than I ever have in my whole life. I did not want to be Chair. I did not like being Chair. I did not like having to make the rules, and fire people, and chastise people, and manage a budget, and all that stuff. And it was my mom who said to me, "Put on your big girl pants, stop crying...Yes, you're a person who likes to be liked, but there're going to be people who don't like you, so get over it," and doing those things that are hard for us to do. And you've always been a person who has brought integrity to whatever role you are doing, who did incredible leadership positions in places and times where you didn't have to, you stepped forward and did it. So all hail to and power to the leaders, and I consider you an exceptional leader. So it's a pleasure to be here with you.

Thembi (01:15:40): Thank you. I'm honored. All right. Well, we're going to have to check back in. I'm definitely going to be following up on that Marian Anderson project. Until next time!