Berth Breach/Breech Birth
Directed by Kyle Haden
Lead sponsor: Donna Ritchie
Synopsis
During a house call for a pregnant mare, a veterinarian discovers an entire ship filled with enslaved people, inside the horse’s uterus. And one enslaved man sees her, too. Is she imagining it all? Can she get them out? And if she can, what happens to them then? What has happened to any of us? This play explores the world of a Black farming community in America and examines how cycles of birth, life, and death look much different to those of the African Diaspora.
Berth Breach/Breech Birth will be performed live over Zoom on Saturday, April 24, at 7:00 pm PT and Sunday, April 25, at 2:00 pm PT.
Tickets are available on a sliding scale.
Playwright Perspective
When my daughter was doing her pre-vet undergrad courses, she’d regularly text me pictures of herself with an arm shoulder-deep in a cow or sheep, a huge smile on her face. She’d talk about her animal husbandry labs. There’s a close relationship between the life cycle of births, castrations, and the stories of deaths. There’s a service nature to herd animals and livestock. They are literally bred for consumption or to work.
In Myung Mi Kim’s book of poetry, “Commons,” Kim includes quotes from Renaissance-era scientists regarding animal and human dissections. In an interview, Kim discussed using her poems to look at how anatomy emerged as a science during voyages to the ‘New World.’ “The idea of looking at the body – more, looking inside it – to inculcate a culture of dissection.” That quote rocked me. That’s what this country was built on. It’s what was done to our ancestors. Kim refers to it as “discovering/owning/naming.” Yep.
It is this aspect of the science, its intersection with humanity, and the history of slavery in America that I want to explore in this play: the discovering/owning/naming. And to do it within a Black farming community, allowing a small, personal story to house these big concepts. I’m hoping that I can speak to all of that in Berth Breach/Breech Birth. That sense of history and mystery, connection and disconnection, grief and birth. Oh, and it’s also funny and joyful. I hope that the play stirs us to honestly acknowledge our past and connections we may think we’ve lost.
Who
| Ashanti Taylor | Christiana Clark |
| Nnamdi/Ernest | Desean K. Terry |
| Marcus Taylor | Shaun Heard |
| Debra Ann Higgins | Josie Seid |
| Stage directions | Samantha Wynette Miller |
Where
Rural Illinois, present. The Taylor kitchen. A horse stall. A feed storage room. The womb of a mare. A slave ship. Other “spaces” on stage as denoted.
In Conversation
Berth Breach/Breech Birth
April 24 & 25, 2021
Directed by Kyle Haden
Inda Craig-Galván writes stuff – mostly plays and TV. Her work often explores intra-racial conflicts and politics within the African-American community. Grounded in reality with a touch of magical realism that fucks with time & memories.
Inda’s currently developing new works of theatre on commission with Primary Stages, Company One, and The Old Globe.
Produced plays include Black Super Hero Magic Mama (Geffen Playhouse, Los Angeles) and I Go Somewhere Else (Playwrights’ Arena, Los Angeles). Inda is the recipient of the Kesselring Prize, Jeffry Melnick New Playwright Award, Blue Ink Playwriting Prize, Jane Chambers Student Award for Feminist Playwriting, and Stage Raw Best Playwright Award. Inda’s plays have been included on the Kilroys List and Steppenwolf Theatre’s The Mix.
Inda has developed & presented work at Ojai Playwrights Conference, Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Black Swan Lab, The Old Globe Powers New Voices Festival, Kitchen Dog Theatre New Works Festival, Black & Latino Playwrights Conference, WomenWorks, Humanitas, Chalk Repertory Theatre, Skylight Theatre, San Francisco Playhouse, Trustus Theatre Playwrights Festival, Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, Intiman, and others.
On the TV side, Inda is a writer on the new JJ Abrams series Demimonde (HBO), and previously wrote on Happy Face, How to Get Away with Murder, and The Rookie.
MFA in Theatre: Dramatic Writing, University of Southern California.
Currently residing: I live in the traditional territory of the Chumash, colonially known as Simi Valley, California. Fun fact: Simi Valley was where the trial was held for the officers who beat Rodney King.
Grew up in: The traditional territory of the Kiikaapoi, Peoria, Kaskaskia, Potawatomi, Myaamia, and Očhéthi Šakówin, colonially known as Chicago. Specifically, the South Side.
Creative beginnings: The first play I ever saw was A Raisin in the Sun, and I remember thinking: this is what theatre is. It’s stories about Black people, written by Black women, and those stories take place in Chicago. Got it. So yeah… kinda matches with my playwriting identity today.
The most amusing thing when I look back on it, because it’s totally me, happened when I was in 7th grade. I thought, “We should do a play or something. Why don’t we have plays? I’ll just write one real quick.” I sat down and wrote an adaptation of Cinderella, with roles for everyone in my class, and it included some roller-skating because a couple of the guys were really good skaters.
I went to my teacher and said, “Hey I wrote this, can we perform it?” And we did and it was a hit. The whole school came to see it – 1st through 8th grades. Several performances. And my teacher asked me to adapt another play the next year. But I didn’t know or understand that playwriting could be a career, so I thought it was just a thing I did in grammar school.
