Legacy: The Art of Peggy Pettitt

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Actor/playwright/storyteller/ teacher Peggy Pettitt has honed her craft via every opportunity her life has presented. She inherited a storytelling tradition from her grandmother, who raised her. She developed an inventory of characters from the poor, Black community in which she spent her childhood. She evolved a sense of professionalism performing the title role in the film of J.E. Franklin's Black Girl (1972) and in the first production of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes's Mule Bone (Lincoln Center, 1991). She acquired the craft of play building as a member of several theatre collectives beginning with the New York City Street Theatre Caravan. She has received these experiences as gifts, and responded by giving something back, not only as a performer and playwright but also as a teacher in venues as varied as senior centers, elementary schools and the New York University Department of Drama. Participating in a story circle she recently led at a community garden in the Bronx, I witnessed Pettitt's capacity to draw wonderful stories out of people with no prior experience in the expressive arts. Expecting to find diamonds in the rough and a legacy in the present, she does.

As a child, Pettitt experienced the power of dance, music and story in people's lives through the church. She grew up in St. Louis, a self-described "child of the church." Her grandfather worked in the steel mills but, avows Pettitt, "I saw his burdens fall away on Sunday." She recalls a great sense of freedom in congregational singing, dancing, and interacting. In 1968, Pettitt attended Antioch College, through Upward Bound. There, she met mostly middle-class students, both White and Black, passionately questioning the status quo. Pettitt describes the experience as "no grades, no clothes, new vision." From the moment she got off the plane and was met by Black students, she began to examine what it meant to be Black. "I had just left a 'Black dorm' [referring to her St. Louis neighborhood], got to college and was placed in a Black dorm!! But most of these Black students came from families that were not invisible-they had power and influence." Pettitt realized a sense of kinship with students whose values she shared, while experiencing the complexities of difference emanating from race and class.

Pettitt majored in acting, but, even at progressive Antioch, was given only Black roles to play. Part of her training inadvertently happened in therapeutic encounter groups, where she gradually expressed more and more of herself. Pettitt explains, "Telling your story separates you from it. You can see it, become aware, even have compassion for yourself, maybe feel remorse but not guilt. And you need some kind of audience to witness it so that you become a vessel for a common experience that they are having, too."

Graduating from college in 1974, Pettitt received a $7,000 travel fellowship. She spent $3,000 to bury her grandmother. She spent the rest over two years in London, involved in the fringe scene. She earned her living teaching cockney Whites and West Indian Blacks in poor communities. Peggy felt that she understood the conditions of the students' lives intimately, and discovered a certain affirmation teaching them. "I had never met people who were poorer than me, who needed something from me," she recalls.

Pettitt eventually moved to New York City and started writing in the famed Frank Silvera Writers' Work- shop. She taught drama at a drug rehabilitation program and joined Modern Times, a political theatre collective. Then she began creating her own multi-character solo pieces, which gave her control over content and allowed her to work whenever she pleased. Soon Remy Tissier, a French painter who had fallen in love with her as a result of seeing her perform, became her sweetheart and director. As a visual artist, Tissier applied his fine eye to Pettitt's solo performance. This was a pivotal moment in her artistic evolution and a collaboration born of necessity.

Pettitt's original impulse to do solo work was in response to Marie Divine, a 79-year-old woman at a senior center in the Bronx where Pettitt was teaching theatre through Elders Share the Arts. Divine kept to herself, although she had been coming to the center for years. After seeing Pettitt perform, Divine asked to have her own personal story told at the center. It was a horrific tale of child abuse that Divine had been carrying alone for many years. Pettitt assented, and asked Divine's permission to add an aunt to the dramatization who stops the abuse. Divine agreed, eager both to imagine what an intervention in her own childhood would have been like and to encourage the audience to intervene if they knew of comparable situations. Pettitt performed the piece on Divine's 80th birthday. It marked the beginning of Divine's blossoming in that community. Pettitt says, "Marie went from being invisible to being somebody." It also opened conversation about abuse which Pettitt saw as therapeutic, especially important for people less likely to undergo traditional treatment, and harkening back to Pettitt's own experience in encounter groups.

Community plays a role in everything Pettitt does. "People imagine an actor doing theatre in communities because they never got the big break. But in fact, it's often a source...When you say community, most people think loose, shabby, amateur. Although they'll accept a character that Toni Morrison or Alice Walker makes speak, a person like that is rarely considered worth listening to...But we don't need to give our attention to people who are already being honored."

Though performed alone, Pettitt's plays are still about community, about connecting and verifying. In fact, Pettitt is grateful for the research that solo pieces demand, making her get out and talk with people. "It never feels like solo work because I represent so many sides of being Black. I have never felt alone on stage. Every costume, every prop-it has history! Also, solo performance is easily portable, making it accessible to just about any community."

