HER GENERAL TUBMAN

58 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE Mar| Apr 2020 PHOTO BY CANDACE DICARLO In Lorene Cary’s new play—her fi rst— Harriet Tubman shuttles between leading a Civil War raid that freed hundreds of enslaved plantation workers and a men’s prison in present-day Philadelphia, where she fi nds love and recruits soldiers for the Union Army. The path to its production was complicated, too. By Julia M. Klein

Mar| Apr 2020 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE 59 I have this scene,” Lorene Cary That image “ended up getting dropped Nolen says he delighted in those email C’78 G’78 is saying over a salad into the emotional center of an opera exchanges: “The way in which she re- “So of fried Brussels sprouts. “I treatment” about “two men in love,” a sponded to the work that she saw here keep trying to think what the project titled His. One character, in de- was something I really valued. I appreci- hell to do with this scene.” spair over being gay, describes walking ated her perspective. I loved her writing The acclaimed author and senior lec- into the ocean, at age 13, determined to and how she captured ideas, even in turer in Penn’s Department of English is drown. “And Tubman was there,” says emails.” He also admired Cary’s social describing her passion for Harriet Tub- Cary, “and she sang in a voice the color activism, especially her service on the man, the legendary Underground Rail- of memory, and pulled him out.” Tubman now-defunct Philadelphia School Re- road conductor who also spearheaded a tells the would-be suicide: “I married a form Commission, which he calls “he- daring Civil War raid. “For certain sub- man [John Tubman] who wanted me to roic.” In theater, he says, “relationships jects,” says Cary, “you just get obsessed lie still, but God made me to run. And are everything. And connection.” and they lodge, like a cyst.” God made you just the way you are. You So it wasn’t a gargantuan leap for Cary That obsession has blossomed into find someone to love you just as you are, to approach Nolen, in February 2016, Cary’s first play, in which a time-travel- then you’ll understand why I’m taking and ask if he saw her gay love story as a ing Tubman appears at a present-day you out.” potential musical. “No, I don’t, actually,” Philadelphia prison to enlist men to the That was the scene that stayed with Nolen told her. “I see it as an opera. I see Union cause. At once fanciful and his- Cary, haunting her. “It’s got to be opera,” it as a possible movie.” torically resonant, My General Tubman, she thought. But their conversation continued, with like many new plays, morphed through Cary telling Nolen facts he hadn’t known an arduous multiyear development pro- Opera Philadelphia, which has be- about the historical Tubman. She re- cess. Originally scheduled to run from come a nationally respected incubator counted how, at the end of the Civil War, January 16 to March 1 at Philadelphia’s of new works, encouraged Cary to de- Nelson Davis, a consumptive African Arden Theatre Company, the show was velop her gay-men-and-Tubman idea. American Union soldier, had walked extended, by popular demand, through But finding the right composer proved from Texas to Auburn, New York, to March 15. It coincides with a cultural a challenge, and, in the end, the com- knock on Tubman’s door and ask her to moment that has spawned Erica Arm- pany decided not to commission the nurse him back to health. In 1869, they strong Dunbar C’94’s biography, She piece. “Dead in the water,” Cary says of were married. Came to Slay; the film Harriet, depict- the nascent libretto. “That’s amazing,” Nolen recalls saying. ing Tubman’s escape from slavery and “I tried to write this as a short story,” “That sounds like a play. Is that a story early Underground Railroad days; and she says. “It didn’t work.” And she knew you’re interested in writing?” Cary said a debate over adding Tubman’s image she didn’t want to write a novel about it was. to the $20 bill. Tubman. “It felt to me,” she says, “like a My General Tubman was commis- But the “very specific origin” of Cary’s story that needed performance.” What’s sioned under the auspices of the Arden’s literary interest in Tubman was simpler: more, “the opera had told me that this Independence Foundation New Play a glimpse, about a decade ago, of an is my time of leaving strict realism.” Showcase, which supports the creation iconic photograph at Historic Cold That’s when Cary, a regular theater- of new plays and musicals. “Commis- Spring Village, a living-history museum goer, turned to the Arden, a nonprofit sions are, in