Chloe Johnston is the Production Dramaturg for our upcoming production of SWEET TEA. In this next entry, she discusses her entry into the process and the value of storytelling. Chloe is also an alumnus/director/performer with the Neo-Futurists and an MFA candidate in Northwestern University’s Department of Performance Studies.
I came to this project three years ago as one of Patrick’s research assistants for his book, Sweet Tea: An Oral History of Black Gay Men of the South. My job was to listen to the original recordings of the interviews and correct the transcriptions. So my first encounter with the men who shared their lives for this project was through their own voices. It was an intimate experience, hearing them whisper in my ears, through the headphones, pouring the tea that was to be turned into words in a book, then words in a script, and finally words on a stage. Their stories, their idiosyncratic turns of phrase—representative of their geographic homes and yet unique to each voice—had already traveled from the South to Chicago, and many were soon to continue their journeys. Now that I am working as a dramaturg on the stage production of “Sweet Tea,” I find that I’m very protective of those voices on the tapes, I want to make sure they’re honored, and most importantly, I want to make sure they’re heard. There’s a really beautiful production just about to happen around and through these stories, but at the end of the day the play will succeed as an emotionally fulfilling experience if we get a chance to know each of these men. Sometimes those of us in theatre refer to a play as having ‘universal themes’ and while the impulse to do so—to assure a prospective audience that they will have emotional access to the story—is understandable, I hope in this show we can celebrate what is unique in these voices and in these stories. The men who shared them are a wonderfully eclectic group, but everyone of them is a gifted storyteller. I think my place in the project is to remember that.
