By Jesse Roth
[The Feast]’s Communications Manager, Jesse Roth, sat down with The Amen Corner director Reggie D. White to discuss card games, [The Feast], the privilege of pressure, and most importantly, James Baldwin.
JR: Reggie, what’s your favorite card game?
RW: My favorite card game is spades, followed very closely by this game that I learned called “oh heck.” It has fifty different names.
JR: Why are cards important in this rehearsal process?
RW: At the end of every rehearsal day, as a collective come-down ritual, the whole cast plays a game of Uno.For me, in particular, cards are important to this rehearsal process because my journey with my Blackness—from being a child, where Blackness was a thing that I saw, to being an adult where it is a thing that I understand and fully live in and inhabit—started with cards.
I remember very clearly the first time I played spades with my best friend. We were in Charlotte, and I did the cardinal sin of reneging. That was a decade ago and she still will never let me live that down.
There’s something very special about the kind of community that comes when people are being ruthlessly competitive. Also, we’ve been saying for so long that Blackness is not a monolith. But there is something communal and shared about cards and shit-talking. I love it. It’s a beautiful way to shake off the difficulty of the work and remind ourselves that, at the end of the day, we are a group of Black artists who are so fortunate to be able to tell this story together.
JR: When did you first read The Amen Corner?
RW: I’d known James’ work as a fiction writer, and I’d known a bit of his work as a person speaking about racism, but I didn’t actually know he was a playwright until maybe a decade ago when someone told me about this play and also Blues for Mister Charlie.
He writes plays like a novelist. Take that for whatever it means for you!But there is such richness to the worlds he creates. Few people who have ever walked the earth are as brilliant as he was. This play is different from Blues because there’s a racial, social problem that he’s exploring there; there’s a need to cast someone as the villain. But I think it’s such a beauty to witness this play, which is really about what it means to be a human. Every character is so deep and so complex. I believe every character has a piece of Jimmy in them, which is such a gift when playwrights can do that.
I’m so happy it came into my life. And I’m so happy to be working on it here.
JR: What is a favorite memory from [The Feast]?
RW: There are so many! But one is from when we were doing Blues for Mister Charlie five years ago—so long ago!
It’s a hard play. It’s about the murder of this Black boy. There’s a lot of racial tension in the play. And there was a lot of racial harmony in the cast. So it was really really beautiful to be, like, “Hey! I love you!” backstage and then have a really intense moment onstage.
When we were doing the show, our dressing rooms were the children’s church classrooms. There were a lot of ….shenanigans and antics that took place on very tiny chairs. Leicester, Grant, and Max know exactly what I mean! It was a time that I will cherish for the rest of my life.
“At the heart of this play is the necessity to remember that love is the most important thing we can do as people. It’s something Jimmy said a lot.”
JR: Why is The Amen Corner important right now?
RW: The Amen Corner is important right now because we are at a time in our society where we’ve gotten really hard. We’ve gotten really hardened. I talk about this a lot around all the collectively traumatic experiences that have transpired between the election in 2016 and the insurrection on January 6th, 2021—not to mention the pandemic that we’re living in.
At the heart of this play is the necessity to remember that love is the most important thing we can do as people. It’s something Jimmy said a lot.
It gets lost because so much of his passion was about race. There are a lot of clips of Jimmy taking people down, and it’s very cathartic to watch someone run intellectual circles around other people.
But at his heart, Jimmy really believed that the most important thing we can do as people is to love each other and allow ourselves to be loved. What more important reminder is there at this point in our history?
Yes, do all the things that make you a responsible citizen. Yes, don’t be racist. And yes, vote. And compost. And all that stuff. But at the heart of it, before you wake up and before you go to bed, just remember that the most important thing we can do is to love.
JR: How does it feel to be doing The Amen Corner in Seattle for the very first time?
RW: To be the first production of The Amen Corner in Seattle is an immense honor. There’s a bunch of pressure to be doing one of the two plays ever written by James Baldwin, at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute. I feel their presence every day—these two Black literary giants of art and culture and queerness and society. It’s a lot. But it’s a tremendous honor that I take really seriously.
One of my favorite quotes is from Billie Jean King, who says that “pressure is a privilege.” They have it at the entrance, where the players walk out, at Arthur Ashe Stadium at the U.S. Open. I feel the privilege of this pressure. I feel such immense trust from [The Feast] to be guiding this story. I feel Jimmy in the room with us. I’m really honored and excited for people to get to see the play, finally!
JR: If you could have dinner with James Baldwin and one other person, who would you invite? And what would you eat? And….what would you wear?
RW: This is so hard! I can only invite one person?!
I think I would invite my grandma.
I almost said Nina Simone because they were best buddies and I’d be so curious to be a fly on the wall for that conversation. But I think I would participate more vigorously in a conversation between Jimmy and my grandmother because they were born very close to the same time as to each other.I think my grandmother had a really difficult time understanding my queerness because it meant that I was existing in a kind of freedom that was so foreign to her—that she had no imagination for. And I think it would have been incredible to have Jimmy at the table because he is a person she had such tremendous respect for—for his literary brain.
Jimmy made no apologies for who he was, but he could never really wear it on his sleeve. And so, I would be fascinated to see what that conversation would have been like.
One of the biggest tragedies of the AIDS epidemic is that we lost an entire generation of elders to that disease. To be able to have a really rigorous multi-generational, intersectional conversation about Blackness and queerness and politics…I think I’m going to have a dream about that very soon, probably.
And I would wear….I think I would wear something sharp. I think I would wear a suit. It would be very muted, with one piece of accent jewelry. And I would spend a great deal of time making sure that not a single hair was out of place on my head—which it often is! I would take great pains to make sure I was presented within an inch of my life for that conversation.
And what would we eat? Oh god! My grandma would cook. She would want to cook. And I would want her to cook.