some ways, an investment in Cape May. The South Jersey shore re- regional theater whose mission is in a particular writer’s voice,” Nolen says. sort is a favorite haunt for Cary and her “bringing to life great stories by great They “buy a little bit of time, make a husband, Robert Clarke Smith, an or- storytellers.” Cary and Terrence J. Nolen, little bit of space” to develop a project. dained minister. Tubman’s connection the theater’s cofounder and producing But they are no guarantee that the Ar- to the town was spending summers as a artistic director, had met in 2003 when den, which has unveiled 45 world pre- housekeeper and cook at the Cape May Cary’s historical novel, The Price of a mieres since its 1988 founding, will pro- Hotel. Cary kept envisioning Tubman Child, was named the inaugural selec- duce a specific show. “I invest in pro- walking along the shoreline and watch- tion of the Free Library of Philadelphia’s cess,” Nolen says. ing dolphins cavorting in the waves. “One Book, One Philadelphia” program. “They looked like family, and they Nolen had read the book, and the Arden Cary’s career has been marked by a looked like freedom, they looked so had sponsored a reading of excerpts. penchant for experimentation and chal- pretty, and the sound [they make] is like Afterwards, he and Cary occasionally lenge. As a writer, she has explored con- laughing,” Cary says. corresponded about theater. temporary fiction (Pride), memoir (Black

60 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE Mar| Apr 2020 Ice and Ladysitting: My Year with Nana “If I could, other people at the time. He was also at the End of Her Century), young adult nearly 17 years older, white, and her boss. history (Free!: Great Escapes from Slav- I would just “Everything was wrong! Nothing was ery on the Underground Railroad), and right,” she recalls. “As Bob says, ‘If Dr. historical fiction (The Price of a Child Phil had seen us, he would have said: and If Sons, Then Heirs). She wrote the write. It’s the ‘Don’t do it.’” They did it anyway, and video scripts for the President’s House have two daughters. (Cary also has a exhibition on Philadelphia’s Indepen- joyous thing stepson and four grandchildren.) As a dence Mall, telling the stories of nine former editor, Smith is her first reader; enslaved African Americans in President I do. It’s the she sings in his church choirs. George Washington’s household. In- “As often happens, when people have spired by her work on His, she success- remarried, when it works, it’s because fully sought a residency in the American thing I feel I’m you’ve been able to find a better self with Lyric Theater’s Composer Librettist De- this new person,” Cary says. It’s not sur- velopment Program, completing a one- built for.” prising that she was intrigued by both act libretto, The Gospel According to the happiness and improbability of Har- Nana, based on Ladysitting. riet Tubman’s second marriage, to a man A West Philadelphia native who now about two decades her junior. lives in the city’s Graduate Hospital was trying to diversify its student body. Cary, whose paternal grandmother, neighborhood, Cary also has been a com- She would later chronicle that experience Nana (the central figure in Ladysitting), mitted teacher and activist. In 1998, she in Black Ice, her literary debut. Praised was so fair-skinned she could pass for founded Art Sanctuary to bring African for its candor and lyrical prose, the 1991 white, says she often wearies of talking American arts to local audiences [“Alum- memoir recounted both her alienation about race in America. But “I’m always ni Profiles,” Jul|Aug 2000]. On the School and her gradual adjustment to the private thinking about it,” she adds. “I suppose Reform Commission, she worked to boarding school. She would eventually I write about it because it’s the way I can eliminate zero-tolerance punishments. return both to teach and to serve on the discipline myself to think about it with- She has created a website called school’s board of directors. out just rolling into rage.” SafeKidsStories.com, to which her Penn Cary entered Penn loving biology and African American—and American— writing students contribute [“Gazetteer,” thinking she might become a doctor. But history figures prominently in Cary’s Jul|Aug 2017]. One offshoot of that site is her parents had just separated, causing work. The protagonist of The Price of a #VoteThatJawn, a project to spur registra- financial, as well as emotional, stress. Child, based on an actual incident, is an tion and voting among 18-year-olds. Cary (Divorce rippled through several gen- enslaved