For playwrights Lisa Langford and Stephanie Fybel, pivotal moments in history provide the backdrop for deeply personal stories.
Langford’s “Netta and Rue” follows two women who grew up together in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, as the civil rights movement gathers momentum. Fybel’s “Threshold” follows a dying judge visited by the ghosts of his parents, whose experiences escaping Nazi persecution intertwine with his final weeks.
Both plays are part of the Ashland New Plays Festival, running Oct. 14-18 at Southern Oregon University’s Main Stage Theatre.
The playwrights joined Vanessa Finney to discuss family history, grief and what ordinary people can accomplish in extraordinary times.
The following interview excerpts have been selected for length and clarity and organized by theme.
Two plays rooted in family history
Lisa Langford: My story is actually a love letter to my ancestors. It starts with a family story that took place during that pivotal moment in civil rights history when the Montgomery bus boycott started. It’s the story of two play sisters, meaning they're not blood sisters, but they grew up together and are very close. Something has come between them, and the play is sort of about the tension in the 50s between Christianity and traditional ways of knowing and having spirituality, traditional roles, non-traditional roles, heterosexuality, homosexuality… So it's really about people discovering themselves in the midst of tremendous historical change.
Stephanie Fybel: My play is sort of a magical realism play that follows an appellate court justice and legal scholar in his final weeks as he's dying from cancer. He’s visited by the sort of teenage versions of his parents, their ghosts, who take him back in time to the 1930s, and he sort of experiences and witnesses the decision-making and the eventual escapes that they make from Nazi Germany and Lithuania in the late 1930s. It sort of merges those two timelines together — the past and the present.
Personal stories behind historic events
Fybel: This play is a very personal one. It is actually based on the life of my father, Justice Richard Fybel, and his death, and his scholarship, and also that of my ancestors. So, like Lisa said about her play, it's really just a family story. It's essentially a family story about what happens when your beloved one is dying, and their death is coming, and you have to say goodbye. I know there are millions of Holocaust escape stories, but I wanted to tell my family story. My play is not a Holocaust play. It doesn't talk about the camps. It's really about the decision-making. What decisions do you make when you have to get out of your own country, and what that looks like.
Langord: Whenever I would see civil rights stories, everyone is stoic, everyone is saintly, everyone's in church, everyone believes. I think you know to recognize the full humanity of Black people, you have to recognize that they accomplished something tremendous. Just ordinary people with ordinary foibles and messy lives and falling in and out of love and having faith and not having faith. They manage to come together and do this.
Finding inspiration in ancestors and grief
Langford: My holy grail as a playwright, my inspiration is obviously the late August Wilson. The fact that he set out to document every decade of the 20th century in African American history — it was a gift to me, and it gave me the privilege of unearthing my own history and trying to figure that out.
Fybel: I've spent a lifetime in a theater. I'm a high school theater educator and teacher and director, and so this was my first stab at writing something. And I have to say it was really it came out of needing to do something with my grief after the death of my father, and looking for a place to put it. So I just thought I need to do it through my art, and my art is theater, and so it came out of that.
What the playwrights hope audiences take away
Langford: I'm going to repeat myself, but the idea that ordinary people can effect incredible change.
Fybel: I always tell my students a great piece of theater should either make you think or make you feel, and preferably both. And so I'm hoping my play makes them think about our judicial system, our government and think about history — and also feel something. I assume most people in the audience have lost a loved one, and what do they do with that grief and how do you say goodbye to someone you love? So hopefully it will move someone out there.
The Ashland New Plays Festival runs Oct. 14-18 at Southern Oregon University’s Main Stage Theatre. The festival features two readings of each of four new plays, discussions with the playwrights and a one-day playwriting workshop open to the public. Tickets and showtimes are available at ashlandnewplays.org.
