INTERVIEW: Harlem Renaissance novel, ‘Quicksand,’ jumps to the stage
Photo: Quicksand is a new play adapted by Regina Robbins from the original novel by Nella Larsen. Photo courtesy of Anaïs Koivisto / Provided by Everyday Inferno Theatre Company with permission.
Nella Larsen’s important Harlem Renaissance novel, Quicksand, has recently been adapted for the stage by playwright Regina Robbins and is currently playing New York City’s IRT Theater, thanks to Everyday Inferno Theatre Company. Performances of the drama, which also features gospel and jazz music, continue through Saturday, Dec. 15.
The story centers on the character of Helga Crane, daughter of a Danish white mother and West Indian black father. The audience watches as she travels through different cultures and communities — black, white, male-dominated, the American South, Denmark, New York — in search of her identity and the world’s understanding. Robbins and director Anaïs Koivisto infuses the narrative with plenty of song and dance as Helga travels farther and deeper.
“It starts long ago when I was an undergraduate college student, and I read Quicksand in a class,” Robbins said in a recent phone interview. “I remember being struck by the fact that I had never read anything like it and was surprised that I had never heard of the author, Nella Larsen, before. It struck me particularly because there aren’t a lot of narratives particularly from the Harlem Renaissance period or any pre-late-20th-century period that are explicitly about a biracial character who experiences the world as biracial.”
Robbins pointed to narratives written by Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington as examples of early literature that deal with issues of being biracial, but it was Quicksand that ushered in a new perspective.
“Myself being biracial, that struck me as extremely unique, so cut to many years later when in the course of my relationship with Everyday Inferno Theatre Company and its artistic director, Anaïs Koivisto, we were having a conversation about things I was thinking about,” the playwright said. “I was thinking about Quicksand, partly because of the increased attention to issues of racial identity that were kicked up in the aftermath of the [Barack] Obama presidency.”
Robbins believes that in 2018 many Americans are still confused about what it means to be biracial or multiracial, even though the country is increasingly becoming more diverse, and there are more narratives about race and identity.
“And the fact that also we just had a president for eight years who, like the character in Quicksand, is a black person who has deep family ties with people who are not black, but again he’s also very clear that he identifies as an African-American person,” she said.
There is also the fact that the character of Helga lives in a time of discrimination against women. That history provided the playwright with another lens to view the story.
“[Considering Quicksand], we think of the ’20s as a time where women were starting to experience greater freedom and personal choices … but there’s still a lot of barriers placed between [Helga] and the life she wants to live,” Robbins said. “So all that factored into my thinking about trying to adapt a novel to the stage, which is always a ridiculous enterprise since structurally speaking a novel is way different than a traditional play. The end result is this isn’t much of a traditional play.”
To adapt this text into a digestible piece for the stage, one that runs nearly three hours, Robbins tried a little bit of everything. She attempted to infuse each scene with as much detail as possible, so that audience members would buy into Helga’s journey, one that takes her around the United States and the world.
“We’re going to let our imagination go crazy and say, yeah, we can have … bicycles crossing the stage of the IRT Theater and have people speaking in multiple languages without benefit of translation,” she said. “There will not be supertitles in the section where people are actually speaking Danish. This came out of an absurd rehearsal one time where we were talking about how to convey the idea that the character is bilingual.”
For the playwright, Quicksand provides an opportunity to mine the history books and Larsen’s source material for stories that engage.
“In addition to being in love with stories, I’m also in love with history, which, of course, is the source of the greatest stories,” Robbins said. “I find more and more that the things that have really happened to people in life are far more fascinating and interesting than anything we could invent, so I hope that some of that sense rubs off on the audience. Our real lives are very interesting.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Quicksand, adapted by Regina Robbins from the original novel by Nella Larsen, is playing through Dec. 15 at the IRT Theater in New York City. The show is produced by Everyday Inferno Theatre Company. Click here for more information and tickets.
