By Karen Amano

I REMEMBER FEELING my gut lurch when I read the script of Yellowman, Dael Orlandersmith's searingly intense, poetic play about the tragic romance between a light-skinned black man and a dark-skinned black woman in South Carolina. The setup is simple: the two actors address the audience and tell their story, which plays out the tragedy of internalized racism in two families, for whom the legacy of slavery is encoded in the shade of their skin.

Orlandersmith, a native New Yorker, was weaned on the multicultural theatrical vision of Joseph Papp and began her career in theater as an actor (she has given towering virtuoso performances in this two-person play). When people kept asking her who wrote her audition monologues, which she penned for herself, she knew she was onto something. Before Yellowman, her first multiactor play, she wrote and performed three solo shows – Beauty's Daughter (which won an Obie Award), Monster, and The Gimmick – to wide acclaim at regional theaters such as Princeton, N.J.'s McCarter Theatre, New Haven, Conn.'s Long Wharf Theatre, and New York Theatre Workshop.

For theater people, regional theaters are the mother lode. They're big-budget, not-for-profit organizations that pay professional wages, real wages. Locally, think American Conservatory Theater, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and San Jose Repertory Theatre. If you're an actor or a playwright and you want to make art and eat on a consistent basis, you want to work regionally. In the last 15 years, many of the finest (and most commercially successful) plays – such as Angels in America, Top Dog/Underdog, and Rent – have originated at regional theaters. In addition to grants from the government, foundations, and individuals, the regionals depend on subscription audiences. Typically, their audiences are well-heeled, over 40, and white.

But Orlandersmith's play about colorism among African Americans is all over regional theaters. Yellowman, commissioned by the McCarter Theatre and a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, is receiving productions at eight theaters across the country, including a run at Berkeley Rep. Orlandersmith is also working on a new play, commissioned by Philadelphia's Wilma Theater. Our conversation really got rolling when we talked about what it was like for artists of color to work in regional theater.

BG: You're one of a handful of playwrights of color being produced nationally. Your play might be the one work by a person of color in a given theater's season. Does that place a special responsibility or burden on your work to be "representative" somehow?

DO: That's scary stuff. I never take that on. I mean, Charles Barkley said that as a basketball player, "I'm not a role model. You've got your parents." Like any group of people, we are multidimensional, multicultural. And each of us black Americans, we have a similar history, but we're different individuals. How we live on a day-to-day basis varies, just like white people. It's a given that I'm black; it's a given that I'm female. I don't want to be known as a black female writer, you know.

BG: Are you treated differently as a writer because you happen to be female and you happen to be black?

DO: My situation has been good for the most part, but what's happened to me with certain theaters – not all – is this: I did this play called The Gimmick quite a few years back. And because it was about a black girl in Harlem and a black boy in Harlem and I played all the roles, everyone assumed automatically that it was autobiographical. Now, my response to that has been and always has been: even if it's not directly autobiographical, it's autobiographical in the sense that whatever subject matter interests someone is very telling. But no, it's not my life. It's not. You know what I'm saying?

What would happen is the theaters would get children "at risk" in. Now, I am not a therapist. I am not a social worker. I am not a surrogate parent. Of course, I want the audience diversified. Of course, I want white people, people of color, in the audiences, but they targeted inner-city kids. And "inner-city kids" is nothing but a pseudonym for poor black and Latino kids. They literally brought in quote-unquote "children at risk," i.e., children who've never been to the theater before. And I was held up as this example or a "credit." For an hour and a half, I was supposed to show these children hope – at the expense of them making noise and me stopping the show – so certain theaters can say, "Oh, we did this outreach in the community," and, "It looks good to the feds, so we can get some money."

BG: Does that make you feel exploited?

DO: It annoys me because I want the audience to be diversified, but also, I should come in as the writer and as the actor and just do my job and leave. You know, that school system should have been hooked up before. Everybody in that class should have had access to people like Langston Hughes and Pablo Neruda and Sherman Alexie and Emily Dickinson way before I got there. My politics, as it were, is in just doing the work. I'm active in my own way, but I like to keep it separate from what I do. I mean, I am not a "political writer-actor," per se.

BG: So you see yourself as an artist, whose responsibilities don't include integrating the audience and inspiring troubled children?

DO: I mean, certain people do do that, and it's not a bad thing. Certain actors and certain writers like doing that. I'm not one of them. I realize that in theater money is low, and there are certain kinds of outreach that need to be done. I'm just saying oftentimes the subtext of that is "credit to one's race." And it's a heavy enough trip as it is, you know, living on a day-to-day basis. The positive-role-model stuff takes on a meaning of it's own. It's very conservative. With black people, like any group of people, you have a very conservative sect, and if I screw up, you know, that means I screwed up for all black people.

