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Charles Fuller Pays Attention
One of the Negro Ensemble Company's most prolific playwrights, Charles Fuller's eight plays with the company include In the Deepest Part of Sleep (1974), The Brownsville Raid (1976), Zooman and the Sign (1980), A Soldier's Play (1981), and the We Cycle (Sally, Prince, Jonquil, and Burner's Frolic, 1988-1990). He is an Obie Award winner for Zooman and the Sign and received the Pulitzer Prize for A Soldier's Play. In 1984 Columbia Pictures produced A Soldier's Story, for which Fuller adapted the screenplay. The film was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Screenplay, Supporting Actor (Adolph Caesar) and Picture.
Fuller spoke with Signature Edition from his home in his native Philadelphia before rehearsals began for Zooman and the Sign about his early career as a playwright, his beginnings with the NEC, and why we must do something about Zooman.
Signature Edition: When did you start writing plays?
Charles Fuller: I started writing plays a long time ago, way back in the sixties. I used to work in a neighborhood called Ludlow in Philadelphia as a housing inspector. Some friends and I got together and started a theatre in that community. We started doing skits about how to take care of the house or how you take your kids to school, and out of that grew my interest in writing plays. Then I was asked if I would be interested in writing a play for Princeton's McCarter Theatre. They were having their fortieth anniversary, and they wanted to open their season with a brand new play. So I wrote the play [The Perfect Party], it opened their season, and that's how I came to be a playwright.
SE: How did you come to work with the Negro Ensemble Company?
CF: The play that I wrote for Princeton was put on in New York City at a theatre at Second Avenue and Tenth Street. Right around the corner was the Negro Ensemble Company, and while I was in New York, I met [then NEC Artistic Director] Douglas Turner Ward and all of the people who were connected to the Negro Ensemble Company. They invited me to submit a play to them, I submitted the play, and Doug said, "We'll do it."
SE: The NEC has produced eight of your plays. What kept you going back to work with them?
CF: It was an all-black company. At the time it was the major theatre in New York where African-American playwrights were being brought to the stage. Most of us, indeed almost all of us, were connected with the Negro Ensemble Company. As a consequence, other theatres got started, such as the New Lafayette and Theatre of the New World in Harlem. There had been very little work since the forties in New York City by African Americans; and when Doug and the NEC came along, it was an enormous opportunity for all of us to involve ourselves in theatre. It proved to be a wonderful place to work and it launched the careers of most of us.
SE: Did working with the NEC shape you as a playwright?
CF: Only to the extent that we always knew when we began working with the Negro Ensemble Company that there wasn't a lot of money to do the kinds of things that are being done now. For example, you couldn't bring a play to the theatre for a stand-up reading where the audience comes in, listens, and gives you feedback, or have a workshop for a couple of weeks. When I started, it was, "Could you please try and have the play at least ninety percent written?" If we were going to do anything we could do it in rehearsal.
SE: So this process taught you how to manage your time and construct a play?
CF: Immediately. You either learn how to write a play, or the play wouldn't get done. We just didn't have the money or the time to do the kinds of things that people do today, which is the whole list of things that tends to drive playwrights mad: read the play fifty or sixty times, and after fifty or sixty times people decide whether or not they want to do it. We didn't have to do those kinds of things, and I'm very grateful for that.
SE: You've said that in your plays you seek to subvert the stereotypical ways that African Americans and whites have been presented on stage. Is that also what drew you to the NEC?
CF: They were prepared to look at us as individuals and as unique people. They wanted to look at African Americans in every aspect of life, and that gave us an opportunity to start writing plays about different kinds of African Americans. There has been, and it's unfortunate that this is beginning to come back again, the idea that there's only one kind of African American. Part of our job, at least my job I felt, was to dispel all that-turn it upside-down.
SE: Do you think that you and the NEC succeeded?
CF: I don't really think so; because when I look at what's on TV and what's in the movies, we are right back where we started. The same basic kind of ideas about who black people are and what we are pervade most of the literature at the moment, all of television. The roles have expanded to a certain extent, but basically it's the same roles that are being glossed over-it's the same black guy, the same black woman.
SE: Do you think that applies to theatre as well?
CF: I think so.
SE: Where did Zooman and the Sign come from?
CF: I knew this young man that had killed someone in a gang war in the community where I worked. We went to the home of the young man, and he said, "Yeah, I shot him. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time." He was absolutely remorseless. I thought, "This is the beginning of something." And it was, because I saw that in 1965. It began way, way back.
SE: When did you write the play?
