Jane M. Saks (Co-Producer), Executive Director, Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media writes about her connection to SWEET TEA.
In Sweet Tea, the play, what E. Patrick Johnson and Daniel Alexander Jones do is bring oxygen and audiences to stories we really cannot live without knowing. It is a privilege and an honor to have collaborated over several years with E. Patrick as an Institute Fellow, and more recently with Daniel to help introduce the lives and stories of the men of Sweet Tea into the theatrical canon.
Oral history, upon which E. Patrick’s scholarship for Sweet Tea, the book, is based, is often how we learn of the existence and life experiences of people that have otherwise been invisible to a wider public and, sometimes to themselves. There have always been great voids and reverberating silences in history and being gay, black and southern fits into that category. Sweet Tea fills part of that large void, adding the cadence and tempo of lives that are often ignored. It is a rare opportunity to accompany and be led through the terrain of these men’s lives. Performance, like oral history, is an encounter at a particular moment between human beings. We must recognize these as contested locations of power and voice and pay attention to what is absent, heard, eliminated, seen, offered and spoken. Who deems it valuable and worthy of historic record, creative gesture or close attention? We must.
In creating Sweet Tea, E. Patrick and Daniel understand it as an act of memory shaped as much by the moment of telling as by the lives being told. Sweet Tea, the play, is a long, deeply-held and layered conversation that resides in the body, the spirit and the mind as the lives overlap and intersect through their solitudes and interdependencies.
We are not merely witnesses nor passive vessels heavy with other people’s experiences and testimonies. We actively participate in the human constellation. I believe words, like people, are defined by the company they keep. The men of Sweet Tea, the play, keep and make glorious company. Messy, challenging, exquisite, beautiful companions, they are. Whispering with words well chosen, screaming with the movement of the earth, singing with the rhythms that water and music carry, and preaching with a grace-filled calling — they help to define us as well as themselves. They create company that is full of pain and loss, tender necessity, fury, haunting honesty, style, humor, bawdy self-possession, sarcastic longing and joy and love. They are defined between and among themselves and each other, sometimes standing alone and, yet, inextricably linked. They tint the air, move the dirt, cry the seasons, and drink the tea.
Through and with E. Patrick, they offer it all to us. You will not want to resist the temptation to love them; it is strong and unyielding. The soil of the play is fertile with a long growing season, but sometimes hard and acidic. It is deep and abiding. I believe our differences and our similarities have essential power – a force we cannot do without. If denied, we are far less than our myriad definitions, like words, which are endless.
The men of Sweet Tea as well as E. Patrick himself bring depth, poignancy and poetry, as well as great power and impact to the narrative landscape of queer black men of the South. They create and change that landscape forever.
Since its founding in 2005, the Institute has been a place for the creation of new innovative work. We believe that creative work can always be a catalyst to challenge assumptions and expand human experience and possibilities. Sweet Tea is a perfect example of this deeply held conviction. E. Patrick and Daniel are visionary artists who courageously mine for the most authentic creative gesture. What is central to their creative practices is a temporal understanding of the value of the moment within their artistic vision and within history. It is a gift to collaborate with them and the men of Sweet Tea: C.C. Chaz/Chastity, D.C., Duncan Teague, George “The Countess” Eagerson, Ed, Freddie, Gerome, Harold, Larry J., Michael, R. Dioneaux, and Stephen. The Institute Staff would like to thank them and our co-producers at About Face Theatre for the World Premiere of Sweet Tea, the play.
Photo from Windy City Media Group.