woman whose escape entails also has taught writing classes at the erations of her family, Cary writes in leaving her youngest child behind. If Philadelphia Detention Center, another Ladysitting.) Strapped for money, Cary Sons, Then Heirs, whose themes include inspiration for My General Tubman. worked odd jobs up to 40 hours a week, family estrangement and the importance “If I could,” Cary says, “I would just and her grades suffered. of land ownership, is set mostly in the write. It’s the joyous thing I do. It’s the The study of literature and creative writ- present. But it unfolds against the back- thing I feel I’m built for.” ing, with professors such as Houston A. drop of the Great Migration of African But her activism is impelled by a sense Baker (now a Distinguished University Americans from the agricultural South of duty: “I feel like I have gotten every Professor at Vanderbilt University) and to the industrial North. It draws on a single break there is, and from where I Sonia Sanchez (Philadelphia’s first poet family story about Cary’s maternal great- came from, that’s what it takes to live a laureate), became a refuge, “the thing I can grandmother’s first husband, who was satisfying life. Everything in my com- do with one arm behind my back.” She said to have been lynched after a state munity, everything in my family, every- excelled, earning both a bachelor’s and fair. “I realized that I was exorcising thing in my race, says, ‘Each one, grab master’s degree in English and winning a that,” she says. one’—because somebody got me. Or else Thouron Award, which financed study at In her historical fiction, Cary says she where would I be?” Sussex University in England. took facts seriously, writing “history Cary’s first big break—“an intervention After Europe, Cary toiled, not always with a corset on.” Now, with her Harriet in my education,” she calls it—was win- happily, as a writer and editor at maga- Tubman story, she was ready to take the ning a scholarship to attend the elite St. zines such as Time and TV Guide, where corset off—admittedly, she adds, “a fun- Paul’s School in New Hampshire, which she met Smith. Both were married to ny thing to say about the 19th century.”

Mar| Apr 2020 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE 61 hen Nolen first read a draft of My favorite plays and what she loved most Tubman followed. To cap off the second, General Tubman, in January 2017, about theater. Cary mentioned Shake- in December 2018, the Arden invited W he was caught off guard. “When I speare’s history play Henry V, with its about 50 guests to attend a reading. started reading about the Philadel- famous St. Crispin’s Day speech (“We few, Their enthusiasm clinched Nolen’s deci- phia Detention Center,” he says, “that was we happy few, we band of brothers …”). sion to add the evolving play to the Ar- the first time I learned that that was going The play was already one of the sources den’s 2019–20 season, even though “ev- to be part of the story. I was absolutely for My General Tubman, and Nolen en- ery time you do a new play, there’s a surprised when I saw that she was going couraged her to “lean in” to that model. risk,” he says, “and there’s a leap of faith.” to be mixing the past and present in the He suggested adding a Chorus whose way that she does, but was totally thrilled narration would mediate between the In October 2019, cast members have to see where that was going to lead.” audience and the characters. As a result, assembled around a conference table for Cary’s stint as an instructor at the Phil- says Cary, “I found a rough structure. a final workshop for My General Tub- adelphia Detention Center, a medium- to And confidence.” man. Cary, radiating warmth, greets a maximum-security, short-term facility, visitor. She’s casually dressed, in slacks was an “intensely spiritual experience,” and sneakers, with a brown jacket, her she explains. “I felt that there was more hair in dreadlocks, and big, dangling going on than we could see.” There was earrings. “It’s new, and I’m new,” she says “so much wounding: wounded people are “I’d come up of her playwriting debut. Nolen enters brought in and are wounded more.” The and envelops Cary in a hug. “I am so prison sequences became central to My excited about this play,” he says. General Tubman. Like Moses, to whom lame, unable The director, James Ijames (pronounced she was compared, the historical Tubman Imes), who is also an actor, playwright, led her family and hundreds of others out to revise and assistant professor of theater at near- of slavery; in the era of mass incarcera- by Villanova University, advises