The Fire This Time Festival 2025
Hagar is fed up with the state of Black playwriting. “These kids aren’t writing anything new. They all keep circling August Wilson. Family dramas are important…but if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.”
It’s an odd and audacious comment by Hagar, an artistic director at a non-profit theater, who is a character in “Security Watch” by TyLie Shider, one of the six short new plays in The Fire This Time Festival, which is on stage at the Wild Project through February 2.
Odd because Wilson only wrote a handful of what could be called family dramas, unless you greatly expand the definition of family. Audacious because four of the six plays at this year’s festival could reasonably be categorized as family dramas… including “Security Watch” itself.
It seems unlikely that the playwright was making a sly comment on the festival that he’s in, which since 2009 has showcased early-career playwrights of African and African-American descent.
But the 16th annual edition does feel like an off year. This could largely be a result of the heightened expectations from all the recent attention – the first play that originated at the festival to make it to Broadway (Jordan E. Cooper’s Ain’t No Mo); the publication of “25 Plays from The Fire This Time Festival” ; the free streaming of some dozen of the plays from past seasons on All-Arts ( House Seats: The Fire This Time Festival.)
The format was slightly different this year, which had its pluses and minuses. The plays, which are supposed to be ten minutes long, were sometimes at least twice that length, and they were interspersed with five music interludes – solo renditions of well-known songs by the likes of Stevie Wonder and Sam Cooke – – which pushed the running time on the night I attended to almost two and a half hours. Only occasionally is there any evident connection between a play and a song. Anita Welch-Smith – one of the five able and versatile cast members — plays Billie Holiday trying to erase her memories (which includes a memory of a lynching) in “Pound Cake” by Brittany Fisher, which is immediately followed by Welch-Smith singing the song about a lynching that Holiday made famous, “Strange Fruit.”
Welch-Smith later plays a rabble-rousing worker named Constance in Garrett Turner’s “Immanentize the Eschaton,” which could win a prize for the most off-putting title of 2025, but it is also among the most promising pieces in the festival, and the phrase is explained amidst some bright dialogue in the play. One of the two non-family dramas, it is set during breaktime in a factory in Huntsville, Alabama. The workers are chatting idly when Thomas (William Watkins) says if he were rich he would avoid paying taxes, and indulge in fancy cars, and weed and women. “Man, you boring,” Teyana (Rebecca L. Hargrove) says to him.
“Naw you don’t understand! We deserve to live a luxurious life. Our people have been stolen from for centuries. And now that we finally have the chance to make the kind of lives we want, we have to. The good life is our birthright….”
This is when Constance says: “Oh, I see, you’re trying to immanentize the eschaton.’
“I’m sorry what?”
“I said you’re trying to immanentize the eschaton.”
“I’m tryna do a lot of things, but I’m pretty sure that’s not one of ‘em.”
“Sure it is! Look. Immanentize means to make immediate. The eschaton means the end of the world. But the end of the world is not so much about how the world ends, but what comes after it.” He wants paradise on earth. But, she says, they’re being stolen from right now – by the owners of the factory, who pay them wages far less than what the owners make from their labor. The bulk of the play is Constance’s argument that they’re being exploited — which presumably will lead to an effort to organize them into a union, although this is not mentioned; perhaps it would the next scene if and when the play is developed further (which would give the playwright a chance to rethink the title.)
The other four plays are all family dramas, but, no, not all the same.
In Security Watch, Abram (Dante Jeanfelix) and his pregnant wife Hagar, the aforementioned artistic director (Hargrove) are getting ready for a party to celebrate Abram’s possible tenure as a university professor, when Hagar gives him a present that tests the security of their marriage. It’s a new watch. This upsets Abram, because his old watch was the last gift by his first wife before she died.
In Felispeaks’ “Out,” Angel (Welch-Smith again) and her mother Arike (LaDonna Burns) sit at a bus stop in Dublin in the rain, after a joint therapy session. In the short time before the bus arrives, the daughter schools her mother on her “club,” the LGBTQIA+ community, patiently answering questions:
“Do you always have to say all the letters? Isn’t it too long? There’s no shorthand format?”
“Mum, that IS the shorthand format!”
The mother then reveals something the daughter didn’t know about their family – something (somebody) queer.
In Jeanette W. Hill’s “Just One Good Day,” old married couple Greg (Williams Watkins) and Sonya (LaDonna Burns) are having a frustrating day – he because of his debilitating illnesses, she because of the taxing job of caretaker. The strength of this play is in the performances, and in the way their frustration melts into shared memories of their times together.
D.L. Patrick’s “…But Not Forgotten” is inspired by the true story of a young woman named Sandra Young, who went missing in 1969. The body was discovered not long afterwards, but went unidentified until 2023, more than half a century later. In the play, Hargrove portrays Sandra Yancy (not Young) as forever 17. We see her having a picnic on the beach with her sister Sophie (Welch-Smith.) Sophie leaves, and Sandra tells us: “the night it happened – it was freezing.” Afterward, lyrical scenes of Sandra speaking from the box where her bones are stored alternate with scenes of Sophie growing old, remembering Sandra, and regularly contacting the police about her missing sister. The response: No new leads. “I have one last question for you, Detective – why didn’t my sister matter?“ says Sophie (now LaDonna Burns)
In “…But Not Forgotten,” Sandra is identified only after family members take the search into their own hands, through DNA testing. “The police screwed up,” Sophie says bitterly. “More than half a century later, the world has changed. But how far have we really come, when somebody like my sister – somebody black or brown or any color but white – goes missing?…”
The way the play recounts the events leading to the identification of her remains is somewhat at variance with the news reports of what happened, which give the police more credit. But the article in NPR does add: “Over the years, missing persons cases have disproportionately affected communities of color…[E]ven though Black people make up just 13% of the U.S. population, they represent close to 40% of all missing persons cases.”
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