George E. Joshua: a playwright in New York

On this episode my friend George E. Joshua and I reflect together about his experience as a Black playwright in New York City since the 1970's until now.

A very special Thank You to Charise Green and Steve Jones, who played Maggie and Moose, and Angela Rostick and Charles Black, who played Roscoe and Eunice. 

The Music credits for this episode got to Universalfield, SergeQuadrado, and Prazkhanal generously published on pixabay.com/music. 

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Directing and editing assistance by Mario Golden. Written and produced by Andreas Robertz.

Please take a moment to rate this episode on podchaser.com or apple podcast. You can follow Update from the Edge by subscribing on the podcast platform of your choice.

Transcript

George E. Joshua: a playwright in New York

It was my first year in New York, and Mario was a member of the Beginners Playwrights Unit at the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, located at the old firehouse on 47th Street, very close to Broadway.  Member playwrights would meet once a week there to give each other feedback on scripts selected for review. 

You had to climb up to the fourth floor of the firehouse, and then an additional floor on an incredibly narrow spiral staircase, to reach the room where the unit was held. The wood floor was old and squeaky; a side glass ceiling, with an open view of Manhattan midtown skyscrapers, leaked when it rained.

George was part of the Professional Playwrights Unit, where advanced, published, and produced writers met. Once you saw George you couldn't forget him. He is tall and lean, with unique features; he is introverted and seemingly absent-minded, and he has a vast knowledge of African-American history and culture: a real presence.

George:           What Alan had, he would start you in one unit, and then after two years or three years or whatever, he would move you up to the next unit. What they would do is leave the scripts out in the hall and during the week people would come by and pick up the scripts, take them home, read them and come back and discuss what they had read. So I would just see scripts from the other unit and I would glance through them. 

Eventually Mario and I were allowed to join the Professional Playwrights Unit and really got to know George and the other members. Meeting weekly for several years, our colleagues became sworn comrades-in-arms: Fred Crecca, Oscar Colon, Pedro Garcia, Michael Mejias, Elena Torres, TCat Ford, Carlos Serrano, Nancy Nevárez, Noemi Martinez-Cress, Noemi de laPuente, and George E. Joshua. The talent of these writers was immense and under the wise leadership of Allen Davis III, the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater Playwrights Unit became our artistic home in New York. In time Mario and I co-directed both units.

George was born in Queens, New York in 1949. He now lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn. For decades he had an administrative position working with the New York Police Department.

George:           I worked at the police department for over 40 years and, there might be a handful of people that I consider my friend, that's 40 years. I mean, I could exchange greetings and this and that, but away from the police department I was still writing, I was involved with theater. So the police department for me became like a job.  The friends that I made to the police department, I actually made when I first started working there back in the seventies. A friend of mine has a birthday coming up, very good friend of mine. He's a police officer. We work together.  He's a little older than I am. Let me see, he'll be 86 years old in a couple of weeks. He's a great guy. I remember I took him out on his birthday. This had to be like in the eighties or something like that, took him to a concert. We both like music. Hugh Masekela, the late trumpet player, was performing with Herp Alpert at The Bottom Line in the village, which is no longer there. When I had my first show done, 1984, Across the Pond, he brought his whole tennis club there. He had like about 20 people there and the small theater only sat like since 74, 75 people.  He's always supported me. 

True to his real profession George was always writing. 

George’s plays are an incredibly rich source of knowledge about the experience of Black people in the U.S. I’d only heard the half-accurate stories I was told about African-Americans back in Germany at school, so it was a topic I did not remotely have a grasp on.

One of his plays, “Meditation on Dead Bones”, is about New York in the 17th century, when slaves, former slaves, and free-born Blacks were all part of the city’s make-up. In it a character named Angola, a freed former slave, tries to escape with his lover, an enslaved woman whose master promises her that her daughter will be free. Angola wants to sail with all of them back to Africa. The tensions arising from the different statuses of the characters are complex. The hate we see directed towards a free Black man is intense. And the characters’ collective struggle for independence and freedom is monumental. 

Another one of George’s plays, “When the Sunset Explodes”, unfolds during the time of the Revolutionary War. It’s the story of a father and a son who had found themselves fighting for opposite sides, one with the British forces and the other with the American rebels,  both driven by the same noble promise of freedom. They have to face a white abolitionist traveling the country advocating for the end of slavery, while at the same time he keeps a black woman they know in common as his property. 

These plays are tragic — with a profound sense of suffering and pride. Reading them moved me deeply, and even more so seeing them acted onstage. 

George:           I had been writing for, um, Oh, number of years, I had a, a play done in 1984 at the, sixth Street Theater, and it ran and it did unexpectedly well. 

Andreas           What was that about? 

