The Hinterlands in Conversation with Jonathan Flatley
Will You Miss Me? A Dossier on The Hinterlands
Jonathan Flatley [JF] I want to start by reflecting on how the play stages the problem of mourning. At some moments, it seems like the mourning will never end, should never end, and indeed that we might draw comfort from attending a funeral every day, which I found to be a compelling idea! And at other moments, especially toward the end, it seems like the play holds out the promise of leaving loss behind.
Richard Newman [RN] Or at least the promise of a burial, if not an actual burial. We don’t bury a body, which was a problem that we encountered in the construction of the piece. What we arrived at is more like an excavation of the body, where all these objects emerge that are sort of garbage, but are also, in some ways, meaningful.
This points to how we make things, which is not with a thesis from the start, as much as a series of questions. And then sometimes we also pose answers, without them being absolutely the answer. We try to create problems for ourselves, to get into some kind of dramaturgical trouble. In this instance, the question has a possible answer, but acknowledges that we don’t have a solution. The problem has to do with familial lineage when it’s mixed up with class history and colonialism; specifically, U.S. colonialism, its horrors, and our complicities. Is this something that one can just bury? Ultimately, that is what the character of Remy, a visitor to the funeral who can’t remember where she comes from, wants to do: “He should be buried. Let’s just end it.” Remy’s arc is looking for an ending. Even once she remembers her past, she still is desiring to put her lineage behind her. But something else happens. What is inside the effigy is revealed and left for us all to look at. And even that’s not the image the audience is left with. One effigy is replaced with another when I lie down on the bier under the funereal fabric.
[JF] That’s really interesting. So one problem concerns the loss of a person you loved, and another is how will I be mourned: “Will you miss me?” This work also raises the issue of how to mourn a history, such as one’s family lineage or more broadly, American history.
At one point during the performance, it becomes clear the characters are celebrating a funeral every day, and that’s when I understood grief as a kind of ubiquitous feeling. Perhaps nowhere are these questions more intensely conveyed than in the music, which is such a central, beautiful, and moving part of the piece. In addition to being a story about a funeral, Will You Miss Me? is also a collection of songs, one of which includes precisely that refrain, “will you miss me,” suggesting that the play itself might be an extended song. Moreover, as a collection of songs, the play itself recovers and re-presents old songs—some very old—keeping them alive for contemporary listeners. Thus, the intention here is obviously multilayered and complex.
Liza Bielby [LB] Yeah. There are a lot of true family stories in the piece. My grandmother is from West Virginia; that was the first place her family emigrated to in the late 1700s. They lived there for almost 200 years, until my great-grandpa moved them out to Delaware, and then she ended up in Flint when she married my grandpa. I didn’t have anything that connected me to West Virginia until my grandmother moved back there in 2006. When I met her parents and sisters, it didn’t make sense to me. They had an accent, but I was like, is this a Delaware accent? We ate pudding, biscuits, fried green tomatoes, and fried potatoes, but I hadn’t registered those things as part of a culture that came from somewhere particular. And it turns out it does. When my grandmother moved back to where she grew up, I started to make sense of certain ways of behaving that her family had.
My mom grew up in Flint and its suburbs. They would occasionally go to West Virginia, but—and I’ve interviewed my aunt and uncles about this—it was just this place of poverty in their minds, where my grandmother’s older siblings and their kids lived. Of course, it’s more than that. There’s a lot of knowledge around how to engage with the land there. It is a specific culture. There are songs. There are belief systems that operated, and still operate, there. This all got erased for my mom’s generation.
I realized right before we started working on this piece that I didn’t know any songs in my heritage. Once we started learning traditional songs, it was a revelation: they’ve come down hundreds of years in the region where my family members were, whether or not my ancestors were singing them. I have a lot of very religious, stern ancestors, so they probably weren’t singing the songs, but the songs were there. Thinking about how I had lost connection to that music felt like a massive loss, a massive erasure. The more proper and more integrated and assimilated into one place that a family becomes, the less connected you are to anything that existed before: songs, food, beliefs. A connection to the land. And so, partially to deal with these feelings of loss, we started learning these old songs in late 2018.
