This story was originally published by ArtsATL.
The Alliance Theatre’s playwright-in-residence Pearl Cleage, whose latest work premieres at the theater in January 2024, will receive the 2022 Paul Robeson Award according to a joint announcement from the Actors’ Equity Association and the Actors’ Equity Foundation. Cleage, whose works include “Blues for an Alabama Sky” and the Oprah Book Club selection “What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day,” has been in residence at the Alliance since 2013.
Given jointly by the union and the foundation, the Paul Robeson Award honors individuals who leverage theater to go beyond the stage to enact their commitment to the freedom of expression and conscience, their belief in the artist’s responsibility to society and their dedication to the betterment of humankind.
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The award has been given annually since 1974, when performer Robeson himself was the first recipient. The pandemic interrupted that tradition, so three awards were announced this year. The 2021 prize will be given to actor-director Dale R. Shields, and the 2023 prize will go to the Black Repertory Theatre of Kansas City.
Alliance Theatre Managing Director Mike Schleifer nominated Cleage for her prize, inspired by her art and her activism.
“More than any artist I know, Pearl’s artistic and civic work have remained intertwined, each fueling the other in a constant dialogue that inspires every word she writes,” said Schleifer in a statement. “Pearl’s words often shake us out of our slumber and help us to see what may have been hidden. Her commitment to rigorously writing her conscience generously invites us to examine our own.”
The Alliance also announced that Cleage’s newest work “Something Moving: A Meditation on Maynard” would be performed January 5-7, 2024, as part of its upcoming season. The play honors the 50th anniversary of the election of Maynard Jackson, Atlanta’s first Black mayor.
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The new work, commissioned by Ford’s Theatre in Washington, again combines Cleage’s artistic and civic work. At age 25, Cleage worked on that campaign and then worked for Jackson for two years as a press secretary and speechwriter.
In a recent interview with ArtsATL, Cleage explained the motivation behind “Something Moving,” which received its first staged reading at Ford’s in February.
“Next year will be 50 years since his inauguration; the election itself would’ve been October,” she said. “I really wanted to do something to talk about what it felt like to be here at such a transitional moment.”
The impact of Jackson’s 1973 election upon Atlanta was profound.
“One of the things about Atlanta is we tend to sweep our footprints as fast as we make them,” Cleage said. “We don’t do a lot of looking back, even at our recent history, and I think this was such a pivotal moment that I wanted to give it some light. I wanted to put some light on that moment and what it felt like. There certainly are lots of scholarly kinds of looks at what this was like and what it meant politically.”
Her play’s structure takes on the tone of “Our Town,” where witnesses to the election look back on what it meant. Jackson is not a character in the play. Instead, Cleage imagines the effect his election had upon the community.
Credit: Courtesy of Alliance Theatre
Credit: Courtesy of Alliance Theatre
“The characters in my play are all imaginary people,” she said. “I’ve done this in several of my plays where I’m less interested in the famous person. I’m fascinated with the people around them, the people that were present in Atlanta but were not necessarily working in that campaign. I want to see the people who were moved by that moment, who were changed and transformed.”
Much of the work is inspired by her own memories of the time.
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“What I’m doing is trying to conjure up imaginary characters who can speak to how it felt, how it felt to realize that you were making history,” she said. “You were a part of something that was changing this town forever.”
Cleage said that working with Jackson, riding around with him from event to event so that she could report on what he said, inspired her own abiding love for Atlanta.
“He’s actually one of the reasons I really love Atlanta; he showed me what it looks like to really love a city,” she said. “Invariably, when we would be going down the street, he would know people in every neighborhood we went. He would stop and speak to people by name everywhere we went because he loved this city, he really did.”
Even now, Cleage is impressed by the mayor’s work. Jackson was only 35 when he was running the city, facing intense scrutiny as the first Black mayor of any major Southern city.
“I’m no longer so young and idealistic that I think he was perfect, because he wasn’t perfect,” she said. “But he was perfect in his love for Atlanta and his desire to be the best mayor he could possibly be.”
Cleage said the Alliance staging will feature a multicultural and multigenerational cast of local actors.
“If this is going to be a true collective history of this moment, then the collective has to include everybody, old people and young people,” she said. “It has to have a wide net so that everybody in town, if they come to the show, can see themselves onstage.”
Christopher Moses, associate artistic director of the Alliance, said in an email that the venue is thrilled about the new work and its local impact.
“Pearl has written a piece that is as much a civic event as it is a night at the theater,” he wrote. “Her meditation on Maynard is a generous invitation for all of us to honestly examine our history — warts and all — and still dream about the future of our community. This is not some static history lesson, but a poetic piece of prophecy — a clear-eyed look at our past and present that helps us see a path forward. I can’t wait for Atlantans to experience this play that was written specifically for us.”
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Benjamin Carr, a member of the American Theatre Critics Association, is an arts journalist and critic who has contributed to ArtsATL since 2019. His plays have been produced at The Vineyard Theatre in Manhattan, as part of the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival, and the Center for Puppetry Arts. His novel Impacted was published by The Story Plant in 2021.
Credit: ArtsATL
Credit: ArtsATL
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