INTERVIEW: Chisa Hutchinson searches for ‘Proof of Love’
Photo: Brenda Pressley stars in Chisa Hutchinson’s Proof of Love at the Minetta Lane Theatre. Photo courtesy of Joan Marcus / Provided by BBB with permission.
Audible Theater has shaken up the off-Broadway world with their staging of thoughtful, engaging one-person shows at the Minetta Lane Theatre in the West Village. They have previously mounted performances by Billy Crudup and Carey Mulligan, among others.
Now the company is giving voice to Chisa Hutchinson’s new show, Proof of Love, directed by Jade King Carroll and starring Brenda Pressley. The production is in partnership with New York Theatre Workshop.
The show follows Constance (Pressley) as she sits by her husband’s bedside in a hospital room. He is in a coma after experiencing a horrific accident, and she has some questions she’d like answered about his affair with another woman. Over the course of 75 minutes, Constance delivers a powerful monologue about love, marriage, finding one’s proof of love, classism and forgiveness.
“It was commissioned by Audible,” Hutchinson said in a recent phone interview. “So I did have some parameters, and that was it needs to work in audio format because initially it was just going to be an audio play. So for that to be successful, they needed a text that could be performed by one or two actors.”
The actual content of the play, depicting Constance’s emotional journey, was partly inspired by circumstances in Hutchinson’s personal life.
“I guess it was just a bunch of different things happening in my life and in my family’s life that inspired the events of the play,” she said. “For starters, my granddad actually was in a really horrific car accident and was in a coma, so a lot of the medical stuff in the play is based on that.”
Another close family member dealt with the difficulty of an affair and the inability to find answers before it was too late. “They didn’t really get to reconcile the way she would have wanted,” Hutchinson said.
Then there are the socio-economic themes of the play. Constance finds that she has lived a somewhat different life than her husband, and Hutchinson said this mirrors her own marriage.
“[These] are things that I feel being married to my husband because I grew up piss poor in the hoodest of the hoods in Newark, New Jersey,” Hutchinson said. “My husband grew up pretty solidly middle-class with two professional parents. They vacationed on the Vineyard every summer, just were an all-American family, an aspirational black family, so every now and then I feel that divide between us. We talk about it.”
Although the events of Proof of Love could have played out as a large dysfunctional family drama, Hutchinson said she doesn’t write that type of show. This is an intimate one-hander, an exploratory monologue that seeks to define Constance, an African-American woman who shares her thoughts and emotions with the audience, right near her husband’s fragile body.
“I don’t like writing characters who are only dealing with problems that are [their own] and no bigger, so I really try to craft characters who are up against forces that are bigger than they are, even if they aren’t aware as in the case of Constance,” said Hutchinson, whose other plays include She Like Girls, The Subject and Dead & Breathing. “She didn’t even realize that classism was an issue in her marriage until just now, so yeah it sort of sneaks up on her. But I definitely went in with the idea that I wasn’t just going to write about a woman who has discovered her husband is having an affair. I definitely wanted there to be something more, something deeper.”
When Hutchinson wrote the play, she had Phylicia Rashad in mind for the role of Constance; however, the actor was busy with other projects. So the playwright starting looking around for another actor to build this portrait. Pressley came onto her radar because of their previous collaboration, Surely Goodness and Mercy, which recently wrapped at Theatre Row thanks to the Keen Company.
“I had to look elsewhere for my vessel, and it just so happened that I was working with Brenda for the first time on the play right before this one called Surely Goodness and Mercy,” the playwright said. “She was doing a fantastic job with that character and also just such a lovely human. She’s such a great person to have in any room. She’s really hard working, just pleasant all the time. She’s a radiant person, so it was a no-brainer for me once I started working with her and once I realized that it was a possibility to have her play the role. I was all for it. I was ready, and I didn’t really have to change much because she’s a highly adaptable actor. She does the work. She really studies a character and listens to the director and listens to the writer.”
Proof of Love, which continues for two more weeks at the Minetta Lane Theatre, did not go through many extensive changes in the development process. When Hutchinson received the commission through the Audible Playwrights Fund, the story and its themes came together rather quickly.
“So this idea of you can never really know what’s someone’s intentions are toward you, and you can never really know how they are feeling about you, you just have to trust, you just have to look for the proof in how they behave and how they treat you, so all of that was definitely there from the beginning,” Hutchinson said. “But discoveries that we made were based more on the issues of class and how much Constance grows or evolves as a person given everything that she’s been through and what she’s come to understand about herself and her dynamic.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Proof of Love, written by Chisa Hutchinson, directed by Jade King Carroll and starring Brenda Pressley, plays through June 16 at the Minetta Lane Theatre in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
