Golden Globe winner Regina Taylor is slated to close out the Atlanta Black Theatre Festival at Spelman College on Sept. 5
The festival, which runs from Sept. 3-5, will feature a plethora of theatrical work, including Taylor’s show “Exhibit.” Written and performed by Taylor, “Exhibit” is about Iris, a Black visual artist faced with the threat of her work completely vanishing from existence. The show reckons with where America stands today in the decades after the Civil Rights Era.
Taylor said she hopes that her work inspires her audience to start a dialogue amongst themselves.
“My emphasis is so that people will be encouraged to have a dialogue, to have conversations with each other,” she said. “I try to impart these memories, this history, to the audience for them to take out and chew on, and to share with others.”
I spoke with Taylor about the inspiration for the show, her start as an actress, and more. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I would love to start by hearing a little bit about you. Did you always know that you wanted to be a performer and a writer? How did those interests arise?
Regina Taylor: I’ve always been a writer, from as far back as I can remember. As a child, I was creating children’s books with a little chocolate girl in the middle of it with some pigtails and barrettes. My mother was very mindful in teaching me how to write, how to create stories, and to write your own narratives in this world. She knew that would be very important, as I’m walking around in this body, in this world.
It was then a great love of reading books and wanting to create books that took me to college to be a journalism major. In my freshman year, my counselor said I could fill out some extra credits by taking an acting class, and I did. He said I would get an easy A pretending to be a tree [laughs], and so I did just that. I still set my sights on journalism. I was going to write some novels on the side. [But] I fell into acting, and loved it so much. It’s that feeling that I have with books, with writing – you get to submerge yourself in other people’s lives in other worlds. You give your spirit over … Writing, that led into acting and this love of being able to walk around in other people’s skin. Expanding yourself through that exploration was fascinating and opened up worlds to me, finding myself, my own voice through the work.
So I took that acting class, and in my first year, I’m over at the art school. I’m walking down the hallway, and Henry Fonda is walking down the hallway.
Oh my gosh. Wow!
Taylor: [Laughs] I’m glad you know who he is.
That would be quite the sight.
Taylor: I was a very shy person, and I was too shy to say hello to him. So I’m just following him down the hallway. And this woman that he’s with catches me stalking Henry Fonda, and she says, “Who are you? What are you doing? Are you an actress?” I said, “Sure.” And she said, “Oh, I’m an agent. There’s this audition this weekend off of I-35 at a Motel 6. Can you make it?” [Laughs] Me – all of 17, 18 years old – I say okay. I took my biggest cousin with me, and I told him, if I don’t come out of that motel room in 15 minutes, knock down the door. [Laughs] I went in. It was a made-for-TV movie, and I got it – about the Little Rock Nine, “Crisis at Central High.” It was starring Joanne Woodward. I took my first airplane ride to Arkansas that summer, and shot this film, and ta-da! I became an actress! [Laughs]
I want to go back to that thing your mom said, about you writing your own narratives. That’s interesting to me in comparison to using acting to discover more about yourself by playing other people, and playing people different from you. How have you continued to take that advice forward in your writing career as you write plays, and as you’re writing one-woman shows like “Exhibit?”
Taylor: I never stopped writing. I continued to write, and in college I started focusing more on acting. I then started writing plays, so that went hand in hand. The acting took off, and then I found myself in certain rooms with certain people, and I’d be asking them to read my plays. One of my first breakthroughs was at The Public Theater in New York City, working first as a spear carrier to understudy small roles in a company that was directed by Estelle Parsons. We did “As You Like It,” “Romeo and Juliet,” the M play [“Macbeth”], in all the boroughs except Manhattan. I started with the smallest of roles, and in that year and a half worked my way through. At the end of the year and a half, we went to Broadway and I became the first Black woman to play Juliet on Broadway.
What was that experience like for you, coming up and rising through the ranks like that? How did that inform your career as an actress?
Taylor: I know it takes a lot of work. Whether I was doing small roles or larger roles, you have to bring the same commitment to it. I think that is what helped me along. I started out in “Romeo and Juliet” as Peter, one of the servants that has, I think, a couple of lines. I would stay after rehearsal. After the whole day of rehearsing, I would be in the theater by myself, going through my props, going through whatever I had to do in all of the plays, and practicing, practicing. One day, I smelled a cigar, and I looked up in the rafters, the catwalk, and Mr. Joseph Papp – who was the head of the theater – was up there smoking his cigar and watching this poor little girl going around saying,” Hang him, Jack, hang him, Jack,” trying to figure out the best way to say that line. He became a huge supporter as I went along that path in that company.
