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Samm-Art Williams on Coming Home
Born in Philadelphia and raised in the farming community of Burgaw, North Carolina, playwright and actor Samm-Art Williams journeyed far from home but remained inspired by the life and language of the rural south. As a member of the Negro Ensemble Company throughout the seventies, Williams participated both on and offstage as a playwright and actor, including appearing in the 1975 Broadway production of Leslie Lee's The First Breeze of Summer (which was also the first play of Signature's Negro Ensemble Company Season). Home was first staged by the NEC at St. Marks Playhouse in 1979, and transferred to Broadway's Cort Theatre in 1980, where it earned nominations for the Tony and Drama Desk Awards. After Home's Broadway run and national tour, Williams moved to Los Angeles, where he continued to act and write for television. He is currently an Artist-in-Residence at North Carolina Central University. Williams' other works with the Negro Ensemble Company include Welcome to Black River (1975), A Love Play (1976), The Sixteenth Round (1980), Eyes of an American (1985), and The Waiting Room (2007).
Prior to the start of rehearsals for Home, Williams spoke with Signature Edition from his hometown of Burgaw, where he has resided for the last ten years, about growing up in the South, his time with the Negro Ensemble Company, and his own return home.
Signature Edition: You grew up in Burgaw, North Carolina?
Samm-Art Williams: I was born in Philadelphia, and grew up in Burgaw. My mother and father separated when I was six or seven years old. She went back to North Carolina, and I went back with her. I would visit my father during the summers and stay with my mother during the school season.
Signature Edition: What was it like to grow up there?
SAW: It's a farming community, and when I was growing up there were farmers, loggers and some of the greatest bootleggers in the country. It was an extremely rural existence but it was almost a writer's dream, which I didn't realize this at the time, because my grandfather would have me working in the fields. I used to love it when my father would say, "Come up, visit me for the summer [in Philadelphia]." Everything was like poetry, you just had to listen to the people. Everybody in the South is a character, and no two are the same. So, it was a wonderful experience. At the time, it was not. I was a big kid, so by the time I was twelve or thirteen years old I was working with the grown folks and by the time I was fifteen, I was doing grown men jobs. My mother did everything she could to keep me as a kid, but it was just a different time. In the South, everybody had to work. But I'm glad that I did because it gave me a lot of inspiration for my writing, and a lot of my work today is based on memories of the South. My mother was trying to get me to do right, and I was like, "Yeah, do right? I'd rather do wrong." I guess she said, "I'm at my wit's end with this boy, what can I do?" She had me read the poetry of Langston Hughes and Edgar Allan Poe, and that was really what changed me. I must have been about fifteen years old when I read "The Raven." I did not know what a raven was! When I finished that poem, I was so scared of that bird. I said, "Wait a minute, how can I be afraid of something when I don't even know what the hell it is?" Which led me to believe that he was a wonderful writer. I said, "Hmm, I would like to do something like that!" I hate football, I hate basketball. The only reason to play sports was to get girls, so when I could recite poetry and get the football and the basketball players' girlfriends, I had no reason to play sports. That's how I got the bug at an early age - just trying to stay off the fields, trying to stay off the basketball court, and trying something different. And trying to stay out of trouble, because I didn't want to drive my mother crazier than I already had.
SE: When did you discover theatre?
SAW: It wasn't until college that I was exposed to the theatre. I went to Morgan State in Baltimore, and it was there that I got into the theatre department. I had always wanted to be a playwright, since I was fifteen or sixteen years old. I didn't know how to do it, because during the sixties you got a college education and you worked. It wasn't until I had had a couple of jobs after college and gotten married, that I said, "No, I want to be a playwright." So I gave it all up and in 1972 I went to New York where I met a gentleman by the name of Steve Carter. Steve was the most influential person in my life as a playwright. At the time he was the head of the Playwrights' Unit at the Negro Ensemble Company. He allowed me to join the company as a playwright, and that's when it all took off. They had actors, directors, choreographers, anyone you needed as a writer was at your disposal. And [NEC Founding Artistic Director] Douglas Turner Ward did not blink, he just said, "If you can do it, if you can take it, come on in." So that's where I got my start.
SE: What drew you towards theatre rather than poetry?
SAW: I think that the two go hand-in-hand. I don't consider myself a poet, but I love the poetic spirit of the written word, whether it's in a play, a straight poem, or even a novel. The stories that I needed to tell needed a play form rather than poetry, because you can only do so much in a poem. A poem is very specific, once you tell the story, you have to stay on line, whereas with a play, even though you're telling a story and you have to focus, keep your central characters, keep your theme, etc., you can bounce around a little bit from scene to scene. It just gave me a broader form to tell the stories that I wanted to tell, stories about the South, stories about my own experience, and it just seemed to work more for me. That's where I'm happiest. When I'm in the theatre, nothing can hurt me, my laugh takes a whole other tone. I'm not as crazy as I usually am when I'm in the theatre, I'm more focused. Being at Signature, I can't even believe this. In today's market, it's just hard to get a play done, period. But to get it done where you have smart people, that's the way it should be. And I think that it's places like Signature Theatre Company that will do that. Like the Negro Ensemble when I was there back in the seventies and early eighties. When you're young, and these things are falling in your lap, it doesn't mean anything to you, but ten or fifteen years from now, you're going to say, holy mackerel! I had all that!
