From the Playwright: Brittany K. Allen

Though the characters and conceit in Redwoodare fabricated, I like to say that a couple slivers of autobiography inspired the play. For starters: several years ago, one of my maternal aunts began to chart my family’s genealogy, and I quickly became fascinated by both my aunt’s commitment to this work, and the way assorted family members (self included) were and were not able to receive her research. The idea for Stevie’s quest was born of the tension between two questions—1) what is it to want to situate yourself on the earth through this ancestor-seeking exercise? and 2) what feelings can that work churn up—particularly for Black Americans?

Second sliver: when I began writing Redwood, I was in an interracial relationship (my first adult one, for what it's worth) and often found myself having conversations that forced me to be articulate as both the considerate partner, and the Black woman who’s ever-aware of the racial power dynamics in every room she enters. Around the time of Mike Brown’s murder, my then-partner and I had this dreadful fight that I’ve since realized was about a much larger feeling I had, though I could not put words to this at the time. In hindsight: I needed my white partner to understand why I was metabolizing a news story so personally—but this was, of course, an impossible ask for a white person. So instead I picked a fight about the dishes, and the day became a bellwether. Like Mom in the play, I obfuscated.

After that frustrating fight, I got obsessed with mapping a more general dynamic, which I’ve since perceived in a thousand conversations I’ve had with white loved ones. I noticed that I’d made a habit of getting tongue-tied and livid in certain conversations which seemed to be skating over something unspeakable. I took a lazy survey of POC friends, and realized I wasn’t alone—in fact, lots of folks had experienced the kind of intimate fight wherein we reckoned briefly with the paradox that many historically disenfranchised bodies walk around with in America: I (in this case, Black lady) mistrust you (in this case, white man) for something vast and ancient that is not your fault, yet you walk with it. Yet I love you! Yet, you walk with it...

Now I present all this personal dredge not in the interest of throwing shade at exes, but to underline what feels really important to me about this story. I believe that this work many of us are doing now, on both national and intimate stages—you may call it “de-colonizing” or “genealogical spelunking”, whatever your verb—sometimes, we forget that it is personal. It is one thing to “know” your politics and your history, the horrors this nation was built on, in the abstract. It is one thing to “know” who you’ll probably fall in love with, or how you’ll probably speak your truth in a vulnerable moment. But we humans are so contradiction-contingent, so clumsy. I wanted to write a play that honors both the heft of every maddening conversation that permits both race and respect in the room, and the undeniable murk of those moments.

To do all this, I thought to write about a family who already has a system in place (humor) that helps them metabolize the historical irony of their situation. But just as happened in my own family, when all the grime and specifics of history are thrust into my characters’ faces, that coping mechanism fails, and muddle ensues. The couple in the play know everything one could ostensibly get from a Zinn book about America, but they have not personalized the stories; that’s what puts them at risk. Mom and Steve have failed to articulate their anxieties, and it’s that failure to give voice to a wound that gnaws at them. As I drafted, I realized I was fixating on how all of us—but particularly Black folks—find ways to talk over that original America paradox: this land is blood-soaked and haunted, yet some of us have survived to love it. I love you. Yet you walk with it. Yet I love you.

I believe there’s a lot of necessary, messy, fighting that has to happen on that paradox plane if any kind of healing is to happen in this nation. And these conversations can’t be abstract, because it’s all personal—even if you’re not in love with a person of a different race, as Meg is. I wrote Redwood, and then named it after the oldest, biggest, most resilient tree in this country, in an attempt to acknowledge that cocktail of frustration and love that engenders messiness before requiring people to grow or get out.

It’s not easy, this work of trying to love each other and look at history simultaneously. Ancient wounds are so hard to see and name. Yet the people in the play try to see and name them.

And I have tried. I hope you will, too.