[JF] How did you find songs?
[RN] Some we learned from people. Others, we found through early recordings. We were looking at a few historical jumping-off points. One is this Appalachian migration to Detroit and its impact. We eulogize [the character of] Blaine as somebody who moved to work in the factories. There were parts of Detroit where people lived, like the Briggs neighborhood, which was filled with rooming houses. There are still some rooming houses just north of I-75 expressway. And people are still living in them, which is interesting. … The people who stayed in that neighborhood never moved up economically or socially, as opposed to people who managed to move to suburbs, or just went back to Kentucky or West Virginia. So that was one thing we were looking at.
A lot of this music came from the British Isles to North America, into the Appalachian Mountain region. There, the songs mixed with a bunch of other music, notably traditional African diasporic music, via the interaction between these songs and the banjo—which is an African instrument—and with other music from continental Europeans in the region. All this music was blending in interesting ways. A lot of the ballads came directly over from the British Isles, and you can tell; songs about the sea were sung in Appalachia but, you know, there’s no sea. Like “House Carpenter,” which isn’t in our piece, but our collaborator Jenna [Kirk] sings a version, and I did years ago, too. It’s about a voyage over the sea. The “salt salt sea” comes up regularly in the music. There’s one I sing called “The Wind and Rain” or “Twa Sisters,” and its earliest attribution is in the 1500s but it’s probably much older, possibly 1,000 years old in some form. Some songs are referencing pre-Christian ideas.
[LB] And herbalism. There’s a bunch of herbalism and magic detailed in the songs.
[RN] There are often fairies in them, right?
[JF] I love that.
[RN] To get back to this question about the layers of grief—individual and collective—I think the songs hold both layers. A song stands in for one individual, whether it’s the person who wrote it or the person it’s about, but it also holds the collective history between the moment it was first sung maybe hundreds of years earlier, and the present moment. I do see that, having had the experience of working on them now for five or six years.
[JF] So the piece started with your interest in the songs?
[LB] That was Richard’s interest. I think for me, I had been interested in family history for a while, but it wasn’t like, “Richard, come get into my family history with me!” It was a personal interest, because I had been going down to West Virginia by that point for 12 years to see my grandma.
[RN] There was a connection to research from our last piece too, The Radicalization Process [view video excerpts here], that didn’t get fully explored. That piece was about radical leftists, specifically white radical leftists, looking at the Weather Underground, among a bunch of other things. And in that research, finding out about the Appalachian radicals who formed the Young Patriots Organization in Chicago who are—
[LB] —part of the original Rainbow Coalition with the Young Lords and the Black Panthers. Robert Lee was organizing it. And we were thinking about the Appalachian migrants here in the neighborhood of Brightmoor [on the northwest side of Detroit]. There’s a section at the end of the film Finally Got the News where they drive through Brightmoor and you can see the people on their porches. It really looks like West Virginia. And then there’s an interview with a young white worker talking about racial solidarity in the factory. We wanted to delve more into that.
[RN] What were the conditions that didn’t allow for class solidarity across racial lines in Detroit, to the extent that it seemed like it was happening in Chicago? It’s clear there was a concerted effort on the part of the auto industry to not let that happen, organizing across race. And it crystallizes around hatred of poor people and a huge suspicion around anything that might be regarded as leftist organizing.
I’m also interested in my family’s history, which passed through Appalachia as well. But Liza had a family history that mirrored this history of Appalachian migration to Detroit. And then there’s also this question of what happens when you start, over time, to work seriously on these old songs that are within a lived tradition you are a part of, but are severed from, right? There’s a process of mourning that loss, through working on songs. And then over time, something else happens. It’s no longer mourning a loss … some kind of new connection is being made.
