Interview: Tim Bond of GEM OF THE OCEAN at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley Honors the Legacy of His Friend and Colleague August Wilson

When the late, great August Wilson wrote Gem of the Ocean almost 20 years ago, I'm not sure he could have envisioned the degree to which his play would become even more relevant two decades later. Part of Wilson's acclaimed American Century Cycle of ten plays that explore the African American experience during the 20th Century, Gem of the Ocean is set in 1904 against the tempestuous backdrop of police violence and rioting. A young Black man desperate for redemption visits 285-year-old Aunt Ester, the community's spiritual advisor and keeper of collective memory. The wise elder takes him on a supernatural voyage of justice and freedom aboard a slave ship to learn the truth of his ancestors' history.

TheatreWorks Silicon Valley is presenting a new production of this seminal classic directed by its Artistic Director Tim Bond. A friend and colleague of the late playwright and a leading interpreter of his work, Bond has specifically chosen this play to make his TheatreWorks directorial debut. I had the pleasure of speaking with Bond by phone last week as he was experiencing the joys of being back in the rehearsal room for the first time since the COVID interruption. We talked about his profound connection to Wilson and his plays, how this new production cuts even deeper for Bond, and what he hopes audiences will take away from it. Bond is a warmly engaging conversationalist who knows his history and strives to honor the legacies he has inherited, both culturally and familially. Even when discussing serious topics, he remains resolutely upbeat and has quite an infectious laugh. The following has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

It's hard to believe you're already coming towards the end of your second year as TheatreWorks' Artistic Director. How has it been going?

Well, COVID is not the easiest time to be trying to run a theater in America, so it's been challenging, but we've learned new levels of adaptability, flexibility, creativity and patience. We've had a really strong season so far. The first three shows we've done in person starting in have been successful in terms of their artistic quality and the performers being so thrilled to get back onstage, and our audiences that have come have been really enjoying the work. So that part's been great. Getting audiences up to the expected numbers has been more of a challenge, but our current show, Sense and Sensibility, is being well attended. Combined with Omicron backing off now and people feeling safer, we're hoping we've got some momentum going into our next three shows.

For me personally, getting back into rehearsals in person again with this show just feels so rejuvenating. You know, you think "COVID's not gonna last forever, we're still doing things online, I can do this for a while." and you sort of adjust. And then as soon as I started doing in-person rehearsals again, the joy that is pouring out of me is like "Oh, I was much sadder than I was letting myself realize for those many months." [laughs] The joy I get from this is so life-affirming again, and career-affirming. I just can't wait to share this production with our audience.

When you came on board as Artistic Director, I assume part of the expectation was that you would direct plays as well, which means you've had to go a long time without being able to show your full range of skills and talents. Has that have been frustrating?

Absolutely. It's been very, very challenging. Because I haven't directed in this region since I was 18 or 19 years old, it's like there's not that to even fall back on, for our audience or our donors or our staff, as people are trying to get to know me in my work. So yes, it's been a real project in patience. [laughs]

But committing to other aspects of the company has benefitted from this time, really looking at our equity and diversity and inclusion culture within the organization. How do we begin to move towards being an anti-racist organization, which we are committed to. And going forward how do we look at our relationships with our community? We began doing more work in terms of developing community partnerships and those sorts of things that when you're in full season and everything's running, you don't always have time to look at. We focused our energies that way, along with producing close to 20 online projects over those two years. So we've been working hard and doing a lot, but it's not the same for me as creating live theater.

Do you have any first-rehearsal rituals that you like to follow?

Well, I do for myself, before I get there. There's a sort of a typical meal I cook. It depends on the show, but when I'm working on August Wilson, I always try to cook some greens, some black-eyed peas - it's sort of a New Year's meal. I have it when I start rehearsals as good luck, as a way to honor my ancestors and to connect.

And then, we didn't do this necessarily our first day of rehearsal, for any number of reasons right now including COVID, but we circle up every day, the cast and I. We all hold hands with stage management and everyone and speak into the circle how we're feeling, what's going on, what we're grateful for. This show in particular really calls on those sorts of spiritual aspects.

