New York-based playwright Eisa Davis is drunk on words. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say she is enamored with language, as in “rarely, if ever, meets a word she cannot love.” With her Pulitzer Prize-finalist play, Bulrusher, returning to Berkeley Repertory Theatre Oct. 27-Dec. 3 in a co-production with Princeton’s McCarter Theatre Center, Davis says it’s a special kind of homecoming after having grown up and performed on Bay Area stages at the start of her career.
Originally premiering at Urban Stages/Playwrights’ Preview Productions in New York in 2006, Bulrusher is set in 1955, in rural logging territory north of San Francisco. When audiences first meet Bulrusher she is 18, having years before been discovered as an orphaned infant found in a basket floating on a river. Adopted by a schoolteacher (Schoolch) and growing up as a multiracial child in a town whose residents are mostly white, she early on displays clairvoyant skills that mark her as peculiar.
Bulrusher’s ability to read someone’s future once she and that person place their hands in water, and a friendship with Vera—a Black girl from Alabama who breaks into Boonville with secret connections of her own—stand out as unusual, even amidst the town’s strikingly unusual residents. Bulrusher’s struggle with her sexuality and identity is complicated and profound, but the play is not lacking in humor, especially that found in the townspeople’s fantastically inventive insider dialect known as Boontling.
Davis stumbled upon and was instantly fascinated by the real-life jargon and rhythms of the language she discovered in Boontling: An American Lingo, written by Charles C. Adams. Coming upon the book while visiting a Northern California winery, Boontling’s more-than-1,300 unique words and phrases captured her long-held interest. “I’ve always loved rich dialogue, dialect and slang, and how they provide specificity to various communities and to people themselves. Character is truly defined or carved by the way that people speak,” she says.
Davis has always been surrounded by eloquent people. Her grandmother was an early reading specialist who taught her to read and write by the time she was two years old. “As an elementary school teacher, education and learning were paramount for her,” Davis says. “She taught all of her children to respect language and use it properly. My mother was a civil rights attorney for 30 years. My aunt, the renowned Angela Davis, is a professor, activist and speaker, and I loved always hearing her language.”
Davis continues, “I loved the slang I would hear amongst all of my friends, especially at Berkeley High. I loved all the slang I found in hip-hop. I used to make up slang of my own with my friends, and we would see what would catch on. I understood language to function as a way of becoming … I want to say I see and saw language as a way of forging identity, building relationships, having meaning we could return to and have as something special. It was the power of language as a tool of subverting power and fighting injustice. It was how powerful language has been in the fight against misogyny, white supremacy, racism, homophobia. Language brought such joy, and I also saw how important it is.”
Language in Bulrusher is a celebration of the people who speak Boontling, but also something that provides insularity and entertainment, enriches inside jokes, keeps secrets and expresses the characters’ verbal virtuosity and humor. In the play, it’s less about keeping outsiders out and has more to do with inventiveness and the introduction of conflict.
“Schoolch, who is Bulrusher’s adoptive parent, wants to keep her safe from vulgar things that are in the language,” Davis says. “He’s trying to keep her laced properly with proper English. He doesn’t allow her to speak Boontling, so that’s where it lands in the play as a conflict. More than anything, it’s about the characters revealing themselves creatively and having their own stamp.”
Theater, Davis suggests, is “the perfect place” to explore the richness of language meant to be spoken and heard aloud. Because of its complexity, she says, films and television delve less deeply into language.
“Theater is a sanctuary for the word, a place where poetry can be digested at the rate it needs to be digested,” she says. “It’s a place of active contemplation. The audience is working along with the performers, designers and the crew to have an experience. It’s not just turning something on and having it in the background while you do the dishes. You’re actually engaging and, hopefully, being transformed.”
The challenge and opportunities for a playwright to captivate an audience in any play, Davis says, is something all theater artists grapple with and comes within the first 10 to 20 minutes of a production. The audience must get accustomed to the world in which they and the performers will “live in” for the duration.
“If you’re in a world that is very language-heavy, like Shakespeare or Branden Jacobs-Jenkins or Naomi Wallace, there can be a resetting,” Davis says. “It can take a second for the style of language, syntax or rate of meaning inside the language to find a home in the listener. In the language of Boontling, as one of the characters says in the play, it doesn’t matter if you know precisely what the word means—Shakespeare would make up tons and tons of words—it’s just part of the scenery, the rhythm, the music of the play. You’ll understand it in the way that you can when learning a new language or hearing something that you don’t get every syllable, but you can feel what the person means and what the intention is.”
