Pretty Fire is written by Charlayne Woodard. I first came to Charline’s work as a kid watching her musical Ain't Misbehaving on PBS (and then over and over on a self-recorded videotape). It came full circle now when I did her play. At SoulRep, we focused on the first part of Pretty Fire (out of three) that tells the story of Charlayne’s life until she turns 11. The actors in my play have black dresses and the whole set simply consists of 2 benches.

I wanted to allow room for the art of storytelling and the performance itself. It is a two women play with no breaks, and the actresses in their roles are fully believable. Throughout the play there is constant moving of benches, which represents different locations, for instance, when the actress is going from a church to a grandma’s house, or to a school. I tell my actors: “You are going to be out of breath. If you are not – then you are not doing this right.” In my work I incorporate a lot of movement, unless the moment calls for a pause. I want the audience to see the actor’s body morph as they talk to another imaginary person. For example, as a viewer you can sense the difference how the dialogues switch between two different grandfathers (taller and shorter) when the actor morphs her body accordingly.

I found a story 10 years ago and kept it in my back pocket, until my main advisor Daniel Garcia convinced me to develop it into a film when I pitched it to him. It comes from the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) of the Library of Congress's holdings – a collection of oral history interviews captured during depression years that document the stories of former slaves. I read all the stories from Texas and major northern cities and stumbled upon the narrative of Walter Graham from Fort Worth. He tells the story of a white girl who was kidnapped from Kentucky, painted black, taken to the south and sold as a slave in Texas, near Corpus Christi. The woman eventually married a black man on the plantation, and one of her children married Walter Graham who tells this story.

This 10-minute-long film will be set in 1857. Taking it from the point of people in the slave quarters, I will explore the array of emotions that would have happened between black slaves and a person who they were told is their enemy. The fundamental question here is: What happens when the oppressed becomes the oppressor? The real protagonist of the story was a 5-year old Mary Schlauser, probably from the immigrant blacksmiths family of German descent, based on her last name. I have some pictures and the death certificate of her daughter in Fort Worth, which will be used in the film credits.