You have to do everything that you’re given fully, with total commitment, total passion, and that was joyous to me. I think that helped me along and opened a lot of doors.
I know you’ve been writing plays for a while, but when did you start diving into one-woman shows?
Taylor: I’ve always enjoyed the form, and I enjoy exploring different forms. I am a writer that is not afraid to switch forms in the writing. I find it all just amazing. I write drama, comedies, musicals, and so a one-woman show would be a part of that exploration. So pretty early on, I was exploring monologues.
You’d acted and written separately. How did you find the experience of combining those things together, and being the only person performing the words that you wrote?
Taylor: Challenging. Exhilarating. You find that your partner is the audience. Usually, you’re doing a scene with another actor. It’s definitely the audience, and to find that commitment to however long the play might be, taking that journey and taking the audience on that journey with you is exhilarating. Very challenging, very exhilarating.
Can you talk about how you had the idea for “Exhibit” and where the inspiration came from?
Taylor: It was a couple years ago. I was doing an interview, and the interviewer was asking me about being a Black woman in America. Growing up here in America, what were my experiences? I usually say something about integrating a school when I was a child in Muskogee, Oklahoma.
Wow!
Taylor: The question started with my first acting role for TV, which, I was just telling you, was “Crisis at Central High,” about the first students to integrate the Arkansas school system. I was sharing what my personal experience along that line was, which was integrating the school in Muskogee, Oklahoma. No one that I recall had asked me how old I was, and when she asked me that I went – Oh. I don’t remember. It was because – in any depth – I had never talked about it. When I started thinking about it afterwards, those memories were little pieces, snatches of time that had been so submerged over my many years. I went, “Oh – that must have been really traumatic.”
I had pushed it away. My mother has passed. I haven’t kept in touch with a lot of people in that town, so I went exploring. I recalled who was my best friend, her name, and I looked her up online. I sent her a message, and we were talking a lot after that. Both of us were piecing together our childhood through each other’s memories, fractured memories. [That’s] how the play started – working with memories, erasure of memory, a time in this country where we are right now. Are we moving forward, or are we moving back? So many things right now are so familiar. If you are a certain age, you can smell it. You’ve lived through it, walked in that before, and now it’s tracking back through again.
I created this story about Iris, a visual artist who, at this moment in time, her work is being thrown out of the museums. Her bio is being erased from the databases. Her books are being banned. How does she feel about the world right now, and the hard-earned space that she has earned? How does she feel about the presence now of that threat of erasure? That’s what I started writing about with this piece, “Exhibit.”
You mentioned going back to the people you knew in Muskogee and talking to them, but what else did your research process look like for this? Were you looking through historical documents of the Civil Rights movement? What were you exploring, as far as art and historical documents go?
Taylor: It was a combination of what is historical and what is the people that I have talked to and people that I know, and then looking at the world that we live in today and how people feel at this moment in time, at different stages and different ages. There is that feeling at this moment of a rollback of hard-earned rights, And what is the pushback? I write about that, and with that, I know the importance of theater, the importance of the arts of how it can permeate society, minds, closed doors – can seep through locked minds and structures and can ignite change.
What did your rehearsal process look like? Usually, you’re working with the director when you’re rehearsing a show, but there’s a bunch of other actors there. This is different, so I’m curious, what was that relationship and process like?
Taylor: I developed it at Aspen Theatre’s Solo Flights, and had the privilege of working with the brilliant Phylicia Rashad directing me in the piece. That was a lot of fun. These were great conversations about the times, both then and now, and about family, about our nation, about the big things and the minutia that add up. A lot of great conversations. Then, writing a lot of times can be quite solitary. You’re inviting ghosts to have conversations with you. And then, with the other parts of historical facts, and the investigator combing through documents, summoning memory, the galvanization of memories – how do you put that together on a stage?
You mentioned earlier that the audience is your scene partner in a sense.
Taylor: Absolutely. It shifts, it changes every night.
I was going to ask, because I know you’ve been doing this show a while – remind me when it premiered?
Taylor: Since Aspen Solo Flights, it’s been a couple of years. I summon this piece as a piece that is always a reaction to the present moment. So each time I do it, I rewrite. It then embraces where we are exactly in this moment. It has been a wonderful challenge.