Playwriting inspiration: I started writing and performing sketch comedy much later in life. By then, I was married and had kids. I’d always wanted to act or something, just didn’t know what the something was. I started taking classes at Second City and then writing and performing in a two-person group that ended up getting invited to all of the sketch comedy festivals.
When my family moved to California, but my sketch partner didn’t, I was at a loss for how to express myself. I literally did a poll of my closest friends and family, including my former sketch partner, and asked “When you think of me, do you think I’m an actor or a writer?” They all said “writer.” So I decided if I’m going to pursue this as a thing, I want to be prepared.
Long answer… grad school nurtured me. I was blessed to be in a program with lots of people of color, teaching and in my cohort of nine. Having people validate the way I use my voice was invaluable. Discovering the freedom to experiment with using sketch comedy tropes in playwriting empowered me to develop my style of writing. I’d compartmentalized that period of life but it was during grad school that I was able to explore all the aspects of me and throw it all into my writing.
I pull out those notes from school when I’m looking for inspiration. Berth Breach/Breech Birth came out of a prompt that I’d written during Dr. Velina Hasu-Houston’s poetry adaptation class in grad school and I went digging in those notes to think about what play to write next. And here we are.
Writing process: Sketch and improv really do help me to think of story in an encapsulated way. I can tell a story in three minutes in a sketch. I can see the abbreviated version of a play. I’ll dwell on the story, the synopsis of it. In the shower. In the car. A LOT of shower and car writing goes on with me. Then I get to researching the where of the story and investigating the characters. I might make a map of important places to these people. Most vital to me are the lists. I make several lists for each character, to get to know everything about them before I write a word of the play. Luis Alfaro taught me about lists – What’s in their shopping cart? What are 10 things they’re hiding? What are the steps to their morning ritual? – so many cool lists to understand a character.
Then I sit down to write whichever scenes I know. Usually the first scene first. I almost exclusively write on computer. I only write one scene a day. Then when I have what I think is everything, I check to see what’s missing. I might make a storyboard or an emotional chart – other Luis Alfaro resources. Then I fill in or move things around. I print it out and I always revise and edit on paper with a red pen. At this point, I need to hear it, so I’ll ask some of my dope actor friends to get together with me and they read it out loud. Then more revisions.
Super important: 70s R&B or instrumental jazz, a candle burning, hot tea, and snacks. Definitely part of the process.
Berth Breach/Breech Birth‘s origin: Myung Mi Kim’s book of poetry, Commons, has these “Vocalise” sections throughout that discuss pregnancies of people and animals as a way of looking at what she calls our “culture of dissection” and the discovering, owning, and naming that we do. So there’s that. My daughter was studying big animal veterinary medicine. And then also my father lived in an all-Black rural community and owned a farm in another part of Illinois.
All of that was percolating for me at the time, and I wondered how to meld the world of a Black veterinarian in a farming community with the idea of discovering, owning, and naming, which in the U.S. says to me, slavery.
Favorite moment or line: Whenever Ernest calls Ashanti “Sugarlump,” because that’s what my dad used to call me.
Most looking forward to at ANPF: Working with actors! I haven’t gotten to that stage with this play yet, so I’m so looking forward to hearing it read out loud, seeing how what’s in my head gets interpreted by people who live outside of it. I’m excited to work with Kyle as a director and to hear how a Black man is experiencing this play. And to see if any of it makes sense!
Audience experience: I love digging into a character’s mind and seeing the world through their perspective. Especially a character whose mind is playing tricks on them. That’s kinda my jam. I would love for the audience to experience what Ashanti is experiencing. I want them to feel the confusion and the mystery and the sense of being fated and compelled. And also, the not knowing how to act on it.
Writing snacks of choice: Avocado oil potato chips – but just one serving because I’m tryna be better to my body. Raw almonds. Raw cashews. I need to hear a crunch in my head when I’m writing. And either Earl Grey or chai, with non-dairy milk/creamer.
Click here to learn more about Inda, the play, and the artists bringing the story off the page.
We look forward to welcoming you to the show! We are presenting Inda’s Berth Breach/Breech Birth for TWO DAYS ONLY Saturday and Sunday, April 24 at 7 pm PT and April 25 at 2 pm PT. Tickets are available on a sliding scale.
Originally from Pittsburgh. Credits include The Royale and the award-winning world premiere of Hazardous Materials (Creede Repertory Theatre); The Devil is a Lie (Quantum Theater, world premiere); Waiting For Lefty (Quintessence Theatre); The Chief (Pittsburgh Public Theater); The Realness, A Brief History of America (Hangar Theatre Company); Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale (Island Shakespeare Festival); and The Tens (Actor’s Theatre of Louisville). 2018 Drama League Directing Fellow, current member of their Directors Council. Former artistic director of the Ashland New Plays Festival, now Senior Associate Head and Associate Professor of Acting at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama. BA: Wake Forest University, MFA: Columbia University. *The Director is a Member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, a national theatrical labor union.