As a teacher, Pettitt shares her own creative process. She'll ask students to conjure up someone who taught them valuable life lessons, attuning them to their own community. "It's important to know where you come from and who taught you what," she says. She encourages students to see their whole lives as resources. She emphasizes journal writing, asking, for example, "What has been neglected in your life? What are the gifts that people have given you?" She urges students to use their journals outside the workshop, explaining, "Once you know what you want in a piece you're developing, words/ images/objects appear around you."

[shephrenology]

Pettitt has created and performed six solo pieces at the experimental New York City venue, P.S. 122. Even the titles are delicious, such as Caught Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (1991), Trickster: All Over You Like White on Rice (1993), Wrapped Up, Tied Up and Tangled (1995), and Mollie Oil Betwixt (1997). She depicts characters who soar by way of a rich oral tradition, and brings us inside intricate family relationships. Combining poetry with realism, and song with visual imagery, these plays also have political implications, peopled by characters who have entered a world with the cards stacked against them. Still, it is not a world of mere victims but rather of human beings who take strength from great reserves of spirituality, humor, and the generations.

For instance, her first professional solo work, Women Preachers (1990), is composed of three short plays. Each features girl children without their mothers, in which a primary relationship with a grandparent saves the day. Also present are characters whose earthly existence has ended. The terror and potential strength of both spirituality and progressive politics are hinted at in the middle play, in which a child faces her fears of baptism and her grandmother, her fear of registering to vote. A New York Times critic lauded the work's "lessons of faith, continuity and transition."

Her most recent play, Wild Steps (1999), begins with an all too familiar story-an African American trying to get a taxi. In this case, a White man with a big umbrella feels entitled to swipe the taxi that Pettitt has hailed. The driver, also of color, sits silently while the White guy wins out. In an almost balletic gesture, Pettitt traces a large semi-circle above her head, the White man's umbrella. That gesture bespeaks his larger-than-bodily power. Pettitt speaks to us like family, distinguishing this telling of the taxi story from any I've heard before. As if to say, "Surely, if you could feel this from the inside, you'd know how wrong it is; how hurtful. You wouldn't do it, and you wouldn't countenance anyone else doing it." Yes. Then she refers to another character as "that Black White lady." Now whatever is that? Little by little, I piece together that this character's got a tough life, making her ipso facto Black in this country. Pettitt, playing a character based on her grandmother, feels for that "Black" White lady, who, although a minor character we never meet, is going to move in with the family by the end of the show.

Most striking is how Pettitt plays several characters at once, stirring up multiple conversations that I forget are between herself and herself. In Wild Steps, she embodies the wisdom and earthiness of the family matriarch, Iris, as well as the rough sexiness of her dead husband's ghost, the innocence of her traumatized granddaughter, and the specificity of her three daughters-the rage of the eldest (who calls herself MT, Moving Target); the cool practicality of the middle one; and the panicked fragility of the youngest. On one level, the performance seems therapeutic for Pettitt who is calling up old ghosts so they can discharge their energy and let her go on. At the same time, she exudes such warmth and performs with such intimacy that audiences are downright tenderized, and can barely help feeling connected to the characters.

This year, Pettitt is adding a new source to her teaching and performing-she is headed to Senegal on a Fulbright Fellowship to do research for her next solo piece. The trip is a continuation of her desire to extend out into community, now moving into a global context. Before she leaves and upon her return, Pettitt will enter her third year as Storyteller-in-Residence at the Central Park East Elementary School. One of her dreams is to write a book of original children's stories based on the tales she has spun there, such as "Willie and the Empty Man." She is also continuing the work she began with me in the previously mentioned community garden in the Bronx. The goal of that project, a collaboration between NYU drama students, citywide community gardeners, and the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, is the creation of a work of art that honors the community gardens and facilitates a forum to address the dearth of green open space in New York City neighborhoods. Performances will be held in community gardens and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in May 2001. Pettitt will also create and perform her next solo piece, continuing to let audiences into the worlds she travels.

Through these and other endeavors, Pettitt reveals that legacy is a relationship-not merely an inheritance bestowed. It is a result of interaction and vision for those who recognize and receive it, not only from the past but also from the present. The thread of legacies will run through all her forthcoming works, via the oral storytelling tradition she shares with children, the experiences she brings back from Senegal, and the honoring of city gardeners who make something beautiful locally against all odds. Pettitt's work allows audiences to see people they may have thought of as maimed and limited, as being equally likely to pass on great treasures. This is not to romanticize the often dangerous sources of such legacies, which not everyone survives intact. But Pettitt is a living testimony to the abundance of legacies surrounding us, if only we can recognize them.