INTERVIEW: ‘Mecca Is Burning’ offers commentary on today’s Harlem
Photo: Mecca Is Burning first premiered at Penn Live Arts in February. Now a revised edition of the show is playing the Harlem School of the Arts. Photo courtesy of NEC / Provided by Jonathan Slaff & Associates with permission.
Mecca Is Burning, the new composite play that features contributions from a group of playwrights, offers a lens on Harlem and how this influential, important section of Manhattan has changed throughout the years. Specifically, the production, presented by the Negro Ensemble Company, looks at the gentrification of this historic African American neighborhood and how some residents are worried about losing that history to the ever-changing winds of the real estate market.
At the helm of this production is Karen Brown, artistic director and executive producer of the NEC. She developed the piece with the help of four playwrights: Cris Eli Blak, Lisa McCree, Levy Lee Simon and Mona R. Washington. They each offered a one-act about a family living in Harlem, and then Brown pieced together the narrative into one single play. This nontraditional showcase also features music, dance and a poetry reading.
“The experience has been very interesting, and for me it has been quite positive,” Brown said in a recent phone interview. “And having spoken to the playwrights, I think they have the same experience.”
Brown, who also directs the piece, was initially approached by the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Live Arts program about crafting a work that would examine the political, social and economic realities of African Americans in today’s world. The team at the NEC was happy to jump onboard and begin the important work of holding a lens up to the many difficulties faced in the 21st century.
“In essence, what they were attempting to do is provide a platform for African Americans to have a voice to a crowd that may not have had an opportunity to hear perspectives other than their own, so they approached us,” she said. “I wrote a proposal. The proposal was accepted, and so what I wanted to do was I wanted to have multiple perspectives from varying playwrights. I wanted to have differing views — generational, regional, gender, all of that — because what I didn’t want was for our work to claim to be a monolithic kind of experience for African Americans because it’s not, and so I put together a team of playwrights to try to cobble out a unified piece that would speak to several different perspectives about what African Americans are feeling now in this turbulent, to say the least, time that we are living.”
This theatrical partnership with Penn Live Arts is believed to be the first of its kind, Brown said, and originally it produced an evening of four one-acts, each penned by Blak, McCree, Simon and Washington. This new version of Mecca Is Burning, which continues through Sunday, Aug. 20, is different because Brown has streamlined each of the stories into one large play, still depicting the lives of four families living in a Harlem brownstone.
“The first play we put together, I think it was four one-acts into a night, and the second one, what I wanted to do was to have one play that spoke to the community at large that was culturally specific,” she said. “I think it is meaningful. It’s about four families living in Harlem, which is really quite interesting. What we get is we get reaction from several different voices, several different families reacting to what is a very dangerous situation that takes place in Harlem. I, personally, think it is very interesting. I think our approach to this particular piece is interesting because it’s not traditional theater. It’s not necessarily experimental theater, but it deals with realism. It’s woven back and forth — realism and non-realism, traditional and nontraditional. It’s kind of an interesting piece, and what I also tried to do was incorporate several other disciplines of theater. We’ve got a little bit of music, a little bit of dance, and we have some multimedia.”
Perhaps the most important element for Brown is that Mecca Is Burning, which is being performed at the Harlem School of the Arts, offers a powerful, poignant commentary on the community right outside the theater’s walls. In many ways, it’s appropriate for Mecca Is Burning to premiere in the very neighborhood that the play examines.
“It absolutely does provide commentary on how the changes that Harlem is going through are impacting people who have been here for generations, so it does speak to the concept of gentrification,” Brown said. “One of the things that we know historically was Harlem was the only place that Black people could live for quite some time, and African Americans moved in and made Harlem their own. Harlem now has a very unique and distinct personality that is being taken away, and people aren’t happy about it. So I think it does provide that commentary, and I don’t mean everybody isn’t happy about it. But there are many people who have lived here for generations and/or people like me. I had a minor in African American Studies. Consequently, I have a background in Langston Hughes. … All of these landmark movements — artistic, social, political — took place in Harlem, and now all of that history we fear is going to be wiped away with gentrification.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Mecca Is Burning continues through Sunday, Aug. 20 at the Harlem School of the Arts. Click here for more information and tickets.
