Audience members attending the main stage performance on closing night of the Atlanta Black Theatre Festival are in for a serious treat. At 7 pm on Saturday, September 5th, Golden Globe-winning actress, director, and playwright Regina Taylor will perform her own one-woman show, Exhibit, at the festival, aiming not only to involve theatergoers directly in its urgent subject matter but also to serve as a call to community. Taylor plays Iris, an African-American visual artist in her sixties who fears that her life’s work is on the brink of vanishing.
“Her work is being thrown out of the museums and galleries,” said Taylor. “Her books are being banned. Her name is being erased from the databases. And she’s confronted with the fear of erasure. This triggers her to think about the America that she grew up with—where we are now, where we were then—and it seems like we’re meeting at a crossroads. Are we moving forward or are we moving back? And what do we do? How do we adapt? It seems that over and over, our superpower as African-Americans has been the ability to adapt, to pass on a legacy, memory, or history to the next generation, and to light those fires.”
In the play, Iris is approached by a young African-American curator who wants to save the artist’s legacy. She thinks that Iris’ symbolic black-on-black paintings would be a perfect fit for the museum, and could be placed alongside the works of artists like Picasso and Monet. Yet what gives Iris pause is the museum’s wish to not have the artist’s name on the pieces in her own retrospective. When Iris asks how one’s legacy is expected to survive without context, the curator points out, “Well, people know a Picasso when they see one!” Iris counters, “Until those who know are no more.”
“The play came out of living day to day in this present moment, being of a certain age and knowing what we’ve been through before to get to this moment,” noted Taylor. “Now it feels like things are being rolled back, and where’s the pushback to that? Exhibit premiered three years ago as part of the Solo Flights Festival in Aspen, and was directed by Phylicia Rashad. Since then, I’ve been dotting the country, doing the show at various venues. The piece was written so that it could be done anywhere and built to travel, though it has some accoutrements in terms of technology and video. I kind of based it on Spalding Gray’ Swimming to Cambodia, where you have a person with a script and projected images behind him that takes you from place to place.”
Taylor will be performing Exhibit at Spelman College’s performing arts center funded by Samuel L. Jackson and LaTanya Richardson Jackson. As a direct address to the audience, the show invites each person in the theater to be Taylor’s scene partner as her character discovers new ways for telling her story. Iris’ experimentation with different forms of art inspired Taylor to create artworks of her own, some of which are on display on stage or in the lobby during a performance. Talkbacks are regularly scheduled after the show with teachers, students, or community leaders to open up a conversation about how people are addressing the times.
“Theatre invites different communities to come together and share stories about who we are and where we came from,” reflected Taylor. “The audience then becomes the vessels of memory to carry those stories onward after the lights have gone out.”
Regina Taylor will perform Exhibit at 7 pm on Saturday, September 5th, at the Atlanta Black Theatre Festival (for tickets, click here), and will host an acting master class at 11 am on Friday, September 4th (for tickets, click here).
