EISA DAVIS was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for her play BULRUSHER. She wrote and starred in ANGELA’S MIXTAPE, named a best of 2009 by The New Yorker. Other plays include THE HISTORY OF LIGHT, PAPER ARMOR, UMKOVU, SIX MINUTES, WARRIORS DON’T CRY, and HIP HOP ANANSI. Eisa was a resident playwright at New Dramatists, where she won the Helen Merrill Award, and the Whitfield Cook Award, among others. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Cave Canem, and the Van Lier and Mellon Foundations. As an actor, recent work includes her Obie Award-winning performance in the Broadway rock musical PASSING STRANGE, now a film directed by Spike Lee. Eisa is also featured in the films Welcome to the Rileys opposite James Gandolfini (Sundance), Robot Stories, The Architect, Confess, Happenstance, Pretty Bird, Apparition of the Eternal Church, and Brass Tacks. She was Bubbles’ sister on The Wire, a repeat offender on the Law and Order franchise, and has guest starred on Damages and Mercy. She was also in the world premiere of Melissa James Gibson’s THIS at Playwrights Horizons. Eisa is a member of the Actors Studio, and a Usual Suspect at New York Theater Workshop. As a singer-songwriter, her album Something Else is available through iTunes and CDBaby. She sings her original music at venues including Joe’s Pub, BAMCafé, Symphony Space, and the Whitney Museum.

Check out Eisa’s plays,
available from Samuel French

Bulrusher
Warriors Don’t Cry

Q & A with Eisa Davis

Q: Set in 1955, your play BULRUSHER deals with a young multiracial foundling who is raised in a mostly white Northern Californian community that retains an unusual and idiosyncratic language called Boontling. How did you first conceive of this piece? Was it the character of Bulrusher, the language of Boontling, or something else entirely?

A: The only reason this play got written was because my friend Daniel T. Denver wanted some text for a song cycle he was composing. I told him how I'd been eager to set something in Mendocino County, a place I'd been visiting with family since I was a child, and how I'd recently run across a book about the unique language developed by the townspeople of Boonville. He let me write whatever I wanted (as long as the text had good open vowels to sing on). By the time I'd finished the 8 poems and he set them to music, I had the skeleton for a play. Almost every single character and even the plot was carried by those poems, so it seemed only natural to create an evening length piece from them.

Looking back at the play now, it's clear I didn’t really write it. John Patrick Shanley told me that it’s like turning on the radio. He says that you can write a great play that way just once if you’re lucky. It’s not that there wasn’t a great deal of conscious shaping or invaluable development that occurred once the ink on the first draft was dry, it’s just that the ink only got there by my hearing voices, imagined and unconsciously remembered.

Q: WARRIORS DON’T CRY is a powerful adaptation of Melba Pattillo Beals’ memoir about her time as a part of the Little Rock Nine (the first group of African-American teenagers to be admitted to an all-white school in Arkansas). What influenced you to adapt the piece into a one-woman show, as opposed to a piece for multiple actors?

A: Besides the brass tacks answer (when he commissioned me, the artistic director of Cornerstone Theater Company, Michael John Garcés, envisioned the adaptation as a solo performance by company member Bahni Turpin), it was an exciting artistic choice because the story is about a girl independently discovering nonviolence as the only means to survive—a worldview that ultimately allowed the civil rights movement its victory. There are so many amazing characters that shape the teenage Melba along the way—her bodyguard from the 101st Airborne, the white schoolboy who risks his own life to help her, and her powerful grandmother India—but with a single performer, we get to see how all these characters are simply facets of herself, transforming her into the woman she would become, a calm spirit who gains the ability to overcome her fear of death.

Q: In addition to being a playwright, you have had great success as an actress and musician, and oftentimes these three realms have merged in your work. How do these three elements of your creative self work together and at odds? Do you feel pulled in multiple directions? Or does one element simply take precedent at times in a fluid way?

A: I’m working on bringing them all together to play in the same room more. Angela’s Mixtape was like that. And totally exhilarating.

Q: When and/or how did you know that you wanted to create plays?

A: In large part it came from the folks in my family talking with dinner guests after the meal. I wanted to be as valuable as their conversation, and the only way they’d listen was if I got all the kids and neighbors’ kids together to put on little shows. It was just a child’s impulse. I had no idea it would turn into my life.

Q: What inspires you to take on a new project?

A: I look for something I don’t know, something I want to figure out, something I want to learn deeply about. Or perhaps it’s something that’s been haunting me that needs an exorcism. It has to be a challenge, and feel truly impossible for me to achieve. Terrible feeling in the beginning, thrilling at the end.

Q: Have you ever come across a production that made you see one of your plays in a new or unexpected way?

A: They all do. Actors, directors, designers—everyone surprises you. That’s the whole joy of making a play—you’re giving others the opportunity to take something from a stranger and become intimate and loving with that strangeness and, with hope, free.

(Photo by Colman Domingo)