the cast tion, Cary’s Tubman dissolves prison and rethink to read for “meaning” and “story.” Cary walls, finding new love in the process. specifically wanted an African American In the first script Nolen saw, the char- director. With Nolen’s support, she tapped acter of Nelson Davis, destined to become completely. Ijames after being wowed by his epic, Bar- Tubman’s second husband, is introduced rymore Award-winning production of Au- as the prison warden of the Philadelphia I was gust Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean at the Ar- Detention Center. (In later drafts, he is a den in the winter of 2019. Like My Gener- Coast Guard veteran, unjustly impris- al Tubman, the Wilson play contains sur- oned when he attempts to protect his floundering.” realistic and visionary elements. sister from a pedophile uncle.) And in the Ijames informs Cary that he has me- 19th-century scenes, the pivotal character ticulously charted her play’s time shifts. of John Brown, the abolitionist martyr Over two acts, the action alternates be- who seeks to enlist Tubman’s help at As she honed her work, Cary says she tween the run-up to John Brown’s Harpers Ferry, had yet to appear. sent occasional drafts to a “secret men- doomed Harpers Ferry raid and the The first weeklong workshop of My tor,” William B. Anawalt, who holds a Civil War, on the one hand, and the con- General Tubman, in September 2017, was master of fine arts degree in playwriting temporary prison where Tubman peri- followed by notes and revisions. But the and chairs a theater company board. odically materializes. She is summoned, next workshop, in July 2018, went awry, Cary also listened repeatedly to YouTube magically, by the prisoners’ drumming, both Nolen and Cary say. Unhappy with workshops by Lauren Gunderson, de- a reference to the spiritual practices of the direction the work was taking, Nolen scribed as the country’s most produced Tubman’s Ashanti ancestors. Tubman’s called a halt partway through the allot- playwright (Ada and the Engine, I and temporal lobe epilepsy, the result of a ted week. “I’d come up lame, unable to You, We Are Denmark, etc.). “She was head injury, permits her to float through revise and rethink completely,” Cary like my intro class and my master class,” time and space. Some characters can see says. “I was floundering.” Cary says. “When she mentioned a book, her; others cannot. How exactly it all Nolen took the aspiring playwright out I read it.” Gunderson, like Cary, has used works remains something of a puzzle. for coffee and encouraged her to take a Shakespeare as source material. Over the next few months, Cary will con- step back. He asked her to reflect on her Two more workshops of My General solidate, sculpt, and rearrange scenes, as

62 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE Mar| Apr 2020 well as clarify the rules of Tubman’s time they’re arguing with themselves, with the By January 3, less than two weeks before travel. The role of the Chorus—who speaks text,” she says. “If anything’s in the way, the start of previews, Cary is feeling buoy- in both prose and Shakespearean iambic that’s why I go home and try to figure how ant. “I have a final script!” she declares. pentameter, injects humor, and helps ori- to make it better, make it right.” She doesn’t, really—she’ll keep tweaking ent the audience—will expand. Other se- With guidance from Ijames, Nolen, and until opening night. But she is much clos- quences, including a “dream circus” in- freelance dramaturg Michele Volansky, er. Working with Volansky, she has cut 30 volving Tubman and Davis, will disappear. Cary retreats to her desk for hours each pages from a lumbering 80-page first act, Ijames recognizes Cary’s fascination night to revise, putting in a double shift. bringing the show’s total run time to about with the history and her struggle to braid For a novelist, the collaborative process can two hours. “Everything had to be faster, exposition into the play. But, at the end of be daunting. “I don’t like a lot of hand- cleaner, sharper,” she says. The main the October reading, he offers this advice: holding,” says Cary, “and I don’t like a lot change was to make Harriet Tubman “If there’s anything historical that’s not of company. I write because I want to get “more dominant, give her more agency.” advancing plot,” he says, it needs to go. in that world. I don’t write because I want The scene being run in rehearsal today, to work together with other people. So, for from the second act, is perhaps the play’s It’s December 20, 2019, a few days into me, theater and playwriting has been a