[JF] I am reminded of W.E.B. Du Bois’s phrase for the sorrow songs—the “siftings of centuries.” He is talking about the way songs accumulate feelings, tonalities, and elements of composition from all the people who have sung them over the years and passed them on. Insofar as a song has a feeling, or is a feeling, when you sing it, you inhabit it, a collective feeling you are sharing with people from the past.
[RN] Strange things start to occur, frankly, if you enter a practice of working with songs with curiosity; images, associations, and sensations appear as yours, but also somehow not yours. I don’t want to trigger too much prejudice by talking about ghosts or the supernatural, but I also get the feeling that something else is in the room with me.
The purpose of working on these songs is not just to perform them. Of course, I’m going to work on it and make it good; but what if I work on it with a question like, who am I when I’m singing? What am I encountering here? Jenna often talks about it in terms of: What are these words? Who is speaking them, and who am I, in relationship to them? Are those people listening in some way through history? So there is an interest from me, of wondering what kind of performance structure can hold them.
[LB] You can’t enter into a song like the ones we sing in the play, in the same way as a song in a musical, because you actually have to enter the song. You have to be inside of it, with the ballads. I had a ballad teacher, Anna Roberts-Gevalt, who quoted maybe Texas Gladden or Almeda Riddle or somebody else, who said, when you sing the ballads, you have to see every image. You’re responsible for the material now because the ballads are stories that were at one point true, they say.
[RN] Especially murder ballads. Jean Ritchie said that every murder ballad is true.
[LB] And you are responsible for telling the story. You can change the lyrics. You could change the ending, too—that’s allowed, and people do it—and you can throw different things in. And you can forget parts of it. But you have to be inside of it.
[JF] That is one thing that makes it so fascinating as a singular form, which accumulates all these different singers who have been inside it. What other aesthetic object has that collective historical power?
[RN] Certain dances.
[LB] Yeah, performance forms from outside this culture, oral traditions. I studied xiqu, traditional Chinese opera, for four years. You learn it by mirroring your teacher. First, you do what they do, and then at some point you start to understand it in your body. It doesn’t exist on its own. It lives only on in the body. Writing it down doesn’t capture everything correctly. It’s so bizarre, because it’s this thing that’s absolute, but you only can get it through this process of putting what you observe in someone else’s body into your own body. Your body will then change the form a little bit because it’s always changing in the process of transmission, from person to person. And you also have to be wise enough when you take it on to understand what of your teacher’s body you don’t need to take on. What exactly is the thing that is being passed on to you? And I think the songs are the same way. Granted, we’re learning most of them through field recordings and the like.
[RN] Yeah, which is the thing in modernity—how things are transmitted. So much of the oral transmission has been lost, although some of the songs we sing were orally transmitted to us.
[JF] Yes, right, when it is sheet music or standardized in some form, then it loses that person-to-person quality. Is there an improvisatory element that is lost when you are following a song that has been written down or recorded in a standardized form? In grief, especially, it seems that improvisatory variability is necessary to allow particular feelings of this loss to come out.
[RN] That’s true, but also Will You Miss Me? exists as a performance that we have to do every time. There is a difference between what it is to grieve a loved one or a larger cultural happening or history, and to enter into this reality of a performance—which is a reality, it’s not that it is not real. It is happening.
[JF] Right. You’ve gotta sing the song. I mean, you guys are both very accomplished and excellent singers, and you couldn’t pull it off if that wasn’t the case, obviously.
[RN] You’ve got to do it. And also there’s a fine tuning that’s happening. It has to be repeatable in performance, in a certain way, and in an actual funeral, it does not.
[LB] Or in a lamentation it does not, and none of these are real lamentations. Some ballads we sing are laments, but not lamentations.
[JF] What about the one that begins the play?
[RN] “Poor Pilgrim of Sorrow.”
[JF] That is call-and-response, right? You’re saying the line, and then everyone’s repeating it. And that’s also interesting because it re-enacts the process of teaching and learning.
[RN] Theoretically, because Remy is then taught the song, the audience could also learn the song. Every time, I wonder if someone will join in from the audience.
