Darrel Alejandro Holnes is one of the most spirited of today’s playwrights and poets, and perhaps the most accomplished. He teaches playwriting and poetry as an Assistant Professor at Medgar Evers College.
This month, the Brick Theater is presenting the festival premiere of Bird of Pray, a play in which Holnes takes audiences into the world of gay black servicemen during the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy years.
During a conversation in Brooklyn, where Professor Holnes often resides, he spoke with me about PTSD, his interviews with African-American veterans that inspired the play, and how this production is the first chapter of his Sandstorm Cycle, a series of plays that is quickly making him one of the freshest voices in the Brooklyn theater scene.
Q: What’s Bird of Pray about?
The play is about two African American soldiers who, together, navigate the dangerous terrain of unrequited love, the inescapable memories of war, and suicide. This theatrical journey into PTSD explores the hidden corners of American history and the legacy of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell through magical realism, dialogue, and dance.
Q: Why did you choose to work on The Sandstorm Cycle, a series of plays that draws on the experiences of black soldiers?
I started this series after hearing the stories of soldiers I knew personally or were personally connected to through friends and family. The majority happened to be African American and I was fascinated by the intersectionality of their stories, by the intersectionality of our stories. As people of African descent, our lives are at a constant crossroads with our gender, sexuality, religion, and class. I was very inspired by how these stories stood at those many intersections and at the same time transcended them to tell universal truths about how we as human beings find life in the contradiction of killing one people to save other people, in the crux of our anxieties about building empire while also being its subject; I live with these paradoxes everyday, and many of these soldiers do too.
I’ve also been really disappointed by the erasure of LGBT and POC stories from American history and am determined to write LGBT and POC stories into the history of the American stage. That’s my way of being the change I want to see in the world. By raising awareness, I hope to inspire people to think more compassionately about these soldiers, especially as the nation continues to debate the undeniably great value of trans soldiers in the military.
Q: What led Williamsburg’s Brick Theater and Collective NY to collaborate with you on a limited engagement basis? My understanding is that there will be one more preview of the Bird of Pray on Sunday, June 27th at 7 p.m. followed potentially by a full run next year.
The limited engagement at The Brick Theater is the end of a development process that started with a residency at The Collective NY, where the play was workshopped, and continued with an industry reading at Playwrights Downtown. This is the final step in that chapter and we’re delighted to finally get the play up on its feet and improve the show with each festival performance. My thanks to my wonderful director Mimi Barcomi, and the cast and crew for their continued support and hard work. Many thanks to our producer Margaret Champagne, and also to Robert Z Grant and Kevin Kane at The Collective NY.
Q: How do you fit in the current generation of Brooklyn playwrights and poets?
I have a lot of respect for Brooklyn-based playwrights like Amina Henry, Eleanor Burgess, Gordon Leary, Julia Meinwald, and Gary Winter, among others. Although aesthetically our work is different, I feel like our works are in conversation with each other, partly because we are all in literal conversation with each other through Page 73, a play development nonprofit; this year, we are all fellows in their Interstate 73 writers workshop. Other fellows this year include Emily Feldman, Michael R. Jackson, and Daniel K. Isaac, whose work also continues to inspire me each time we explore it in the workshop. I’m grateful to Page 73 and Michael Walkup for their continued support and for welcoming me into their Brooklyn-based community of playwrights.
For Brooklyn poets, there are too many to name, so I’ll just name a few here with apologies to the hundreds of more (if not thousands!) I am leaving out that also deserve mention. First, I’d like to acknowledge Hafizah Geter and Ricky Maldonado for their terrific Brooklyn poetry reading series EMPIRE, where I had the privilege of reading alongside wonderful poets like Amber Atiya, Puneet Dutt, Darrel Alejandro Holnes & Nina Puro. Aside from being talented poets themselves, Hafizah and Ricky have built a beautiful community through their reading series. I also really enjoyed participating in Cheryl Boyce-Taylor’s Glittering Pomegranate Reading Series another Brooklyn staple alongside her, Linda Susan Jackson, and E.J. Antonio. And lastly, I’m grateful to Cave Canem, a Brooklyn-based poetry nonprofit known as a “home for Black poetry” that has supported my work and the work of many of my peers for years. It was a pleasure to perform my poetry as a headliner for their annual presentation at the Brooklyn Museum alongside Jessica Lanay Moore. Also, anyone interested in poetry should check out the Word.Sound.Power events at BAM and Jason Koo’s Brooklyn Poets.
Also, I’m happy to be in community with Brooklyn poets like Elizabeth Spackman, and my MEC colleague, Joanna Sit, who are both phenomenal writers.
Q: What role do dance and magical realism play in this production?
Magical realism is the genre of the play. Bird of Pray takes the real-life stories of these soldiers and sets them in a world where magic can happen and is natural. The realism is usually in the form of a dialogue or a monologue and magic usually appears in the form of dance or poetry. Magic is a way to illustrate the soldiers’ hallucinations and it also blurs the lines between their pasts at war and their present at home, which mimics other symptoms of PTSD and creates a simulacrum of different stages of the characters mental health.
As an avid reader of Latin American literature, I’m inspired by writers like Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and filmmakers like Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) to take on historical issues in this style. Magic is also a way to ground the play in many different histories. The magic in the play is mostly rooted in African Diasporic rituals and traditions, especially death rituals and folk dance. However, it is also inspired by spiritual practices of peoples in Tibet, Aboriginal Australia, and other parts of the world.
In a truly (continental) American way, the magic in this show is a melting pot of magical work and spiritual work from throughout the human family. And by melting these traditions, the play illustrates how a person’s search to understand their own mortality and find meaning in the anonymity of their own lives is a universal one that transcends time, region, and ethnicity; it is a search that is as ancient as the ground on which we walk. Magical realism gives life to their faith and their rituals; it makes the magic real. And perhaps it truly is…
In my plays, I’ve built a world where dance, dialogue, and poetry, can co-exist, a world where moving in and out of these modes is as natural as a human being inhaling and exhaling oxygen. Dance, dialogue, and poetry are what move me through life, so perhaps it’s only natural for my dreams to mirror my own practice, the way I live my own life.
Q: What message do you want to emphasize with audiences in relation to the racial, sexual orientation, and political nature of Bird of Pray?
I don’t have a single message. (And if I did, I certainly wouldn’t give it a way. Ha!) Rather, I’d like to leave the audience with questions. And I hope those questions prompt them to seek out more stories like this and to show more compassion to soldiers and perhaps to anyone they don’t already know or understand. I think sharing and listening to stories is an act of compassion; everyone wants to be heard, everyone wants to have their say, few people get a chance to do so. I’m here to better those odds.
