Washington Theater Review

It’s been 25 years since the feisty women of Brewster Place first sprang into action fighting poverty and prejudice in Gloria Naylor’s best-selling novel, but they’ve still got it. “Noble and flawed, heartbreaking and funny, wounded and life-affirming” is how playwright Tim Acito describes the characters.

Acito should know. He’s been honing their story over a three-year odyssey that began in New York, nearly dead-ended in a New Jersey warehouse, took a side trip to a Virginia university campus, picked up a Georgia co-producer, and detoured to a Florida artist retreat. The Women of Brewster Place, Acito’s musical adaptation of the Naylor novel, opens at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta in September, then – at long last! – arrives at its DC destination on October 19.

“It’s the perfect story for us to tell in Washington,” declared Arena Artistic Director Molly Smith, “and especially at Arena Stage. We sit right on the edge of the projects on one side of us, and on the other side of us are half million dollar condos. This is a story of women who are being left behind by society. It’s an issue we’ve never addressed at Arena.”

Quite a few theater artists have had a hand in tuning up Brewster Place, described by Smith as “a complicated piece of machinery.” But it was Mark Bly, Arena’s senior dramaturg, who gets the credit for setting the wheels in motion. Bly first encountered novice playwright Tim Acito at the Yale School of Drama, where he chaired the playwriting program before coming to Arena. Acito was applying for admission to the program and submitted a “fresh and funny” play that made a big impression on Bly. “It turned out that Tim was a professional dancer,” he recalled. “He had a degree in philosophy from Stanford, and this was the first play he had ever written.” As a Yale grad student, Acito wrote a number of exceptional plays, including a musical that went on to an off-Broadway run and snagged three Drama Desk nominations.

“When I came to Arena in 2004,” said Bly, “Molly made it clear the goal was for me to locate the new voice in American musical theater.” So when Tim Acito called him in the fall of 2005 to commiserate about production setbacks with his off-Broadway show, Bly asked what else he was working on. “Tim is very modest,” noted Bly. “There was a long pause. Then he told me he was working on a Gloria Naylor piece that he didn’t think I’d be interested in.” Eventually Bly convinced his former student to send a draft to Arena, and he passed it on to Smith.

“It was a very fast marriage,” remarked Molly Smith about her artistic partnership with Tim Acito. She decided at their first meeting, while listening to the score, that she wanted to direct Brewster Place and premiere it at Arena.

Smith hasn’t always been a fan of musical theater. “I’ve just been directing musicals for the past five years after I virtually shunned them my entire professional life,” she confessed. “I didn’t think of it as serious theatre.” Her change of heart grew out of Arena’s mandate to be an expression of American voices. “When you talk about American voices you have to talk about musical theater,” she said. “It’s our seminal art form. Now I think it’s often the most subversive theater that we can do.”

After brokering the collaboration between Smith and Acito, Mark Bly had another pivotal role to play before Brewster Place could move ahead. “It’s unusual for a writer to do all the work Tim had done without getting formal permission,” he said, but that was the case. Bly took on the task of procuring the rights, which was complicated by the television series that had been based on Naylor’s book.

“It was a long protracted process,” he said wryly, “with great moments of stillness and silence. Everyone said the network owned the rights and wouldn’t give them up.” But just when Bly was about to send some hapless intern to a New Jersey warehouse in search of stored network documents, Naylor discovered a letter stating that the author’s rights had reverted to her, so she was free to negotiate a new arrangement with Acito and Arena.

For the next few months, Acito—a triple threat playwright, composer, and lyricist—worked steadily, inspired by Gloria Naylor’s language that “sang off the pages” of her novel. (Determined to keep his adaptation based on the novel, he has never seen the 1989 TV mini-series starring Oprah Winfrey.)

In July 2006 Acito and Smith went with ten actors and the musical director to a two-week summer workshop at Virginia Tech, where Arena has forged a partnership with the theater department. “We called it Camp Brewster Place,” recalled Acito with a laugh. “We lived in the dorms and ate in the cafeteria. For the first time, we got to see the show up on its feet.” But as opening night loomed closer, it became clear that Brewster Place needed more work. According to Bly, “It felt like we were rushing the gestation period.” On the heels of the decision to pull the show from the 2006-07 season came the idea to engage another regional theater as a co-producer.

For Smith, Alliance Theatre in Atlanta was the natural choice. “Arena and Alliance are two theaters in America that have a very strong African-American following,” explained Smith, who went on to describe Alliance’s history of producing world premieres of African-American subject matter, including Crowns, Cuttin’ Up, and The Color Purple. The production will share an identical cast and set at both theaters.

With the show rescheduled for a fall opening and a co-producer on board, the project got a lucky break when it was selected for a two-week workshop at the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab at White Oak, a sprawling artist retreat and wildlife refuge in Florida. The Sundance Lab focuses on developing new musical and ensemble theater works, including such hits as Spring Awakening, Grey Gardens, and The Laramie Project.

It was here that Brewster Place really kicked into high gear. As Smith sums it up, “We came into Sundance with one script and left with a whole different script structurally.” Acito had come to the workshop prepared to integrate new music and re-writes, but even with the new material in place, something just wasn’t clicking. As Smith recalls, “Literary advisors and dramaturgs were talking to us about the first 20 minutes of a musical, where classically there are problems. After seeing the revised show up on stage with full out performances, they told us it was time to lose that first 20 minutes.” Unfazed, Acito began cutting and writing new material, eventually re-working the entire piece.

The musical’s structural problems had to do with Acito’s attempts to faithfully translate the novel to the stage. “The novel is seven short stories,” he explained. “Each can stand on its own but subtly has connections with others. We found in a theatrical context it was a little confusing, so we decided to interweave the stories from the get-go.”

Still, The Women of Brewster Place we will see at Arena won’t be the same show that opened in Atlanta, as more tweaking is planned. “What we have contractually is ten hours of potential rehearsal time a week,” said Smith, who plans to fly back to Atlanta a week after opening.
“The piece will have settled a bit by then. We’ll make changes and put them into rehearsal.”

With the rescheduled opening and never-ending re-writes, one wonders if the collaborators are feeling the strain. “Even under the best circumstances collaborations can be a little overwhelming,” admits Acito. “But Molly has a great respect for writers. It’s been about as positive a collaborative experience as a writer could hope for.”

For her part, Smith credits Acito with an admirable work ethic. “In each workshop he wrote three or four songs and two or three scenes,” she said. “That’s really prolific. He’s very smart in the way he uses the workshop process. He doesn’t sit back and gently shave. When it’s clear that we need another impulse or another scene, he would just write it. That bodes well for Tim.”

Smith has put together “a cast of divas” headlined by Tina Fabrique (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Crowns) in the central role of Mattie, played by Oprah in the mini-series. When asked to speculate whether The Women of Brewster Place will be the next Crowns in terms of box office appeal, Smith just laughed. “I have no idea,” she said. “All I know is I’m really looking forward to seeing it up on the Arena stage.”

Charlotte Sommers is an arts journalist whose knowledge is grounded in experience as an actor, choreographer, and arts administrator.

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The Women of Brewster Place, at Arena Stage, Oct. 19 – Dec. 9.