And we do pushups. [laughs] We increase by one every day, and then eventually we'll decrease as we get ready to open. It's something I've done for a very long time. I can't tell you why, other than it's just sort of a bonding thing that I like to do with my cast and we always have fun with that.

This isn't the first time you've directed Gem of the Ocean. In fact, when we spoke back in 2020, you cited a previous production of it as the one that felt most like an expression of your authentic self. Is there any particular section of the play that hits you differently now that it did then?

Much of it does, in a certain way. There are things that hit me the first time I worked on the play, but they have deepened, and I feel less alone in my experience with the play. Because of The 1619 Project and the horrific details of the George Floyd murder and the response to that, the beginnings of some awakening in the greater culture around police violence towards black bodies, and the need for healing in the nation, I feel like the play is even more urgent now. And the whole question of redemption, I think really, really lands in a very different way now for many people than it did when I worked on it 16 years ago. I knew these things already, but they now feel like they're part of a lexicon that many people will tap into.

That's certainly true for me. I saw Gem of the Ocean at the Taper in LA almost 20 years ago, and a lot of the play was basically new information for me. But now due to things like Isabel Wilkerson's Caste and The 1619 Project, I'm much better educated about the origins and ramifications of slavery than I was back then, so I'm really curious to see Gem again. I feel like I'll be experiencing a whole different play.

Yeah. I hear that, and that's what I'm hoping will happen for many people. I think they will receive it in much more of the way August intended, which is to put back together the pieces of history and memory of the ancestral connection of African Americans to our African heritage and to the legacy of the Middle Passage, and our need to heal from that original American sin, as a whole nation, for everyone - African Americans, white Americans, all Americans. We have to know our history.

The idea of freedom, which is talked about constantly right now by people, is talked about a lot in the play. What is freedom? How do you get it? Don't you already have it? Who gets the right to say they're giving it to you? And even if they do, have they really given you freedom if they haven't given you true opportunity? These are questions we still have yet to answer fully as a nation, and these characters are doing it in such a personal and human way. They're not just issues, this is life - full of great music and humor and yearning and love and family and community. I think it's gonna really hit people in a powerful way as they realize we've been talking about this for a couple hundred years and it's time for us to figure this out.

I'm just thrilled to be working on this play right now. I added it to our season after the George Floyd murder because my thought was "What can I do as an artist to help healing happen in our community? Which play would do that?" I went straight to Gem of the Ocean and it just hit me like a ton of bricks that I think this is what we need to be doing right now. This expresses something important to our community about what I believe healing can be for us.

I also have learned, since 16 years ago, that I have family members who were part of the Underground Railroad. I had been told this and it was part of the lore in our family, but we actually found documents that have definitely showed that certain members of our family just a couple of generations back were very involved in the Underground Railroad in Canada and Ohio and on the border up there with Michigan. We've been tracking my ancestry back to former slaves and to all sorts of things that are also making me attached to details in this piece in a much more visceral way. It's not just an idea, a notion. It's cellularly affecting me as I'm working on this piece, as I learn more about my family history in the last 15 years or so.

When we spoke in 2020, you also sort of casually mentioned "hanging out" with August Wilson, who is such an iconic and, I think some might say, intimidating figure in American theater. What was it like to hang out with him?

Oh, such a privilege, such a joy. Yes, August was a very powerful guy, and he could be intimidating. I mean I, whenever I would see him, a chill would run down my spine, like a chill of recognition, almost like I was seeing a ghost, an ancestor that took me back to some ancient something. It was the most profound experience. And then a big smile would come across my face as we would recognize each other and then wherever we were, from the very first time I met him, we just would cross whatever distance was between us and connect and talk.

