Aleshea Harris (AH): Hi Celeste, how are you?

Celeste Jennings (CJ): I’m pretty good, how are you? Thank you for doing this with me.

AH: Of course, thank you for asking me. I’m good, I live in LA, but I’m currently here in New York working on postproduction for my movie.

CJ: Oh wow, I live in Brooklyn, but I’m currently here in LA opening a show.

AH: What show?

CJ: Furlough’s Paradise [by a.k. payne] opens tonight at the Geffen Playhouse. I’ve had the best time collaborating with a.k., and I return to the city tomorrow.

AH: That’s amazing, a.k. is a mentee of mine, and I’m happy to hear it’s going well. I know you’re a costume designer and that makes me curious about what parts of your practice as a costume designer inform your practice as a writer and vice versa?

CJ: I was introduced to theater in undergrad through costume design. I didn’t go to college for theater, and my work study assignment was to work in the costume shop. I didn’t know anything about technical theatre at the time but soon fell in love with costume design and then playwriting. My favorite parts of both disciplines are researching and creating brand-new worlds. I love to research specific moments in time and explore how they influence characters and ask questions as small as “what do these characters have in their closet that belongs to their grandmas?” It feels like a gift of the job. As a writer I find myself mostly drawn to writing Southern plays. I struggle to write about right here right now, but I just love reading and figuring out history. I’m writing to better understanding and connect my ancestor’s lives, trials and tribulations, joys, and love, to the same lived experiences we have today.

AH: Thank you so much for sharing all of that, so much of it resonates with me. I absolutely feel

the unspeakable, indescribable excitement for building a world as writer, too. I would love to turn to Potliqka, and ask you how you make sure characters feel loved and real in your writing?

CJ:  I love to write period Black plays, generally set after the Emancipation Proclamation. I write about oppression and hope and am drawn to bittersweet realistic endings. I don’t want my work to be fairytales, and I want to really highlight the similarities we share with lives lived many generations ago. Sometimes when I’m going through craziness and chaos in my own life, I think to myself, “my Granny or Great Uncles wouldn’t understand this”, but that’s definitely not true! They certainly did endure the same chaos even if the situations or technology of the time was different! My goal as a writer is parallel period characters experiences to contemporary life. Those direct connections really excite me!

Having Potliqka set during slavery and before the Emancipation Proclamation, has been terrifying to me! I can’t just call a family member who was there like I can for my other plays. It’s been hard, because I don’t want the play to feel like it is about slavery because it’s not at all, but I also cannot dismiss that context in the writing. I have tried so hard to love my characters, and to represent their robust and rich lives. I don’t think of myself as a comedy writer, but I try to find moments of relief that I think are real. I know they that experienced that too - or we wouldn’t be here!

AH: I think that taking care to balance characters who are experiencing oppression is critical when writing about oppressed people and I think that you’ve done a great job—so hat’s off to you for that. Why did you need to write this play?

CJ:  This might feel unrelated but my Granny, Gloria Jean Bradford, who I loved to pieces passed away about two years ago. I miss her so much and her passing has deeply and affected my life. But the Thanksgiving after she passed, I was in New York and planning to go to a Friendsgiving, and I was just really missing her and my family, so I thought I would make greens for the first time in my life to bring to this party. I was really nervous! I didn’t want to mess up this iconic dish: Most everyone in my family can cook really well; everyone has their own greens recipe, and they’re all so good!!

So I decided to make it, and I’m not trying to brag or anything, but it came out perfect! I was like “oh shit, I am really good at this!” It didn’t make any sense, and I was kind of overcome with emotions—and questions, like “is this recipe in my DNA?” I could feel my Granny, and Dad (who passed when I was a teenager) right there with me over my shoulders leading me as I was cooking, and I felt I had to write about it. I never really thought about how ancestral and intuitive cooking is, it was always this thing that I learned how to do at such an early age. But I just really wanted to write about that feeling, and the rest of the play came to me through that.

AH:  That’s so beautiful. It sounds like there’s some comfort inside of making those perfect greens and reaching through time in that way. I want to talk about how times moves in your play, since the ancestors in Potliqka are from the late 18^th century.