BG: You're not looking to set yourself up as a role model for black American youth.

DO: You want your kids to follow me? 'Cause I can tell you what I do before a show, before a play comes out. I'll tell you exactly what I do. I got these guys on East Fourth Street that I know – I'm serious – I roll craps with them. I do. I get on Fourth Street, I say, "Man, I got a new show." You know, I roll craps with these cats and I do two shots of tequila, and then I'm gone. Now, do you really want your children to follow me?

So in terms of working with the regionals, I'm there to do the work. And that audience should have been diversified before I got there.

BG: Of course, Yellowman is the result of a commission from a regional theater, the McCarter. Tell me something about the genesis of the play.

DO: You know, "high yella" is a nasty term directed toward lighter-skinned blacks. I wanted to look at not only race, I wanted to look at how people take on the bias that's been done to them and how they perpetuate it – the proverbial sins of the father, sins of the mother – and how the very thing one despises about one's parents, one ends up becoming. It's not an autobiographical piece. I'm a New Yorker. My mother was from South Carolina, and she did kind of grow up in the Gullah Geechee community. When I was a kid, I would go down and visit. This was in the '60s. And I was aware of how, particularly down there, the darkest of the dark and the lightest of the light got together.

But I would also hear these stories about how certain lighter-skinned families would interbreed to keep light skin going and how darker-skinned people were treated. And then I also looked at the dynamic of how, particularly when "black is beautiful" came in, how light-skinned males really had to prove that they were quote-unquote "black enough." They were forced to fight twice as hard, say, if they were in a violent situation. And light-skinned girls got their hair pulled. The flip side of the action, too, is how someone would laugh at a black person, a darker-skinned person, who had larger lips and nappy hair – whatever that means. You know what I'm saying? I wanted to look at the dynamic. And in this regard, I didn't want to let white people off the hook certainly – I mean, the history of why that is, is because of slavery – but I also didn't want to let black people off the hook for taking it on.

BG: And what kind of reaction have you gotten from black audiences?

DO: For the most part, black people have been so supportive. They've said, "I'm glad this is out," "Yes, we do this." There are a few people who got mad at me. I mean, one woman said, "I'm a dark-skinned person. I have great self-esteem." And, you know, people are going to look at a racial ratio and often look for justice, as opposed to looking for a story. This is a story, not the story. I got a lot of letters from light-skinned men who said, "This happened to me." You know, "I was made to feel that I was a punk."

BG: You performed in the first four or five productions of Yellowman, but now it's being done without you. How does that make you feel?

DO: I'm glad. It feels good that other people are doing it. That's the whole point. And other people are doing The Gimmick as well. That's nice – I mean, I worry about not seeing the productions. I worry about that. Here in New York I had to describe to a casting person what a light-skinned black man looked like.

BG: No!

DO: I'm not playing around when I say that. I had people as dark as Sidney Poitier coming in. And I kept explaining to the casting people, "Light-skinned is Vin Diesel. Light-skinned is Brian Stokes Mitchell." One guy in the middle of an audition said, "I'm too dark for this, aren't I?" and I said, "Yeah, you are, and I've been trying to tell these folks this, but no one's listening." And the flip side of it, in terms of [the character] Alma – I want her to be a big shapely woman; I don't want her to be a mammy. I mean, you asked me about racism, right? I'm telling you that many casting people cannot tell the difference between a light-skinned black person and a dark-skinned black person. It's a simple matter of bigotry. If I say to somebody, "a yellow man," why do I see somebody of Sidney Poitier's color sitting up there? That's just common sense. You know what I mean? Yellow man. High yellow. The same way that there's a difference between Julianne Moore and Demi Moore, there's a difference with us. We look nothing alike. I mean, some people say, "Well, you know, when I ask for a blond, I get a brunette." I say you can't compare that. You cannot compare hair color to skin color. That's what I mean. It was just out-and-out racism, that's what it was. And people can tell when they're being patronized. "Oh, you're not right for this, but we'll keep you in mind for something else." I had to keep from really yelling at times.

BG: I'm interested in the way you choose to tell your stories in your plays. The story is told, rather than shown. We get the story through the subjective voices of two of the characters.

DO: It's more like poetry than personal narrative.

BG: Most plays operate with an illusion of objectivity. You see the actors talking to each other, and you can assume that you're witnessing the actual conversation between these characters. In Yellowman we experience the story through these two people.

DO: It's like being in the heads of the characters, right? And then they talk to each other at points. Dialogue comes out of monologue. It's almost as if you have a talking head before you. And by doing so, we're experimenting with the fourth wall [the imaginary wall that separates the audience from the actors], and then we do break it. But I still say there's a beginning, middle, end, story, conflict, resolution.

BG: So it seems that one thing that's really important to you is the point of view of these storytellers.