Davis adds, “I’m not dropping an obscure dialogue. It’s English that’s spiced with this dialect. I don’t see it as a challenge, but I’m not afraid of challenging audiences. We actually need that. If we’re truly engaged in worthwhile questions, we might find ourselves using more of our soul, heart and brain as muscles to make our way through all of those questions.”
The keen hearing skills reflected through the language in Davis’ scripts have their origin in a practice she can’t switch off. Workers on the MTA, the subway where she lives in New York, speak about rushing waters in the tunnels in language she doesn’t understand, but whose words she can’t resist.
“That’s interesting jargon, to me,” Davis says. “I’m also interested in the jargon that may come from a lawyer’s legaleze or a doctor describing lab tests. I’m always fascinated by the specific language people have for their own existence, world, communities. I don’t see markers [of race, gender, class, age] as anything to worry about. Language is something to celebrate.”
This includes unspoken languages. “I’m glad you brought up languages that aren’t spoken,” she says. “The languages of the body, visuals, nature. All of those things are fascinating to me as well. They have to be working in tandem to allow each of them to speak when it comes to making theater.”
Water and music are interdependent in Bulrusher and, according to Davis, exist in the forefront with more relevancy than in any of her works that have followed. “Music is the water that flows through all of my plays,” she says. “Sometimes there are actual songs; sometimes I’m writing music theater pieces. What that can mean is that more than just a song somewhere, the language itself is its own music. The character’s journey, the narrative, is its own music.”
She continues, “People will talk about ‘the music of the play,’ and making sure you’re honoring the rhythm that’s baked into the lines—how the syllables work and the punctuation. I first trained as a classical pianist and that’s something that hasn’t left me. Music is always in it and something you can hear and feel. Sometimes it’s not apparent if you simply read it, but once the play is said aloud and exists in a place, the sense of it and the feel of it becomes clear.”
That clarity is achieved intuitively, with Davis writing a play’s early drafts as an improviser. She, like many writers, claims to “listen” and hear what a character needs to say and for how long they must speak, only afterward constructing the framing for the language.
“I love rat-a-tat-tat dialogue back and forth, that is single lines between characters,” she says. “That’s a lovely rhythm that’s in all of my plays and definitely in Bulrusher. And there’s a particular poetic language the character Bulrusher uses when she speaks to the river. Then there’s the language of Vera. Her rhythm is shaped by sounds of the South, versus sounds of California. Each character has their own kind of rhythm.”
Cumulatively, the voices join like instruments in a symphony, or perhaps like performers and an orchestra in an opera. Davis is, in fact, currently working on the operatic production of Bulrusher, slated for a premiere in 2024. “I take their experiences and values and ways of seeing the world and have it show up in their language, concerns and values,” she says. “Bulrusher is a cipher; a circle of people who are all contributing their rhythms. I hesitate to even know what the label would be, musically, for the rhythms happening in the play. Maybe, ‘New Bulrusher?’”
Asked about conformity and sameness and the movement in contemporary society—and really, throughout history—toward polarization, Davis says one aspect of Bulrusher she most values is that it’s filled with people who don’t see themselves as “a herd of sheep.”
“Boy [a character in the play] says, ‘I’m not different than no one else, but I’m not always the same,’” Davis says. “That’s what these characters are all revealing. They’re all equal in respect to race, gender, sexuality, origin. They are very much their own people, and for a variety of reasons they’ve found themselves lonely to some degree. Circumstances left them feeling they didn’t have anyone to hold onto. In the course of the show, they’re able to recognize they can find intimacy and love within this band of misfits. They aren’t outcasts at all, but are intertwined as a family.”
Having landed as a balm when it was recently presented at Princeton University, Davis is not sure what to expect of Bulrusher in Berkeley. Aware that the global traumas of the pandemic, politics and social-injustice unrest have resulted in fractured communities and families and prevented people from engaging in true discourse—or trusting each other—she only knows, and is surprised, that the play continues to move her.
“Certain moments will set me off, and I’ll start sobbing,” Davis says. “The actors and what their creative minds bring to it; I feel more appreciation for the piece. I love that it has this life, it really could have just died after that first production, if not for Paula [Vogel, at Princeton] championing it, the Pulitzer jury lifting it into visibility and Berkeley Rep wanting to join the party. Of all the plays I’ve written, this play keeps resonating.”
Davis, in reflecting on her future work and the theater industry in general to remain viable and vital, says strong theater will always be timeless and created in response to the current “herstory, history or theirstory” of the playwright. “Theater can be immediate and innovative at shifting our notions of the possible and, if lucky, a play keeps having meaning over time,” she says. “You can go back to [various works], things set in time that have something to say about where we are now. What I love is theater that informs and also speaks across the ages.”