SE: Will you tell us more about working with the Negro Ensemble Company?
SAW: I started in the Playwrights' Workshop and I auditioned for a couple of things. The Playwrights' Workshop was upstairs, and the main stage was downstairs, and whether you were an actor or a writer, your main objective was to get something on that main stage. It came to the point where I said, "I'll take any job," because I was trying to pay the rent and things were hard. I had just left a marriage, I was dedicated to becoming this writer, I was on unemployment, and I was living on 54th street in a fifth floor walk-up with the bathtub in the kitchen. When I got my first job at the Negro Ensemble Company, I could pay a bill here and there. But an amazing thing happened. There was a play called The First Breeze of Summer [by Leslie Lee] that the Negro Ensemble Company was putting on Broadway. Douglas [Turner Ward] hired me as his understudy in the role of Harper [Edwards]. I thought I had died and went to heaven. I was now able to move from that fifth floor walk-up to an apartment on West 47th Street. I could finally get a table to write on. I had two mattresses on the floor that I was sleeping on, the bathtub was in the kitchen, and I had a metal frame over the top of it which would become a table. That's where I had been writing up until now. Once I got that understudy job and moved to 47th Street, I got a decent table to write on, and to this day I still have that table. I was blessed because of that company. Had it not been for them, we probably wouldn't be having this conversation today. Most of the stuff I've written was developed there until the eighties when I left and started doing television.
SE: How did you start to write Home?
SAW: Well, I had done street theatre in New York and I wanted to do something that was very very simple, that could be done on the street, which Home can be, if push comes to shove. I wanted to do it almost as a poem and I wanted it to reflect my early life. I was just thinking about growing up and how I would love to go back home, back to the South, back to the land. I just kept working with the form until Home came to me and I started writing. You know, writers can never tell you where [an idea] comes from. You never know, and you probably shouldn't. The inspiration came, I think, from being in New York and having a longing to go back home and visit. At that time it seemed like it would never happen because everything was just so far away. I didn't have any money, and if I traveled, it meant that I had to save, save, and save just to get home for Christmas. So it had a very special meaning. I would say one thing: it sure came from the heart, and that's for real.
SE: Were Cephus' experiences similar to yours?
SAW: Well, I used my imagination. The feeling was there. I never hit the skids, at that time I didn't drink, certainly didn't smoke. But as I would travel around New York and look in the faces of the people, I could see where they came from. Even if a guy was on skid row, even if a woman was begging on the street, in that face, I could see this person came from somewhere before they got to this place. This is a foreign place to them, being a bum on the street, being on hard times, but inside of them is a good heart, a good spirit and God. They may not know that because they're so far removed and trying to live long enough to get that next meal and live until the next day. So a lot of it came from me looking at people in New York and saying, "Hmm, this would be a good character." Then of course, I reflected on the characters that I grew up with in Burgaw and Pender County and working on the farm. I put them all together in many cases. For instance, a character such as Hard-Headed Herbert is a composite of ten people that I knew.
SE: After Home opened it moved to Broadway and went on tour. What happened for you?
SAW: Yeah, it did do a lot of good things, and I kept writing plays. But I was getting older, and it wasn't like today, there weren't a lot of places you could have your plays done. I met this guy, he came to town casting for a [television] show called "Mike Hammer" in Los Angeles, and [he] hired me as an actor to go out there and do an episode. He knew I was I writer and he asked me, "Have you ever written for cop shows?" I told him yes because it sounded like a job in the making. And he said, "Well, why don't we bring you on as a writer for the show?" I said, "Cool," as broke as I was. I owed everybody, including Uncle Ed's three-legged donkey. So I went out there to work on "Mike Hammer," then I got a job on "Cagney and Lacey," and then "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air."
SE: Did you enjoy it?
SAW: Well, it was necessary. I didn't get into it because that's not my kind of lifestyle, but it afforded me a living. I did it mainly as a job, and I had no intention of staying in California. I was just looking at it as a job that's going to help me to take care of my family.
SE: You returned to Burgaw ten years ago. What made you leave L.A. and come back home?
SAW: Got tired of it. My mom had a stroke and she got sick. I just wanted to be around her more and I couldn't because once you're on a television show, that's your life. Well, that didn't suit me because that's not my life, I have another life, I have a family in North Carolina. I'm a Burgaw boy. I go to Philadelphia to visit my family on that side, I come to New York to do the plays, but I am a Burgaw boy, I'm happiest here.
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