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Atlanta is burning
Regina Taylor explores a hot American city.
Regina Taylor’s Magnolia is a tale of two cities. Set in Atlanta in 1963, the play examines a progressive American city in an otherwise conservative region, wrestling with how to make the politics of integration jibe with the gentle manners of a sophisticated metropolis. It’s also a Chicago story. As a member of the Goodman Theatre’s artistic collective, playwright, director and screen actor Taylor, 48, connects the Chicago theater scene to the equally vital but less nationally chronicled Atlanta theater scene.
In civil-rights battles, both cities have seen the best and worst of times. (Like Atlanta, ’60s-era Chicago served as a globally watched hotbed of political tumult.) Meanwhile, both cities have offered up homegrown theater that’s both an American contribution and a source of extreme local pride.
“Atlanta is first and foremost entrepreneurial,” Taylor says. “That’s how they got their airport. And the theater scene there is no different. These people are running businesses, and they take that very seriously.”
Taylor’s enthusiasm for Atlanta and Chicago stems from her love of localized arts (“theater should be grassroots,” she says plainly). Although she could have had her pick of coastal lives—as an actor she plays Molly Blane on TV’s The Unit, and as a writer she created the gospel play Crowns, one of the most widely produced musicals in the country—Taylor devotes as much time as possible to the non–New York stage.
Raised by a single working mother in Dallas, Taylor didn’t want for live arts in her childhood. She probably didn’t think of it as regional theater at the time, but her adolescence was significantly colored by the many plays and musicals she attended with her mom. When she reminisces about that experience, the tone and vocabulary she uses to describe it is no different than when she raps about working with some of the biggest players in the business. Even when she’s praising Unit series creator and onetime Goodman scribe David Mamet (about whom she suspiciously only has lovely things to say), it all comes out the same. To Taylor, theater is theater is theater.
Kenny Leon, artistic director of Atlanta’s True Colors Theatre (and whose many varied credits include the most recent Broadway revival and screen remake of A Raisin in the Sun with Diddy and Phylicia Rashad), was one of the first producers to take Taylor’s voice as a playwright seriously. She was mainly still a working stage actor when Leon brought her play Watermelon Rinds to Atlanta’s prestigious Alliance Theatre, where Leon eventually became artistic director.
“I can look at something and know it’s Regina’s without her name on it,” Leon says of Taylor’s often-sprawling works. “It’s the same as with August Wilson’s plays. You know the voice the minute you hear it.” A fan and frequent adapter of Chekhov’s ensemble dramas, Taylor most recently showed off her intelligent voice to Chicagoans in 2006 with The Dreams of Sarah Breedlove, a look at the life of African-American women’s hair-care pioneer Madame C.J. Walker, which Taylor also directed. (Anna D. Shapiro directs Magnolia, marking her first crack at a new work since helming Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County.)
While discussing Magnolia’s location, both Taylor and Leon mention another key trait that Chicago and Atlanta share: a lust for ascension. “Atlanta is a city of potential,” Leon says. “It wants to be international, but it’s really not.” As far as Atlanta’s theater scene is concerned, that’s not for lack of trying. Like Chicago, it has long been an ecosystem of independent companies, which occasionally catapults something unexpected onto the national stage, often with Chicago talent shared through a continental pipeline.
Former Goodman literary manager Susan Booth, now the Alliance’s artistic director, used the theater to incubate the Broadway-bound The Color Purple (produced and directed by Chicago’s Oprah Winfrey and Gary Griffin, respectively). It was also at the Alliance that Robert Falls, for better or for worse, rescued a then-flailing 2000 Elton John project, Aida, for Disney Theatricals. The commercial stage works of Atlanta-based showman Tyler Perry regularly draw huge crowds to the Arie Crown. Atlanta even boasts a healthy fringe scene with young audiences to rival Chicago’s storefront circuit; our Neo-Futurists often exchange talent and projects with the alternative troupe Dad’s Garage.
As for Taylor, when she talks about the kind of pragmatic business proprietors she writes about in Magnolia—“they’re proud of what they make”—you get the feeling she relates.
Magnolia is in previews at Goodman Theatre.