bit most dramatic. It involves Tubman’s the five-week-plus rehearsal period—a of a challenge—’cause I like to write up on leadership of the 1863 Combahee River week longer than usual because the play is the third floor by my damn self. I love it. I Raid, in South Carolina, which conclud- “a loose and baggy monster, still,” Cary says. love the aloneness.” But she says that, in ed with hundreds of formerly enslaved The mostly bare rehearsal space, where the the end, “a deep joy”—as well as better art— plantation workers being transported to actors are still holding scripts and trying to emerged from the Arden collaboration. freedom on Union ships. find their characters, is framed by tables, Volansky—who is also associate artistic In an earlier scene, Tubman has rallied chairs, a coat rack, and a coffee maker. director for PlayPenn, which specializes her black troops with a version of the St. These are long, exhausting days, and all the in new play development—says much of Crispin’s Day speech, reminding them: actors and members of the production her work with playwrights involves dra- “We have crawled on our bellies through team have designated mugs. matic structure. When she first read My time/ Itself to do this new thing together.” This morning, Ijames is working inten- General Tubman in October 2018, she was They’re enthusiastically behind her sively with Danielle Leneé, who stars as drawn to what she calls “a remarkable now. But meanwhile, (unseen) planta- Harriet Tubman. In the current scene, story and a lively vision.” But “the balance tion workers, afraid of being left behind, Tubman is relating a story from childhood, of past and present didn’t feel quite right are swamping the small boats meant to when one of her tasks was to empty musk- to me,” she says, nor did “the balance be- ferry them to the larger Union vessels. rat traps, to a roomful of Northern women tween urgency and character exploration.” And Union soldiers are fending them off whose donations she’s soliciting for the All the key players on the production violently with their oars. abolitionist cause. Leneé wants to know team, she says, agreed on two ideas: To stop the clamor and the carnage, the how big the traps were, so she knows just “One was to look at Harriet Tubman as resourceful Tubman climbs atop a plat- how large a gesture to make. someone other than this iconic figure— form and improvises lyrics to the tune of Ijames is thinking more about charac- she was a human being. And that her the Battle of Hymn of the Republic: “We’ve ter and context: “She is fighting percep- legacy endures today through a variety got room on Lincoln’s gunboats/ Plenty tions not only of her, but of black people of different ways that we deal with the room for you and me/ We’ve got soldiers writ large. The intellect of that is kind of systems that oppress and keep people in the small boats/ Rowing back and breathtaking. … I don’t want to clutter down. That’s the nature of the prison forth, you see./ The government has sent that up with a lot of business.” A few sequences.” But the question, she says, us here/ And means to set you free:/ Our minutes later, he adds: “She’s probably was, “How do the scenes from the past God is marching on!” Her troops add surrounded by nothing but white people. inform the present—and vice versa?” their voices to the chorus. There’s quite a bit of not being herself In general, Volansky says, she sees two “This is a great moment,” Ijames says. completely and not being able to com- different kinds of plays. Some “get the “Let’s gather around. Let’s learn this pletely relax.” balls in the air really easily and then it’s song together.” As they sing, an ebullient While Ijames runs rehearsals, Cary’s time to figure out where they go, and Cary joins them. presence is essential. She interjects an oc- things fall apart in the second act. Or it’s During a lunch break, she describes her casional comment, but, mostly, she is there the opposite,” she says. “In this case, it creative process: “Stories are down there, to hear what’s working, and what isn’t. was trying to set up the rules of the and you’re swimming along, and you’re the “They’re trying like hell to figure this out, world that I think was a challenge.” fish, and for some reason that bait pulls

