Black Gay Plays Matter

He may not have been kicking and screaming, but Harrison David Rivers was definitely dragged to the Million Hoodie March. "My roommate was, like, you're coming to this march with me," Rivers said recently. "I was very hesitant and maybe not even that nice about it, and it became one of the key moments in the play."

The play is "This Bitter Earth," commissioned by New Conservatory Theatre Center, and it will launch the theater's new season on Sept. 30. Rivers is in town from the Twin Cities during rehearsals and previews, offering input as the story of a politically apathetic black man and his Black Lives Matter-impassioned white boyfriend moves toward its world premiere.

"These two men meet at the Million Hoodie March in 2012," Rivers said of the New York protest over the killing of Trayon Martin, the unarmed young black teen (dressed in a hoodie) who was shot to death on his way home by a neighborhood-watch coordinator. "At the march, he meets this white man with a bullhorn, which leads to a date, which then leads to more. You have lovely, sweet moments, and then you have these moments where they are navigating something they are on the opposite sides of."

The play moves around in time, but over the course of the two men's relationship, they relocate from New York to St. Paul. Several years ago, Rivers moved from New York to St. Paul, where he met his white partner and now husband. "There are moments in the play we both recognize," Rivers said. "But the larger piece is certainly not us."

Rivers, 36, is recognized as an emerging playwriting talent, and productions of his plays have so far attracted attention in New York, the Twin Cities, and beyond. "I've been sending plays to Ed for years," he said, referring to NCTC Artistic Director Ed Decker, who is directing "This Bitter Earth." Rivers suggested creating a new work together, and Decker invited him to be part of the theater's New Play Development Lab.

During the development process, Decker flew to Minneapolis several times to workshop the play at the Playwrights Center, where Rivers had had a playwriting fellowship and where he is now on the board of directors. There, they worked with Twin Cities-based actors H. Adam Harris and Michael Hanna. "Ed sort of fell in love with them, and asked them to come here to do it," Harrison said. The play will then return to the Twin Cities for a 2018 production at the Penumbra Theatre.

Rivers first became familiar with New Conservatory when he lived in San Francisco for a couple of years after graduating from college in 2004. "I thought it was a good place to try to figure out what I want to do," he said. The answer came in an unexpected and somewhat unsettling way.

"I was hearing voices that didn't sound like mine. Like, there's an old woman I don't know in a rocking chair telling me a story, but I'm also in the middle of living my life and she's a little bit loud, and I'm, like, 'You're distracting me from getting on this bus.' It got bad enough where I called my mother, and I thought she was going to tell me to come home. But my mom said, 'Why don't you write down what they are saying?' And that sort of was my way into playwriting."

The voices are still there, but Rivers has found a way of compartmentalizing them. "It sounds a little nutty, but now I know how to say, 'You know, now is not a good time for me? Can we resume this conversation tomorrow?' And sometimes I lose whatever story it was that they were telling me."

Working with the voices, instead of fighting them, Rivers wrote a play that he submitted to Columbia University as part of his application to its MFA program. "That play was 180 pages of mess, but someone saw something in that mess," he said. "When I got to Columbia, there were actors who people really didn't seem to know what to do with - often people of color - and I thought maybe I should write something for them, and that took my work in a new direction."

Autobiography has certainly been a source for material, as it partially is in "This Bitter Earth." But one of his earliest plays featured a character who looked very much like Harrison David Rivers. In "When Last We Flew," the central character is a closeted teen living in Manhattan, Kansas, who steals a copy of "Angels in America" from the local library - which is where Rivers grew up, and what he did with the play.

"My grandmother was head of reference at our local library, so I spent a lot of time there, and I was sort of shocked and awed to find there were gay plays. 'Angels in America,' 'Torch Song Trilogy.' I was embarrassed to read them in the context of my town and the fact that my grandmother worked there. So there was a day when I sort of shoved the book into my underwear. I don't think I ever returned it, but I'm pretty sure they had two copies."

"This Bitter Earth" will run through Oct. 22 at New Conservatory Theatre Center. Tickets are $20-$50. Call (415) 861-8972 or go to nctcsf.org