CF: I didn't write the play until about 1968. When Martin Luther King was killed, I started writing the play. It didn't get done until 1979. The character, Zooman, was running rampant all over the country. Very recently, I read an article in the newspaper that said that most of these murders in the black community are happening with young men. Just like Zooman. This thing has not stopped. It's unfortunate. What I wanted to do at the time was to say, "Please, we must pay attention to this young man. He is what's on the horizon, please pay attention." Well people did, but I don't think they paid enough attention.
SE: I've read that in recent years crime has gone up in Philadelphia.
CF: Yes, it has. This past year I think there were more than 200 shootings in the city. In those days it was rare that young people would kill one another. That particular year, it was really very bad-I think twenty or more. I thought, "What's going on here?" It was devastating when I met this boy. I'm still devastated every time I read the paper and find out another teenager has been killed. So it hasn't changed, as far as I'm concerned. We're taking lives and just throwing them away. These are all young people who ought to have a future. And they don't.
SE: Was it difficult for you to get into Zooman's head?
CF: No, because I worked the streets every day. As an inspector I walked into people's houses and notified the city of Philadelphia to de-rat them, de-roach them, put roofs on them, fix pipes, doors, bricks, and windows. I was in the community every single day and on the street everyday. I knew everybody and there were a few who knew me, so it wasn't difficult; I'd been there all of my life. I lived and grew up in North Philadelphia where I'd met young people like him. It was difficult for me to understand how somebody could have no remorse. And I'm not so sure I understand even now. But as for him as a character, I've known him all of my life.
SE: Was the reaction to the murder in Zooman based on what you saw in these communities as well?
CF: No, my father was the sort of person who was always concerned about the fact that people would not come forward when a crime occurred. He believed the only way to guarantee that the neighborhood remain stable, that property continue to be worth what you put in it, was to make sure people come forward when things happen that endanger the community. If you knew who it was, you had an obligation to the rest of the community to notify the proper authorities to take that person off your streets. It's unfortunate now that the police have so much trouble getting people to come forward when neighbors are murdered and shot or there's crime in the community. When anyone is killed in your community, the person who killed them threatens you and everyone else on the block. Most people nowadays just close their windows or their doors and walk away. But my father was an advocate of not doing that. So the character in Zooman who puts the sign in the window is my Dad, frankly.
SE: Did you work with Douglas Turner Ward on the play in rehearsal?
CF: Oh absolutely, in rehearsal. I re-wrote things, and Doug told me, "Listen, we need to think about this, we need to think about that," and I would go back and write and make changes and bring them in the next day. There is no such thing as a perfect play. He gave me ideas, some I took, some I didn't, but it was a good working relationship. In fact, I think most playwrights need a director that they can work with on a regular basis. Because the director brings things to the production that the playwright sometimes cannot see. And if they're as interested in the production as you are, nine times out of ten what they bring to it can help the production. It's not true that all directors want to steal your work or change it so that it's not you. I know a lot of playwrights believe that, but I've not found that to be true. I found that every director I've worked with in the theatre, who enjoyed the play as much as I did, helped me make the play better.
SE: What's your involvement with theatre today?
CF: I'm mentoring young playwrights and writing plays. Nowadays it is far more difficult to get a play done than it was when I began. Sometimes an endless series of readings is a waste of a playwright's time. Sometimes workshopping is a waste of a playwright's time. It's hard for me to build a play, sit through endless readings, and wait for the committee to decide whether they're going to do the play or not. I keep writing because I'm a playwright. But the idea that I have to put up with this nonsense is not something that I want to do.
SE: Is that what drew you into film and television?
CF: To a certain extent. The only problem I have with TV and movies is that you don't do them by yourself. Television and motion pictures are like riding on a bus. Writing a play is like riding on a motorcycle. A bus has eighty-two passengers and a motorcycle has one. And that's the joy of writing a play.
SE: What are your thoughts on revisiting Zooman and the Sign with Signature?
CF: Zooman is a play that has relevance now. And we haven't done very much to change the circumstances of the play. The fact is people are killed every day, and no one seems to care enough, other than to hunt down the teenagers and lock them up if you can find them. If someone is willing to come forward. And so the same things are happening today that happened forty years ago. And it seems to me that we can learn from them by watching the production and taking a deep breath and saying, "Hey, that guy's still with us, and what have we done to really make the country a better place? To make our cities a better place so that there are no more of these Zoomen who are born and raised and wind up throwing their lives away in a single stupid act?" So doing the play is important. Because something has to be done about Zooman.
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