A Conversation with Thomas Gibbons
On November 1, Don Cohen spoke with Thomas Gibbons, author of Permanent Collection, the second play in New Rep’s 2004–2005 season
Cohen: How did you come up with the story of Permanent Collection?
Gibbons: The play is inspired by the Barnes Foundation, just outside Philadelphia, which is a collection mostly of Impressionist and post-Impressionist art. Albert Barnes, the founder, is a well-known provocateur of Philadelphia society. In his will, he stipulated that the collection would pass into the control of Lincoln University, an African-American school outside Philadelphia. When that happened in the early nineties, the university appointed an African-American lawyer named Richard Glanton as the new director. Glanton decided that he wanted to build a parking lot on the grounds of the Foundation to increase the number of visitors and give them a place to park. He was opposed by some neighbors in the area—the Barnes is situated in an affluent suburb of Philadelphia—who didn’t want increased traffic on their street. After some heated back and forth, Glanton accused the neighbors of opposing his plans out of racism. They sued him for libel. Once the issue of race and racism was raised, the controversy was not about parking or the collection or anything else. The issue became race. I’ve noticed before that when race is introduced into any kind of public dispute, it immediately submerges every other consideration.
Cohen: The controversy in the play is not about parking. It’s about whether some of the African art in storage will be put on display.
Gibbons: When I started thinking about the play, I quickly realized I wasn‘t interested in writing about a parking lot. The issue of whether or not the African pieces can be brought out of storage is much more interesting and far-reaching. When we go into a museum and look at the pieces hanging there, we’re being presented with a consensus of what is worth preserving and examining in our culture. It’s a statement about who we are and what we value. How do we decide what hangs on the walls?
Cohen: Somewhere in the play, Paul says that these great paintings invite you to set aside your own perspective and look at the world through the eyes of the artist. But no one in the play manages to see through the eyes of the other characters.
Gibbons: The phrase, “put yourself in my place,” occurs three times in the course of the play. It points to a fundamental theme, which is the overriding importance of being able to look at any issue from other people’s perspectives, and the incredible difficulty we have in doing that. Look at the election. When people are polarized to the extent that the country is, it becomes almost impossible to step back even for a moment and say, “Let me look at this from the other person’s viewpoint.” We don’t want to. We’re right; they’re wrong. We’re good; they’re evil. That’s all there is to it.
Cohen: The only one able to step back is you, the playwright.
Gibbons: I think Kanika has the capacity to do that. Partly because she’s younger and has had different experiences, she is not locked into a particular viewpoint the way they are. I’m 50 years old and I’ve noticed that, at least in terms of race, people in their twenties, as Kanika is, seem to be much more accepting of interracial relationships and racial matters in general. They seem to be more open and matter-of-fact about, say, having a friend from another race. For people of my age, there are still all kinds of issues involved with that. I think that’s a hopeful sign.
Cohen: The hope for the future is that guys like you and me will die out, leaving the world to younger people?
Gibbons: It’s certainly true that attitudes change slowly. When I was plotting the play out, I felt it was important for there to be a younger viewpoint.
Cohen: You’ve written several plays on the racial issue.
Gibbons: Most of my plays for the last ten years.
Cohen: So why are you, a white guy, writing about this issue?
Gibbons: About 11 years ago, I wrote a play called 6221 for the Interact Theatre Company in Philadelphia. It was a big three-act documentary about the MOVE bombing, with 15 actors in a cast almost evenly divided between white and African-American. It quickly became evident in the course of rehearsals that the black actors and white actors had extraordinarily different perspectives on the events in the play, the people depicted in it, and the experience of living life in America. We had tense confrontations in the course of rehearsals about how we view these things. In situations like that, people talk about their lives and the experiences they’ve had. I remember one of the black actors telling me how he’d been jumped on by a bunch of police because a store in the neighborhood had just been robbed by a black guy. So they went out and got the first black guy they saw. This particular actor is very distinctive looking. He has no hair anywhere: bald head, no eyebrows. He doesn’t look like other people, but clearly that didn’t matter. The black actors all had stories like that—certainly the men did. In the course of hearing these stories and having these discussions day after day, I saw the huge divide between the white perspective and the black perspective—something I should have realized before, but it never had been brought home to me with that kind of immediacy. I didn’t have an epiphany that I was going to write about that, but the ideas that began to interest me all explored that divide.
Cohen: Do you have to deal with criticism from black actors or audience members who say, “What right do you have to write about our experience?”
Gibbons: That question has come up a lot and I thought it was a good question, one I wanted to ask myself and explore in a play. That’s why I wrote my previous play, Bee-luther-hatchee. The main character is a woman, an African-American editor in New York who publishes a book called Bee-luther-hatchee, the autobiography of a 72-year-old black woman from the South. The author is reclusive; the editor has never met her. In the course of the play, she does and it turns out to be a middle-aged white man. The play is about several questions. One is the notion of authenticity: what is it that makes a work of art authentic? The other, the really interesting question, is: Can a person of one race legitimately, authentically depict the experience of someone of another race? If we say, as many people do, that you can’t do that, doesn’t it follow that a man couldn’t write a woman character, or vice-versa.
