Playwright Regina Taylor talks about A Night in Tunisia at George Street Playhouse.
By: Matt Smith
If you happen upon playwright and actress Regina Taylor on an airplane or in a New York City coffee shop, expect to see her immersed in conversation with her constant companions pen and paper.
She keeps homes in New York, Los Angeles and her native Dallas. She doesn’t, however, bring a laptop along when she travels.
"I write longhand, not on a computer," says Ms. Taylor. "I love the feel of it. It’s very tactile, very conducive to just spreading the facts through the body, having a pen and paper. And I can write anywhere, wherever I am a plane, park, coffee shop, a room on a set."
Right now she is commuting between New York and George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, where her play A Night in Tunisia opens Sept. 17. On a lunch break from a day of rehearsals, Ms. Taylor seems amazingly calm and relaxed for such a busy woman. Sitting on a comfortable couch in a downstairs dressing room, she appears completely at ease about the demands of her career. Her secret? "Optimism," she says, laughing.
Best known for her role as Lily on the acclaimed TV show I’ll Fly Away in the early ’90s, Ms. Taylor, 42, appeared on the small screen last season in The Education of Max Bickford on CBS but is more in demand as a playwright. Her newest work, Crowns, opens at McCarter Theatre in Princeton next month, and she’s working on a musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, as well as an adaptation of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and a piece about Madam C.J. Walker, one of the first self-made female millionaires.
Although her acting career took off when she moved to New York after graduating from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, writing was always her first love.
"When I was 10 or 11, I’d write plays and I’d invite kids over in the backyard and we’d put on a play," Ms. Taylor says. "And I went to school with the idea of being a journalist. I took an acting class and fell in love with that form of expression. Being able to go inside the skin of another human being was fascinating to me and the same thing was what attracted me to writing."
A Night in Tunisia, which premiered at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in 2000, is a play with music that combines contemporary hits such as "R-E-S-P-E-C-T" and "I Will Survive" with new songs penned by Ms. Taylor and composer Timothy Graphenreed.
"I find myself writing rather lyrically," says the playwright. "I love writing poems, and it seemed to be a natural slide into writing lyrics."
Ms. Taylor says music was the inspiration for the play’s narrator, Simone a chanteuse at the Tunisia Bar-B-Q and Grill, who relates the story of four vibrant women: Amanda, Gin XYZ, M&M and Madear.
"That was how I found Simone that was her way of speaking, through sound, through music," she says. "Each of the women have their own types of music that they like Gin with acid guitar, Amanda with disco, M&M with Aretha Franklin, and Madear with church songs that Simone can take on these personas, these songs as well as her songs, as she’s weaving these stories together."
Cheryl Freeman plays Simone, and Suzzanne Douglass, who starred in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill at George Street last season, plays the four women, each of whom face seemingly insurmountable challenges: Amanda, a TV-news personality who feels her biological clock ticking as she nears age 40; Gin, a teen-ager whose body is developing too fast; M&M, a woman whose identity centers around her breasts yet must endure a double mastectomy; and Madear, a 109-year-old woman who has outlived her time.
"These characters were speaking to me pretty loud, and I had to listen to them," Ms. Taylor says. "They are all stories about survival. You’re faced with this fire in your life what are you going to do? Are you going to go through that fire, or are you going to try to sidestep that fire? Are you going to turn and go away from it, escape it or are you going to just stand there petrified because of it.
"All these characters are transitioning, facing something that they have to deal with. They’re all charging into it headlong or are trying to find some other way around it."
Gin XYZ, described in the script as a "cross between Storm from the X-Men cartoons and a werewolf girl," is the most immediately compelling character. Gin must face a situation that most adults couldn’t deal with, although she’s just a girl, albeit in a woman’s body.
"Gin is a young woman who is developing really fast physically getting breasts, getting hair, going through her first period and trying to find out who she is and feeling really strange, like an alien, or like a werewolf," Ms. Taylor says. "And then she finds herself in an instant, in a flash, going through this situation that an adult mind really can’t deal with so how does she as a child?"
There are little (and not-so-little) bits of the playwright in each of the characters. For example, Amanda, like Ms. Taylor when she wrote A Night in Tunisia, is 40 years old. However, she and Simone are the most alike as the storytellers.
"Simone, who is theatricalized as a singer in this piece, is the writer, and she’s telling these stories, she’s finding certain truths about herself," Ms. Taylor says. "I found with myself I was finding things that I needed to find in these characters as they were coming to me, as they were speaking to me, as I was writing this down. I think with writing there are certain points where you’re the narrator, you’re the storyteller, you’re creating these stories, but there are points where the characters take over and they’re truly speaking to you and you’re learning from them."
A Night in Tunisia plays at George Street Playhouse, 9 Livingston Ave., New Brunswick, Sept. 17-Oct. 20. Performances: Tues.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 2 p.m.; Sept. 21-22, 26, 29, Oct. 5-6, 12-13, 17, 19, 2 p.m. Tickets cost $26-$50. For information, call (732) 246-7717. On the Web: www.georgestplayhouse.org