Mar| Apr 2020 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE 63 you—like in a dream where you’re the ob- ject and the subject both. In this case, I’m “There has to be music, also fishing. I don’t always know what there is about that story that I need.” She adds: “The real urge is to make beauty from it,” it has to be funny, there has to find “where spirit touches aesthetics.” Tubman’s story “is part of the Ameri- to be drumming, there has to can story, so I want to serve it up and put it on the table,” Cary says. “I want to share what it felt like to think about this be spectacle—all of these woman who came up with [the notion of] ‘making a way out of no way.’ It had crazy-ass things, all in one play.” to be a play, there has to be music, it has to be funny, there has to be drumming, there has to be spectacle—all of these crazy-ass things, all in one play.” out. One audience member, a Civil War explaining” Chorus, prison characters who In the stage directions, Cary describes buff, says she would have preferred more exude “the faint whiff of cliché,” and an her aims this way: “This play asks how emphasis on the past. But the Civil War overly “mystical aura” around Tubman HT gives and receives love. The answer scenes and the love story between Tub- herself. The review concludes by declaring is that she gives and receives The Big man and Davis are stirring, and the au- that “in its best moments—and there are Love. And she manifests God’s love de- dience responds with measured warmth. many—My General Tubman gets under spite evil. America does not deserve HT By opening night, January 22, the the skin of a complex woman and shows or her leadership. But we have her. Like show is noticeably improved. The Cho- us the ways we still walk the path she Nelson this play is trying to figure out rus has gotten some new lines. The first- forged. And it shows the work our society how to go back in time and adore her.” act ending has been sharpened. There still has left to do.” are more laughs, too. During intermis- In the Philadelphia Inquirer, John The first preview, on January 16, is ac- sion, Cary says she fine-tuned the script Timpane praises Cary’s play for its com- tually the second time a paying audience during previews because “it took a long bination of “history, bloodshed, heroism, has seen My General Tubman, following time for people to realize they had per- love, and magic,” as well as “a succession a “Pay What You Can” dress rehearsal. mission to laugh.” The audience, filled of surreal, moving scenes.” He sees the (One of Tubman’s descendants showed with members of the Arden’s board of show as losing “momentum and focus” up at the rehearsal, giving the cast an directors and other donors, gives My in the second act. And he offers an opti- emotional jolt.) The show is in the Ar- General Tubman a standing ovation. mistic prediction: “This hot property den’s intimate Arcadia Theatre, with the At the reception afterwards, Arden will continue to develop, find about 10 audience arrayed in a horseshoe con- board president Robert Elfant W’73 but- to 20 minutes it can profitably lose, and figuration around the stage. Melpomene tonholes Cary, and tells her how much he emerge even warmer.” Katakalos’s set is uncommonly spare. enjoyed the show. “So many things could “We just ran out of time,” says Volan- Crisscrossing the floor and backdrop are go wrong,” Cary replies. “So many things sky, who argues that a play is never re- networks of blue squiggles resembling have to go right for this to do well.” ally finished. “There are always ques- both rivers and veins, and possibly “It worked beautifully,” Elfant reas- tions to ask. It’s just the nature of the meant to suggest the osmotic quality of sures her. “Everyone I talked to wants to work.” But of Cary’s gutsiness, she has time. Jordan McCree’s sound design, know more about Harriet Tubman now.” no doubt. “She swung for the rafters,” dominated by drumming, further unifies the dramaturg says. past and present. Finally, there are the reviews: respect- Leneé’s Tubman is stately and digni- ful, if not full-out raves. Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in fied, while Aaron Bell’s Chorus character In the Broad Street Review, an online Philadelphia, writes frequently for the Ga- is deliberately arch, inviting the audi- publication covering the Philadelphia arts zette. Her stories on Eli Rosenbaum W’76 ence into the story. But, given the serious scene, Cameron Kelsall commends the WG’77 and Eva Moskowitz C’86 won the subject matter, the preview crowd isn’t Arden’s “finely wrought” production, while American Society of Journalists and Authors’ always sure when—or whether—to suggesting that Cary made some “rookie award for Outstanding Profile in 2018 and laugh. The first act seems to just peter mistakes.” He cites the device of an “over- 2019. Follow her on Twitter @JuliaMKlein.

64 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE Mar| Apr 2020