When Goodman Theatre artistic director Susan V. Booth began thinking about the 2023-24 season, she knew exactly the play to start her inaugural season — the Chicago premiere of Pearl Cleage’s “The Nacirema Society Requests the Honor of Your Presence at a Celebration of Their First One Hundred Years.”
Booth spent the past 21 years as artistic director at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre, where she forged a deep friendship and working relationship with Cleage, a prolific playwright in the African American canon whose body of work contains many plays not yet staged in Chicago.
They collaborated on “The Nacirema Society” at its world premiere at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery as well as a later production at the Alliance. Booth directed both stagings of the romantic comedy about African American debutantes and their introduction to a world of wealth, privilege and social responsibility.
But this choice of season opener was just the beginning of the blossoming of an even bigger idea — The Pearl Cleage Festival — which is a compelling mix of fully staged productions, readings, discussions and workshops at the Goodman and theaters around the city kicking off Sept. 14.
Booth recalls: “Once I shared with folks that I wanted to open with ‘Nacirema,’ that nice Chuck Smith (Goodman’s resident director) walked into my office with a handful of fliers from previous festivals the Goodman produced. ‘This is something we do,’ he said. And that was that.”
The Goodman production of “The Nacirema Society” is directed by Lili-Anne Brown with E. Faye Butler, Ora Jones, Tyla Abercrumbie and Demetra Dee leading the cast.
Other festival offerings include a fully staged “Blues for an Alabama Sky” at Remy Bumppo Theatre directed by Mikael Burke, plus free staged readings of “Bourbon at the Border” at MPAACT, “Pointing at the Moon” and “What I Learned in Paris” at the Goodman, “Angry, Raucous and Shamelessly Gorgeous” at Congo Square Theatre, “A Song for Coretta” at Definition Theatre, “Chain” at eta Creative Arts Foundation and Jackie Taylor in “Mad at Miles” at Black Ensemble Theater.
”This is a playwright who has done for Black actresses what August Wilson did for Black actors, which is give them voice and opportunity in terms of widely expanding the canon of meaty, smart, complicated works,” Booth says of Atlanta-based Cleage, who is playwright-in-residence at the Alliance. “We want to celebrate the fullness of her contribution to theater with this festival.”
While she greatly admires Wilson’s work, Cleage says she was always part of the discussion Black women in theater were having about the desire “for roles that were as challenging and as full as the roles for Black men.”
“So I felt my job was to create good parts for Black women, something they could sink their teeth into,” Cleage says, adding, “To write plays about smart, interesting women who are trying to figure out how to live their lives.”
Malkia Stampley, Goodman’s BOLD artistic producer who curated the festival says, Cleage’s work “speaks to the curious soul in all of us, and reminds us of our capacity to love, to fight and to dream.”
Booth was Director of New Play Development at the Goodman when she left Chicago in 2001 to become the artistic director at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre. There she stepped into a very different artistic, political and social landscape. Cleage helped with the transition.
“We are in the Deep South, so there were all kinds of dynamics that Susan was navigating,” Cleage says, “and I think our friendship allowed her to talk about some of the complexities of all of that in a very honest way.”
Adds Booth: “It was a big jump for Pearl to say yes to a white director [for those early stagings of ‘The Nacirema Society’]. That’s when we put some guardrails in place. I acknowledged that I was going to make mistakes and she welcomed questions, and we agreed to always tell each other the truth. That started a conversation that has been going on for 20 years.”
Cleage, 74, grew up in Detroit, where writing kicked in at an early age and never stopped. She wrote her first play — an adaptation of “Chicken Little” — in the fourth grade.
“It was a hit, and my teacher let us perform it for the 5th and 6th grades,” she says, adding with a laugh, “I was really excited that my show was going on tour.”
Cleage’s father, Rev. Albert Cleage, was a political activist and a prominent civil rights leader. She came of age during the ‘60s when movements were all around her — civil rights, anti-war, women’s liberation.
“My father was a really wonderful, charismatic speaker,” Cleage says. “ I got to watch him take all of these complicated ideas that he had been thinking about all week and translate all of that complexity into a Sunday sermon that would invite regular, hardworking people into the conversation.
“I always wanted to be able to speak to the audience like that, and writing for the theater allowed me to accomplish that goal.”
Cleage is also a poet, novelist (she’s written eight, including the Oprah Book Club pick “What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day”) and essayist. But she readily admits playwriting is the most satisfying.
“Writing can be very solitary, and I love the collaborative aspect of theater,” she says. “I love being in the room with other artists and finding a way to marry my process with their process and together bringing the play alive.”
Cleage refers to the Goodman festival as “a kind of out-of-body experience.”
“The idea that I’ve managed to do enough work that means something to people, that they would choose to do this in a great theater town like Chicago is really wonderful.”
For a complete list of plays and events for the Pearl Cleage Festival, visit goodmantheatre.org/pearl.
