A retooled “Birdie” flies home to the Rep
The last time Seattle-based writer Cheryl L. West had one of her plays done at Seattle Repertory Theatre was in 1998, when her Broadway musical “Play On!” ran there.
Now she’s back at the Rep, which is about to open a newish piece of hers, “Birdie Blue.”
The single-act play chronicles a lengthy marriage in the African-American community. It debuted Off Broadway in 2005 with S. Epatha Merkerson (a star on TV’s “Law and Order”) in the lead.
Due to her TV shooting schedule, Merkerson was not available to play Birdie in Seattle. But West says she’s very satisfied with the three-member cast here under Chuck Smith’s direction. It includes Chicago actors Velma Austin and Sean Blake, and Seattle’s own William Hall Jr.
West was also happy for the chance to revise this impressionistic script about a middle-age woman who recalls her life as a transplanted Southerner in Chicago, while she bakes her son a birthday cake and tends to her ill husband.
“We didn’t have the best production in New York,” admits West. “I wanted to streamline the play, have a concept in the staging and do some refining in one particular area of the script. I’m very pleased I could do that.”
West describes “Birdie Blue” as “a love story. It’s definitely about the choices we make that have to do with love, and longevity. And the hard choices that come up in a marriage, when you’re making a journey together with someone.”
Birdie’s saga runs from the 1940s to today, and touches on such historical events as the rise of the civil-rights movement and the assassination of rights crusader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
But West did not want to write a didactic history lesson. “I’m telling one intimate story. But there’s a certain illumination of history because of how much it affected the conditions of people’s lives.”
Another such event that intrigued West was the mass black migration from the Deep South to the Midwest - particularly Chicago, where she grew up.
“I knew from experiences in my own family that coming up from Mississippi, how difficult it was if you had few resources and were not very literate. I wanted to show the struggle of being in a small, cramped spot, of trying to make your way and take care of your child while keeping a sense of dignity.”
So is Birdie a hero? “She’s both a heroine and an average person. Anyone who survives through tumultuous periods of history, who learned from them and grew from them, that to me is heroic. Birdie would probably describe herself as an ordinary black woman who loved her family fiercely.”
New York reviews for “Birdie Blue” were mixed, but West won some high praise from critics who’ve followed her career from her early play “Jar the Floor” (which premiered at Seattle’s Empty Space Theatre) onward.
Wrote Michael Feingold in the Village Voice, “In the bumper crop of young black women playwrights we’re currently experiencing, [West] has one of the most intriguing sensibilities around, offering a sharp eye for detail, a wide-ranging compassion for human eccentricity, and a sense, rare in contemporary playwriting, of moral curiosity.”
West stays very busy. Last year she adapted Richard Wright’s novel “Native Son” for the Intiman Theatre, but withdrew the script due to sticky issues over rights and credits. (A different play based on “Native Son,” by Kent Gash, was used instead.)
That disappointment was ameliorated by the success of her new work based on the youth novel “Addy: An American Girl Story.” The debut Seattle Children’s Theatre production will soon embark on a national tour.
Unlike Birdie, West is a never-married, single mother balancing a successful career with raising two young daughters.
The inspiration for “Birdie Blue” really came from “a number of women in my family,” she reveals. “And I was very much interested in the forgotten person, the caretaker of others.”
West was guided in part by a resonant comment made by a relative battling cancer: “Live like somebody loves you.”
“That came from a great-aunt. When I started the play, I kept that thought in my mind. Feeling that way makes a big difference in how you move through the world.”
Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com