[JF] It’s tempting.
[LB] I think in Play House [The Hinterlands’ theater] they won’t, but I think when the piece is performed outside, they might.
[JF] I also feel at the beginning of the play, as an audience member, we are waiting for you guys to set the expectations. Everyone’s like, “What is this? What’s going on here? I guess it has started now?”
[LB] We love that, putting people in the position of assessing what is happening. What is required of me?
[RN] There is a logic to the funeral and when we are in the structure of the funeral, they are in the funeral with us, but there’s no desire for them to join in and sing that song.
[LB] They could.
[RN] They could.
[LB] Then I don’t know what happens.
[JF] I’ll try next time.
[RN] Next time, you see if you can just pick it up.
[JF] Well, I have the recording so I can practice. I’m not a good singer.
[LB] Those songs aren’t for good singers.
[RN] No, that’s the beauty of them. It’s from the Old Regular Baptist and we had to work on it to make it not sound “worked on.” There’s the danger that you could sing it too well. It should not be a pretty song. It’s not made for that.
[LB] It was made to get people to church.
[RN] It’s a kind of call, so there’s a cacophony to how it sounds that’s somehow important to its form.
[JF] Is that the one with the line “I have no promise of tomorrow?”
[RN and LB] Yeah.
[JF] The lyrical content is also outstanding and they speak to the problem of mourning, each in their own way.
[RN] “My mother has reached the bright glory. My father is still wandering in sin.”
[LB] “My brothers and sisters won’t harm me.”
[RN] Hopefully, they won’t.
[JF] You inevitably confront these broader questions about white ethnicity in the United States, and how migration disrupts and destroys memories across generations … peoples’ access to their history has been blocked.
[LB] Some of it was strategic, like Henry Ford tying the $5 workday to participation in his Americanization programs, down to his melting pot ritual where workers literally took off their traditional clothing and put on business suits. In other instances, it was peoples’ own decision to step away from a part of their identity.
[RN] You know, I’m just having more and more questions about that. And maybe it’s the book I’m reading, Technic and Magic by Federico Campagna, which is about how our reality functions, so I wonder about how much choice we have if the only option presented is assimilation.
[LB] Totally.
[JF] It’s like that old Marx saying that we make our own history, but we do not make it in conditions of our own choosing.
[LB] My great-grandpa had to leave West Virginia. There was no work he could do. He kept getting injured. That second eulogy is about him. He worked in the mines and got injured in the mines, so he wasn’t going back to the mines. He started building roads through the mountains, and then got injured doing that, so he moved his family to Delaware. My mom’s childhood ended up totally different than that of her cousins because my grandmother left the mountains. This was both a good thing and maybe a not-so-good thing. There aren’t a lot of resources where my grandmother grew up in terms of jobs, ease of getting your kids to school … Leaving was the only choice my great-grandpa had for work that wasn’t going to kill him. Some young people try to figure out how to raise a family there, but it seems very hard. The only employers in my grandma’s town are an elementary school, two gas stations, and a Dollar General. You have to have a car. The water has been too toxic drink multiple times since she’s moved there. There are floods all the time.
[RN] You’re describing Southeast Michigan.
[LB] Totally. There’s a huge group of people who have similar struggles. I don’t know how much choice there is.
[RN] It’s like you’re living in some kind of reality that ultimately is trying to flatten everything … And a metaphor for that, for us, became the culture of whiteness. Now, broadly I would say, the emptiness at the heart of our current reality can’t just be summed up by white culture, but there’s an allegory of how different groups of people coming from European descent assimilated into a “homogenous” culture of whiteness in order to gain—
[LB] —Capital.
[RN] Yes, resources.
[JF] And other forms of privilege. It’s like “how the Irish became white.” All these ethnic groups didn’t start out as white.