George:            It was a play called Across the Pond.  It was really it was a military piece. Now, I'd been in the military and this was like in 69 and 70. But at that time I wasn't writing plays. I was just writing, I was writing short stories, poetry and stuff like that. I got into plays like in about, I would say 73 or something like that, cause that time theater was relatively cheap. Theater in New York at that time was basically segregated up until like about 1982. 

Andreas:          Really? 

George:            Yeah. And so there were really like four or five locations where black and brown people would go. So everybody would be congregated in those places. But what it was interesting because, because theater was limited in that sense. Everybody was together and there would be like fantastic talent there.  I can remember seeing people in little readings and in small productions that today, if I said their name, the general public would know who they are. I knew them as like, somebody who, you'd have a cup of coffee with or chit chat with. Sam Jackson, he was in the reading of a friend of mines. So I got the earlier accompany my friend and we all hung out. Denzel Washington, I saw him in a couple of things. I saw him in a production, it was called “When Chickens Come Home to Roost”, two Character piece. He played Malcolm X. Yeah … yeah. 

Music

In 2008 Mario and I started a theater project about slavery through our company, OneHeart Productions, focused on the personal experiences of actors who were descendants of enslaved people and enslavers. We invited a few actors with this background and asked George to create a play based on their stories. 

The following scene takes place at a run-down hotel in Birmingham, Alabama. Long time employee Moose resists Maggie, the owner of the Plantation Haven, as she tries to break with its racist past. 

Scene form “Birmingham Reunion” 

The name of the play was Birmingham Reunion.

George:           All these companies had writers units and it was very easy to join if you wanted to, for a minimal fee or, or sometimes nothing.

Andreas:          I think you told me once that you met Morgan Freeman.

George:            Morgan Freeman was one it was the four co-founders of the Frank Silvera Writers’ Workshop. Morgan Freeman, Garland Lee Thompson, Billy Allen. And there was one other lady, I apologize, I can't recall right now. But Garland had been a director out in California and he worked with the late Frank Silvera. So that's where the workshop got derived its name. And Morgan Freeman was in on it because, which is funny to think about now, he couldn't get any roles in any pictures, so he was trying to have a forum where the writers could write roles that he could do. I used to see him like twice a week and he would be in the readings. He would play parts every time he sees something he could play. I remember he said once that if he could get a chance, he would play a chair, if that's what they wanted him to play.

Andreas:         So, so you're saying because it was so segregated Yeah, it was very intimate and personal. 

George:            Yeah. 

Andreas           And accessible. 

George:           Accessible. And the talent was extreme. In terms of writing, in the units, none of them that I mentioned, Garland nor Morgan Freeman dealt with the writing aspect.

So in these different little small venues, I got a chance to work with people that, later on would, command thousands of dollars to teach the universities and colleges across the country. And I'm working for like $25 I think was the top I paid. I studied with Jay Franklin, Adrian Kennedy, the late Charles Fuller, Ed Bullins, Ron Milner.  I remember, maybe three or four years ago, the Dramatists Guild Magazine did a cover story and they featured four playwrights, two of them, Charles Fuller and Adrian Kennedy, I had studied with.

Andreas:          So you were in a way constantly writing?

George:            Yeah.

Flatbush Avenue is full of bodegas, cheap Chinese restaurants, 99 Cent outlets, and fruit stands outside mini-markets. 

When I went to visit George in his neighborhood, he picked me up from the subway stop at Church Avenue, a very busy corner. His apartment is in a quieter area just a few blocks away. He lives with his wife Josefina. 

George’s apartment could very well be the stage of “The World According to Roscoe,” a new play he is working on. In it Roscoe and Eunice, an older couple, find themselves trapped in their flat at the start of the Covid Pandemic. Roscoe is recovering from a work related accident and Eunice, a nurse, is taking time off to help him.

Scene form “The World according to Roscoe” 

The scene we just heard is from an earlier version of the script. George already revised it. He writes and re-writes methodically, even after his plays are considered ready.

George and I spent the whole afternoon together that day, talking about his plays, art, politics, and the states of the world. 

I admire him for his steadfastness when it comes to his work. He is constantly writing and rewriting, mirroring life through the eyes of his characters. He told me that he was always most interested in history but recently he’s wanted to write about people living in the present time. 

George:           People, just being them, the situation we find ourselves in. And how do we deal with it?  How do we manage it? And surviving it? And in surviving it also maintained our humanity. And the perspective, that it doesn't always have to be like this.

George does not seem to mind if his plays get produced; he writes them anyway. I find that immensely encouraging. The question of how to stay relevant to my audiences is always on my mind, and through his example he shows me that as long as my stories are rooted in real life, they remain relevant and current. George is truly talented. I love working and collaborating with him, and above all I’m very grateful that I can call him my friend.

A very special Thank You to Charise Green and Steve Jones, who played Maggie and Moose, and Angela Rostick and Charles Black, who played Roscoe and Eunice. 

The Music credits for this episode got to Universalfield, SergeQuadrado, and Prazkhanal generously published on pixabay.com/music.