📼 Adapting Contexts: A Conversation with Isaiah Wooden

📅 March 3, 2022

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Recently I had a conversation with Dr. Isaiah Wooden, a scholar and dramaturg, about black identity, adaptation, and reworking black stories. The following is a part of that conversation.

Joseph: My upcoming presentation argues that both Erasure and The Sellout are actively reworking and reimagining, and, in Erasure's case, parodying, Wright's novel Native Son in a new century. Could you talk about your experiences working on the stage adaptation of Native Son, and other plays? Do you have any sort of general thoughts or insights on this topic from working on these plays, especially about telling the story (especially one so divisive) in the 21st century?

Isaiah: I worked as a dramaturg on a relatively new stage adaptation of the text by playwright Nambi E. Kelley. I have an essay on that adaptation, [and] one of the notable innovations of Kelley's adaptation is the personification of the Black Rat from the opening pages of the novel. In Kelley's adaptation, the Black Rat character becomes representative of Bigger's complex psychic life, which intensifies the stakes a bit, I think.

Joseph: So the Black Rat becomes a fully-fledged character . . . Scholars have written about Wright's allusion to Poe's story "The Black Cat;” does the Black Rat fit into that conversation at all? Does it feel like a furthering of this kind of other-worldly, mystical idea, or is it more of a grounded feature of the play? Does this change feel necessary to tell the story now, in an altered context?

Isaiah: I think Kelley’s vision of the character does create a kind of otherworldliness that makes explicit Bigger’s sense of himself as always already othered. In an interview we did with her, Kelly noted she thought of the Black Rat as an externalization of Bigger’s double consciousness. As such, the change does feel necessary to the adaptation, as it allows the piece to explore the ways folks continue to negotiate double consciousness in the twenty-first century.

Joseph: The new context of the twenty-first century certainly changes things. In your essay, you also discuss the ending of the adaptation: that it could seem rather positive, and that some scholars caution against that sort of reading. The pattern of retellings of similar stories (Erasure, The Sellout) becoming more hopeful at the cost of becoming less "real" (with a turn toward absurdism/satire over realism) might ring true with the stage adaptation, as this time around there is a talking rat and a perhaps more hopeful ending. Does it feel to you like this play might fit into this sort of proposed pattern of retelling the story—or is there something else entirely going on in the play?

The opening scene of Kelley's adaptation of Native Son (2016)

"Bigger’s actions at the end of the piece aren’t necessarily hopeful but do mark a refusal of the status quo. And that, in some ways, might be thought of as a kind of futurity."

The final moments of Kelley's Native Son

Isaiah: I would say that the ending of the adaptation, which concludes with a flight of fancy, fits into a larger conversation that’s ongoing now about what it means to imagine the world otherwise. Bigger’s actions at the end of the piece aren’t necessarily hopeful but do mark a refusal of the status quo. And that, in some ways, might be thought of as a kind of futurity.

Joseph: When you say that the ending of the play is a sort of "futurity" what exactly does that mean for Bigger, and then, for the world? What does "futurity" look like?

Isaiah: The final stage direction for Kelley's adaptation is as follows:

POLICE #1: Drop ‘em!

(They drop him. . . Lights. Fantasy. BIGGER’s body suspends midair. He listens for the voice inside his head. But it is not there. A defiant, wry smile crosses his lips.)

BIGGER

...Fly.

(BIGGER drops. He flies.)

The turn toward fantasy and flying here suggests that there is still more to come for Bigger—and all for whom he is a substitute. And, that's what I mean by futurity—the possibility of creating a world otherwise, of imagining and embodying something outside of the here and now.

Joseph: You were also the dramaturg for another play that deals with Wright. What was your experience like as dramaturg for Les Deux Noirs: Notes on Notes of a Native Son? What sorts of conversations arose when it came to telling this story? What sorts of concerns were raised/addressed?

Isaiah: The production [of Notes on Notes] uses a meeting that Wright and Baldwin reportedly had at Paris’s Les Deux Magot as a springboard to fictionalize an encounter between mentor and mentee in the wake of several years of dissension. Perhaps one of the more interesting features of it was the way it spoke to the FBI’s keen interest in surveilling Black writers during the Cold War and Civil Rights eras, fearing their work might pose "a threat to democracy". There’s a fascinating book, F.B. Eyes, that offers a detailed account of the ways that the FBI came to influence African American literature.

Joseph: How do Baldwin's thoughts on the novel change the way we think about this story now, in 2022?

Isaiah: There’s something important about knowing that, despite its popularity, the novel was the source of tremendous debate in its day. I see Baldwin’s thoughts on the novel as an invitation to really sit with some of the ambivalence it likely continues to produce for contemporary readers, which can embolden them to interpret the text on its own terms.

If you would like to learn more about these plays and more, Dr. Wooden's work can be found here.

Richard Wright and James Baldwin squaring off

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