[RN] There was a survey done in Detroit in the fifties about who was the least desirable neighbor. The first was a felon and the second was poor Southern whites and hillbillies, which was remarkable to me. And the question is, who is being interviewed? Probably middle-class white people, in that era. And why is it that poor Southern whites are at the top of the list?
[JF] Are Black people in there somewhere?
[RN] Yeah, they’re fourth. There’s something about this feeling of embarrassment and the shock of another white person being racialized, bearing some kind of cultural markers that exist as “other” in the sense of like, “Oh, those people eat weird food or talk in a strange way, or dress in this other way.”
[LB] Those people are too into going to church.
[JF] So whiteness is not unmarked there. And that becomes a problem if you’re trying to be an unmarked white person who’s just the norm, just “a person.”
[LB] You’re like, “Don’t associate me with those people.”
[RN] Which is still something that—I wouldn’t say in leftist circles, but in white liberal and white progressive circles—the embarrassment around poor Southern whites still exists.
[JF] Which is something that Trump obviously plays on.
[RN] One hundred percent—that alienation.
[JF] But also grief! That’s what I was thinking; just the degree to which your piece feels extraordinarily timely, because across political divides there’s this sense at the current moment that things which should be present in our lives are missing, like health or, you know, air that’s not smoky.
[LB] Joy.
[JF] Yes, joy! It’s as if we’ve lost more than we can account for.
[RN] It’s easy to look down on a white people’s grief over their perceived loss of exceptionalism. I spent plenty of time turning up my nose at that kind of relationship to identity; national identity or patriotic identity. And yet, if you don’t have anything else, if there’s no other culture really present—no song, no food, actually, that’s yours, there’s kind of nothing there because you gave it up or your parents or grandparents gave it all up in order for you to participate in this American exceptionalism based on a homogenous idea—
[JF] —to make a living. To just get a job at the factory.
[RN] Yes, totally, so when that is called into question or feels like it’s eroding, this reactionary response, of course, makes sense. And then our question is: Okay then, how do we grieve? We’ve all had that uncle, right, who’s done some good things and some problematic things and he’s still your uncle. And when he passes away, there might be a lot of messed up things he did, you know, like he stole your grandfather’s truck ... Okay, I’m actually talking about my uncle. He did these messed up things but he also gave me a Sun Ra CD—amazing!—when I was 15. That was super-cool, Uncle John. But there’s this person, who is complicated. That relationship to our own identity or inherited identities, let’s say, feels connected to our sense of grief for this specific individual. And that’s why I think it’s important that we don’t frame Blaine—the character in our piece who’s died and who turns out to be an effigy—as anyone’s father. He’s great-uncle Blaine, from Faith’s perspective. He’s a bit removed, not known so well. This echoes the relationship white people in the U.S. have to whiteness. We know we’re a part of it, but we don’t fully understand what it has done.
[JF] And maybe people don’t want to know the history. Reckoning with the past is not only about mourning loss. It may also be about purging one’s sense of complicity in historical processes. Whatever privilege attaches to whiteness, of course, is the product of a long, violent history. You’re born into this situation where privilege accrues to the hue of your skin and then you realize that’s linked to this super-fucked up overall situation. Will You Miss Me? is also grappling with that element of a problematic relation to the past.
[RN] And this is when we get to the issue of what we do with the body in our construction of the piece. How do we deal with him?
[LB] In the early version of the play, we carried him outdoors. We try to bury him; we try to dig a hole but can’t break through the cement and Remy carries him away with the pallbearer. And we were like, that is not it. That is not how we get rid of the body.
[RN] What we ultimately came to, and this became a central dramaturgical problem, was that he cannot be buried. He cannot leave, actually. But something transformative has to happen to him. Which is why, ultimately, the body is ripped open, after Liza’s text about ancestry and unearthing our ancestors throughout history until, as she says in the piece, we “arrive at the one who stepped out of the forest and denied that God was the pine tree smashing through sandstone, wrestle that traitor to the ground, open your mouth and devour him.”
[LB] And you can’t really do that.