CJ: I’ve been developing my approach on historical reimagining with this play. Once I knew it was about food, I immediately connected to James Hemmings [the first American to train as a chef in France], and then I started doing all this research and I learned about Malinda Russell, the first black woman to publish a cookbook in 1866. What is so amazing is that you can just get her book. It’s available all these years later as a pdf on her website. And at the beginning of the book, she has a few paragraphs where she talks about her life, and her reason for publishing the cookbook. Structure isn’t something that I’m guided by when writing, it’s been a more intuitive process – I write what feels good.

Malinda Russell and James Hemings don’t really overlap historically, and it really bothered me initially because I really felt like they needed to be in my play together, but finally I just accepted that I was messing with time and pursuing historical reimagining, and the decision was so liberating! After that I really felt like I could write the play.

AH: Well I would offer that it does have structure. Maybe not traditional Western playwrighting structure, but there is a structure. And I think an intuitive structure is still a structure. I am also very intuitive when it comes to writing, I feel like I find my stories by writing them. The play sort of tells me what it wants to be—I can’t tell it from afar.

CJ: That’s great to hear. I’m not really an outliner, because I always think to myself, “how would I know?”

AH: Completely, that practice doesn’t make sense to my spirit at all.

CJ: Can I ask you a question? How do your plays come to you? How do you wrestle with them and go from thought to writing?

AH:  It sort of varies form play to play, but generally I have what I would call a flash, which is an image or an interest or an idea for a story that I immediately feel strongly will make for a good narrative that I’m excited to wrestle with for the year it will take to write it. When those ideas come, I know that they’re quite fruitful, or I can feel how much I might be able to do with it. Sometimes I’ll see an image and write towards an image, or I’ll be in a space and want to write a play that takes place in that space. It’s very alive for me, and very thrilling.

What do you hope people take away from Potliqka?

CJ: I really hope that people leave it feeling a deeper connection to history that wasn’t that long ago, but that we cannot place ourselves into directly. I’m writing this for the people in my family and extended community who have never gone to a play can witness themselves and our ancestors onstage. I always hope my plays create a welcoming a space for my Granny, Papa, Dad, Aunts, Uncles, and Cousins and play cousin’s and their cousin’s too! – for all of us - to sit down and feel at ease, laugh, cry, and feel loved in the theatre. And I hope my plays remind them of something in their souls, hearts, and, or I guess their minds, that maybe they didn’t know was there, or that they haven’t accessed in a really long time- I hope maybe my work takes them back and reopens those memories and feelings of love. I’m kinda obsessed with that – remembering what we’ve forgotten, or maybe didn’t even know was there.

Celeste Jennings is a playwright and costume designer who is so proud to be in the Emerging Writers Group! Her soulful and southern work invites her community to stop and rest awhile as they refamiliarize themselves with poetic diction, music, and rhythm of home. Her dream projects evoke the past, present, and future and remind Black women that they’re soft, powerful, capable of resting, deserving of liberation, and that they’re so very loved. Recent/Upcoming Designs includes Furlough’s Paradise (Geffen Playhouse), Appropriate (The Old Globe), Oh Happy Day (Baltimore Center Stage), and Memnon (The Classical Theatre of Harlem). Her play ‘Bov Water was produced at Northern Stage, and she developed a play with music, Contentious Woman (Relentless Award Honorable Mention) with PlayCo. Selected work includes Citrus (produced at Northern Stage), and Processing. Jennings holds an MFA in costume design from NYU Tish School of the Arts

Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is won the Relentless Award, an OBIE for playwriting and is currently being adapted for the screen at Amazon MGM Orion. What to Send Up When It Goes Down was featured in American Theatre Magazine and received a special commendation from the Blackburn Prize. On Sugarland was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist and winner of the Kesselring Prize. Honors: Windham-Campbell Literary Prize, Hermitage Greenfield Prize, Alpert Award, Helen Merrill Award. Residencies: MacDowell, Hermitage Artist Retreat, Hedgebrook, Casa Ecco, SPACE on Ryder Farms and Djerassi. Harris has been featured in VOGUE and the NEW YORKER.