(blues music)
- Seven new plays written by Black playwrights
are coming to Broadway this fall, including
"Lackawanna Blues" from Tony Award winner
Ruben Santiago-Hudson.
♪ Don't mask, don't ask ♪
♪ No glove, no love ♪
♪ Moderna, Pfizer and some hand sanitizer ♪
♪ No jest without your test ♪
- That show is celebrating its first preview performance
on the same night Broadway biggest musicals
also returned to the stage.
Santiago-Hudson's solo show features live music,
from Grammy-nominated blues guitarist, Junior Mac.
Paul Wontorek caught up with the creator and star
of "Lackawanna Blues," Ruben Santiago-Hudson.
- Being in a one-actor play is a really unique experience.
Are you excited to get up
and be able to connect with people?
It's so exciting as an audience member
to watch an actor do this
and to watch you transform from character to character.
And are you excited to get up
and have that intimate relationship?
- Excitement is a word that pales to the reality
that I'm really going to feel, I mean, the first thing
I gotta get over is when I hear the people
on my monitor coming into the theater.
Now, once that crying is over,
once I finished those tears 'cause, you know,
grown men do cry, particularly those of a certain age.
And then I got to get over that,
to say my prayers before I go on stage
and call them my ancestors called Lloyd and August,
and Douglas Turner Ward and Nanny
and all those people back in.
Then I got to not cry
when the lights come on.
And that goes, when I come on as Nanny,
I do look the audience over to say, "Welcome."
I've been doing it from the beginning.
Don't cry, and I won't cry, I don't believe, until the end.
- Does it still, feel very personal to you, this piece?
- Absolutely, it never leaves me.
Your life never leaves you, you can change your suit,
you can change your attitude, you can't change your life.
What it is, it is.
In the beauty and the turmoil and the pathos and the pain,
and the laughter and the jokes and the mother wit
and in the food, all that stayed with me.
I still long for that stuff.
Like, when I'm down in the south for some,
cause the stuff my mom would cook,
anything you hunted and killed, it was trouble
cause she gonna cook it.
So, you know, they don't do that in New York.
My wife's a chef, she's not going to do that.
You know, but if I'm down south, sometimes I'll walk
into a place and I'll look up and say,
"Oh, you know, they got that."
You know, people don't eat that, you know,
where I'm from New York, unless you might find it right.
So it never leaves you.
It never leaves you, it stays with you.
And, and I think that's the joy of it all.
- And so what you're introducing us to this community
that really raised you,
sort of in your heart and made you the man you are today.
How would you describe that community to people who
maybe don't know the play and missed the fantastic film
adaptation?
- See, you know, this crazy thing called segregation
made Black people have to create
their own heaven on earth, but, so I...
I was in a very nurturing community
where people can lean out the window and say,
"Don't you do that, boy, I'm gonna call Nanny."
And I knew that that person might spank my bottom.
And then when I get home, Nanny might drop one on me too.
So because we were raised by a community,
we were protected by that community,
we were nurtured by that community,
taught by the community.
Bad lessons and good.
And you had to discern, and that's where Nanny comes in,
you know better than that.
Like, if Nanny would say something to me, like,
"Listen to me good now."
That means, "I'm not going to say it again."
"Listen to me good now."
Or she would say to me,
now, and this is a saying in the black community,
every Black community, when I say this, people are like,
"Nah I'm thew wittit."
Not, "I'm through with it." "Nah I'm thew wittit."
That means that's never going to be spoken about again.
- Yeah, final word.
- You know those cold, listen, now I say things in here
like, that she would say, and some people,
"What did you say?"
You know, but listen, when I go see a Pinter play
with his McDonough
or even Shakespeare,
I don't know what they say half the time,
but I am enthralled because I'm learning,
I'm learning things that are different than me.
So I want to share this wonderful community with people.
(blues music ends)