Cohen: Or the rich couldn’t write about poor.
Gibbons: Exactly. The inevitable endpoint of that argument is that it’s impossible to write about anybody else. You arrive at the conclusion that we are all marooned in our own separate universes, among which no communication is possible. Bee-luther-hatchee is another case of a play inspired by an actual event. A book had been published in Australia that was ostensibly the autobiography of an elderly Aboriginal woman. It got great reviews and won a major prize. It was then revealed that the author was actually a white man. I find it hard to invent premises for plays. I read the paper and take what I need.
Cohen: The end of Permanent Collection is also based on fact: the proposed move the Barnes collection to downtown Philadelphia.
Gibbons: A judge is supposed to rule on that request by the end of the year.
Cohen: So, in the play, neither Sterling, who wants African art displayed, nor Paul, who fights change, wins the battle.
Gibbons: It’s a final irony. Paul in particular, who has battled to preserve the Foundation exactly as it is, is now faced with the prospect of it changing in a much more profound way. The fact that it actually follows the real story of the Barnes is of a bonus. My original ending was somewhat different. I remember the day that somebody emailed me at work, saying, “The Barnes has just announced that it wants to move downtown.” As soon as Iread that, I thought, “There’s the perfect ending for the play.”
Cohen: It’s nice to be handed a good ending.
Gibbons: When it happens, all you can do is say, “Thank you.”
Cohen: Let’s talk about the opening monologue, where Sterling talks about driving while black. Why start there?
Gibbons: I wish I could say I had a carefully thought-out reason, but I don’t. One day, I was sitting at my desk working on another play, but the story of the Barnes was in my head and—it’s one of those instances when you almost literally hear a character telling you something—and I put the play aside and wrote this monologue. It has changed very little from that moment. The original version was in the first person and I put it in the second person. A couple of months later we were doing a reading of the first act of the other play I’d been working on. We got some actors together to do the reading and then everybody sat around and tore it apart. I knew pretty quickly that it wasn’t a good play and I was not going to continue with it. I had brought this monologue along with me. Just before everybody left, I said, “Hold on a second.” I gave it to an actor named Frank X, who played Sterling North. In fact, I wrote the part for him. I gave it to him and said, “Would you mind just reading this?” He read it, totally cold. I could tell by people’s responses that it had an effect. I said, “OK, I’m dropping the other play; this is the play I’m writing.” That was one of the first things I knew about the play: that it was going to open with a monologue by Sterling that would begin with the phrase, “Put yourself in my place.” And Act Two would open with a monologue by Paul that would begin with the same phrase. That was the basic architecture of the play.
Cohen: You work with actors while writing your plays?
Gibbons: I’m the playwright-in-residence at Interact. I tend to write the major parts for specific actors. Usually I’ll write Act One and we’ll get the actors together to read it and people will give me their feedback before I start Act Two. We do these private readings around a table as I go along, pretty much after every draft. Going through that process—which takes a couple of years for me—I’m confident that the play is about as good as I can make it by the time we go into rehearsal. I still do rewriting in rehearsal and after the first production. With this play, I rewrote probably every scene to some extent.
Cohen: Can you think of an example of a change you made?
Gibbons: One thing I did was strengthen the role of Gillian, the reporter. She was a little bit of a plot device to get these guys to talk and further the stream of revelations. I wanted to explore her character and understand her motivations and ground them in the reality of her job. Also, I tend to over-write at first. For me, a large part of rewriting is finding the things that can come out, that make the points too obvious. I’m trusting more and more that you need to give the play a little bit of room and create some space for the actors to fill in.
Cohen: Are you working on a new play?
Gibbons: Yes, one I think of as the third play in a trilogy that began with Bee-luther-hatchee and includes Permanent Collection. It is also based on an actual event. I work downtown in Philadelphia. The window of my cubicle overlooks a new pavilion that the city built for the Liberty Bell on the exact site of George Washington’s slave quarters, when he was President and Philadelphia was the capital. When they were beginning construction, a local historian asked the Park Service, “Since this is the exact site of George Washington’s slave quarters, are you planning to acknowledge or commemorate the existence of his slaves?” In fact, the Park Service was planning to refer to the slaves’ quarters as “servants’ quarters.” As soon as the controversy arose, I knew right away it was a play. The issue is, how do we decide as a nation what we’re going to remember and what we’re not going to remember? And who tells the story?
Cohen: It’s similar to the question of the art on the wall.
Gibbons: Yes, and similar to the way that Bee-luther-hatchee asks who has the right to tell a story and what does it mean to be authentic. One of the characters in this play is a black conservative woman. The challenge is to treat the black conservative viewpoint as sympathetically and eloquently as I possibly can. I think it’s a viewpoint that has never been done on stage and doesn’t have much visibility in the culture in general. There’s a chance for a kick-ass confrontation here that will really rile people. Mostly that’s what I want to do, to get people upset.
Don Cohen is a writer, researcher, and consultant whose articles on knowledge management and social capital have been published in The Harvard Business Review, the California Management Review, and other journals. He is the co-author of several books on social capital in organizations and other cultural institutions. Also a playwright and fiction writer, Cohen lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, with his wife Helen.