Culture
The Playwright Who Rewrote American Grief
A rare extended interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Constance Adeyemi, whose new work is already selling out through December and who speaks for the first time about the personal losses that shaped it.
Constance Adeyemi does not especially enjoy talking about her plays while they are still running. "The thing is alive," she said, sitting in a rehearsal room in lower Manhattan, a cup of tea going cold beside her. "If I explain it, I'm killing a part of it." And yet she agreed to this conversation — three hours, two afternoons — because she believes the questions she is being asked about the work, the public discourse around it, have grown so distant from what she actually made that silence is no longer a useful option.
Her new play, Everything That Stays, opened at the Hartley Theatre in April to reviews that exhausted the positive end of the critical vocabulary. It has since transferred to a larger house two blocks north, where it will run through the end of the year. Tickets for the full run sold out within seventy-two hours of transfer announcement; a waiting list that the box office has stopped formally tracking stretches into the thousands.
The play follows three adult siblings over the course of a single sleepless night in their childhood home, the night before their mother's funeral. There is no villain, almost no conflict in the conventional dramatic sense. What there is, running beneath every scene like groundwater, is the accumulated weight of everything the siblings cannot say to each other about who they are and who their mother was and what, exactly, they are losing. "I was interested in the things grief makes visible that ordinary life keeps covered," Adeyemi said. "Loss is a kind of X-ray."
She came to the subject, she acknowledged, through her own experience. Her mother died two years ago, and the play grew from notebooks she kept during the year that followed. Those notebooks, she said, contained mostly questions — not about death itself, but about memory and its unreliability, about the gap between the person you remember and the person who actually existed, about the strange way that grief makes you mourn not only the dead but every version of the person you could have been to them and were not.
"My mother and I had a complicated relationship," she said. "I think most adult children and parents do, if they're honest. The sentimentality that descends on death — the smoothing over — always struck me as a form of abandonment. You're abandoning the real person in favor of an easier one." Everything That Stays refuses that abandonment, she said. The mother in the play, glimpsed only in the siblings' recollections and disagreements about those recollections, is contradictory, difficult, frequently unkind, and utterly irreplaceable. The audience is not given permission to feel uncomplicated things about her.
This has not prevented audiences from weeping copiously, often starting well before the play's most explicitly emotional moments. Adeyemi said she has come to think of this as a sign that the play is doing what she intended: not manufacturing emotion but uncovering it, the way a doctor's probe finds a bruise the patient had forgotten they had. "The theater is one of the few places left where we allow ourselves to feel things publicly in the presence of strangers," she said. "I find that sacred. I try not to waste it."
She began writing for the theater in her late twenties, after a decade as a fiction writer that produced two well-regarded novels but that left her, she said, with the persistent feeling that something essential was missing. "Prose lives in the mind," she said. "Theater lives in the body. I needed to be in a room with people." Her first play, produced by a small company in Chicago, ran four weeks and was seen by perhaps eight hundred people total. Her second, which won the Pulitzer and moved to Broadway, was seen by hundreds of thousands. She spent several years learning to hold that scale without letting it reshape what she was trying to make.
With Everything That Stays, she said, she wanted to return to the intimacy of that first play while working at a scale that would allow the work to reach people who needed it. "Grief is not rare," she said. "Everybody has it. The question is whether we give people a place to bring it."
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