[RN] You can’t. But after that, the body of Blaine is ripped open, and in a joyful way, disemboweled. Out of his body come TV Guides, a telephone, parts of the vacuum, things from some relative’s house that are left over after they die and you deal with their home. What you’re left with is mostly junk that they have accumulated.
[LB] Which is yours now to deal with.
[JF] The remains. I think that holding onto objects from the past can be very powerful politically. For a recent example—you guys might have been there— in the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, there was one event two or three weeks into the daily protests, where everybody met at the site of the Algiers Motel murders [in Detroit] which occurred during the 1967 rebellion.
[LB] I missed this, but I heard about it.
[JF] A number of elders from the Detroit political scene, including members of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers who were still around, came and spoke and it was this incredibly moving but also energizing experience, to link the current struggle against white supremacy to this past moment in the struggle. It could be depressing, right? One might think, ok, here we are just remembering our failure to deal with this, to get rid of the problem. But instead, it felt really emboldening, because we’re joined with people from a past moment. I think it made the people gathered there feel more powerful.
As you were talking about the songs, I was thinking, do they model a way of keeping these things of the past alive, and allow the past to inhabit the present in a way that redirects us or opens us up to different kinds of group energies? There’s a powerful call to collectivity in your piece. We were sort of joking about people joining up in the singing at the beginning, but the play, as a whole, does invite the audience in.
[RN] Right.
[LB] It ends, and I’m speaking directly to everyone. I see them. I’m trying to truly connect with them via something that’s personal to me, that I imagine is true for my grandmother, my oldest living ancestor. A lot of people talk to us after the piece, saying, “I’ve also been thinking about this. This is something I’ve experienced, the disconnect around lineage.”
The piece closes with the sentiment that we are part of nature, or some greater imagination. We wanted it to connect into space and the cosmos. And, yeah, we’re part of the songs. You’re part of your family. You’re part of humanity.
[JF] We all die.
[LB] We all die. We all live. We all have an individual story that does have beauty in it. There are things that are yours, that are just for you. When you’re eulogized, no one will know what you dreamt about when you were a child. Nobody will know the secrets that you shared with one person, or that you didn’t share with anybody.
[JF] That was a really nice part of the play, I must say.
[LB] Thank you.
[RN] As the piece goes on, we’re dealing with larger cultural issues, difficulties that we’re wrestling with at the level of lineage, at the level of whiteness in this context of the U.S. … To acknowledge that I am this white person who is complicit by association, and in some ways, participated in this genocidal history of the United States, and at the same time, I’m an individual who had strange moments of magic as a child; who had dreams that I couldn’t understand, who tried to live a life that was compelling. I mourned my parents, and I carry things from them, whether I meant to or not, as almost everyone does. In my case, my character ends through self-eulogizing, and then Liza’s character, Faith, ends through this text about her childhood and as an old woman, talking to the animals.
[LB] It felt important to land on some sense of possibility, because I don’t know how you deal with this horrible historical inheritance. Who, as a human being, would want to participate in this shit? I guess there are plenty of people right now who might want to, but I don’t. So we tried to think, what else can we do? How else can we be? What framing allows you to see something differently? And as part of the natural world, does that allow for other possibilities?
We had just read The Three-Body Problem trilogy by Liu Cixin when we started working on Will You Miss Me? I finished it before the pandemic. There’s this beautiful section in the last book where it skips tens of thousands—
[RN] —billions. Billions of years.
[LB] And in the last 20 pages, two of them leave Earth and keep existing.
[RN] They step outside of space and time. And some civilization, who knows who, puts out a call: The universe is about to collide back in on itself. Too many of you are gone, and we’re missing the matter that will allow the universe to reform itself. It’s a long call. The same statement is put out in just billions and billions of languages, and way down on the list—way, way, way, way, way, way down—are the human languages, and Trisolaran, which is the other alien civilization featured in the book. They’re not important. There are billions of other civilizations over the course of time who are listed before them, but they are remembered in some tiny, insignificant way, by existence, by somehow or someone, and in that moment the human and the Trisolaran android start weeping. That was incredibly powerful in thinking about this project.
When I was working on the song, “Will You Miss Me?” I would sing it to the trees and the rocks and the sky and ask if humanity would be missed in some little way. This was a thread in the piece that we ultimately did not fully include, of imagining human extinction, mourning our own possibly eminent demise, and wondering if we would be missed. We didn’t feel we could fully work the thread into the dramaturgy of what we had—
[LB] —But there is an echo of it in the last section.
[RN] It’s in the line: “As he dies, he sends out one final wave of thought into the universe, like a satellite sending out a message of peace heard by unknown civilizations, billions, and billions of years from now.” And then in Liza’s text, she sees the International Space Station passing overhead and shouts, “Hello, you fools! Come back to Earth where the food is hot and your blankets won’t float away from you!” and it’s a funny moment. Later, when the deer comes to her window and looks at her through the window, it looks at her the same way that she looks at the space station: “Hello, you fool.”
[JF] You guys packed a lot into those final speeches! They are rich texts.
[RN] Liza wrote the end before we had the rest of the piece.
[LB] I wrote it two weeks after Richard’s dad died.
[RN] We were doing a writing intensive, which was ill-timed. We had a French dramaturg who was working with us remotely and we had scheduled this time to work on it, and Liza wrote this piece, and then we were like, ah it’s the end. I don’t know what the piece is, but that is the end, somehow.
[LB] Or how we get there.
[RN] Sometimes that happens. You’re like, okay, this is the final text of the piece, so, how do we construct this piece? We’re at this funeral but I don’t know how we possibly end up at this place that she’s written at the end. It creates a nice problem.
[JF] It’s a very interesting move you’ve charted out, where you end up back at this question of contemplating your own mortality as the inevitable endpoint, but also as one that then opens onto other things, including other people and the natural world.
One of the emotionally and politically resonant ideas at the end is that what needs to happen in relation to this super-problematic history of American genocidal exceptionalism is not only forming some new collective that leads a revolution, but also unlearning things from the past, or detaching from things that are damaging, which people forget is hard.
[RN] Unlearning is always tied to learning, and they have to function at the same time. In Technic and Magic, Campagna says if things feel impossible right now, politically, maybe it’s because they are impossible. If they feel hopeless, maybe it’s because they are hopeless within our current reality system. And paraphrasing a quote from the book: This is not a manual for us to turn our defeat into some kind of victory. It’s a rumor about a passageway underneath the battlefield, leading to the forest beyond it.
We have to create a new reality. Of course, we need to continue to do all that work that everyone’s doing politically, all the organizing in our communities. These things need to happen. But we also have to look for a different way of making meaning, of perceiving our reality and our existence. And that is something that we are trying to do within our performances. All these things about the piece that we’ve talked about— structures, the meanings, the dramaturgies— they can be talked about, but there is something else within it that we can’t talk about. We are trying to create an experience for people that circumnavigates or short circuits their experience of reality for 76 ½ minutes—78 if we’re slow that night—and through the work, these questions we are asking can be absorbed in a different way. I think it’s important to bring up this other layer of experiencing. It’s a big part of how we work, and why we don’t necessarily publish the play, even though there’s writing in it that I really like a lot. It’s meant to be experienced, and hopefully, afterwards, people can’t fully describe what happens.
[JF] Yeah. It’s a passage under the battlefield leading to a forest beyond it.
[LB] I love the forest because we’re strangers there. It’s a place of the trees and we’re guests.
[RN] Or maybe people could find a way to live there.
[JF] And the forest is sort of a commons, too. It’s not property.
[RN] It should not be property.
[JF] It should not be. That forest that doesn’t have a fence around it. Maybe that is a nice place to stop.
View next: Image gallery, as part of “Will You Miss Me? A Dossier on The Hinterlands”
Jonathan Flatley is a professor in the English department at Wayne State University. He has lived in Detroit since 2003.