We had some fantastic conversations, the most profound of which were about the three last plays he wrote in the American Century Cycle - King Hedley II, Gem of the Ocean and Radio Golf. Like I'd be at Oregon Shakespeare Festival (I was Associate Artistic Director there in the late 1990s and early 2000s) and I'd hear, "Hey, Tim Bond! You got a minute?" I'd turn around and it would be August Wilson and he'd say, "Come on over. I got something I want to tell you about." And of course I would drop whatever I was doing and go join him, and an hour and a half later he would have told me the whole story and plot and characters and monologs, verbatim, from Gem of the Ocean, and then at the end he'd say "So, it's gonna be called 'Gem of the Ocean.' What do you think?" [laughs in amazement]

And my mouth is just on the ground, amazed at the storytelling ability, how he's transported me. It felt like time travel. I mean I'd literally come back into my body again and go, "Oh, I'm standing in Oregon now, on the Bricks out in front of Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I was just in 1904 in Pittsburgh." Or I was just on a slave ship going through the Middle Passage. He just could transport you. He was a genius, an amazing storyteller, a wonderful and extraordinary poet and playwright and activist in his own way. He changed my life, and I miss him every day. I promised him I would finish this cycle, the last time I saw him, which was just the week before I found out that he was terminally ill, and I have tried to honor that. I've still got three more plays to go to finish his cycle so...

I have a very deep relationship still with his widow, Constanza Romero, who's the head of his estate. She's working with me right now on the one-person show that August wrote, which is the other play he told me about, actually the fourth, called How I Learned What I Learned, that I'm getting ready to open at Oregon Shakespeare Festival next month. So right now it's August Wilson all the time for me, and I couldn't be happier.

How did you initially meet August Wilson?

Well, I actually met him at the National Black Theatre Festival in North Carolina back in the early 90s. There was some session going on that neither of us apparently were all that interested in, and so we had both wandered out separately. There was this wonderful village of artisans selling African clothing and artifacts and incredible books from the Black diaspora laid out in a big empty room. There was no one there, cause everyone was at whatever this other thing was. I started looking at the books and the artifacts and checking stuff out and then I noticed, opposite me on the other side of these tables, someone else walked in. He had a hat on, and I did a second take and went, "That's August Wilson!"

So we both for the next 20 minutes just kept kind of doing our own thing, looking through this or that and eventually our circles ended up coming together. We were next to each other, he held up a book and said, "You read this one?" And I'd read it, so I held up a book and we're talking about it and the great books of Black literature - Native Son and Black Like Me and all these different pieces and just started chatting and got to know each other like that.

Then I ran into him at the O'Neill Playwrights Festival. I chose to watch him rehearse and develop Seven Guitars. He was there with Lloyd Richards and Larry Fishburne and all the gang and it was amazing. August read the piece himself. They had the playwright read their own play first and then the actors would start working on it. So I got to hear him read Seven Guitars and then I watched them for the next week putting it on its feet and rehearsing it. And through the years I would run into him because we were both in Seattle at the same time. It's not like I hung out with August a lot, but I'll tell you honestly, as many hours as I spent with him, I would give anything to spend even one hour more.

I love that in your initial meeting, he was the one who approached you. I had imagined you maybe came up to him as an acolyte at some big event.

I've never been someone who's tried to pursue someone or anything like that. It was really more that it just sort of naturally fell into, "Hey, we're both artists making work." He shared some very intimate things about his development on his plays with me, probably knowing that someday I would work on them. He wanted to bring me into his world, and I was privileged to have that opportunity.

Any director of an August Wilson play also inherits the legacy of the great directors Lloyd Richards and Marion McClinton who worked with him so often during his lifetime. How do you honor that legacy, without just trying to recreate what they did?

I've been a great admirer of Lloyd Richards for a very long time and met him as well and have worked with many people who have worked with him through the years. I think we share a lot of similarities in terms of what we believe the director's job is, in working with playwrights but also in bringing their plays to life and trying to keep our hands off of the production, in a sense. To be invisible is what I try to do as a director. I mean, [I'm] very engaged, but my goal is that when you see it you don't go, "Oh, look what that director did." You just go, "Wow, I was totally sucked into the world of this play, and I kind of don't know how all that happened to me during it, emotionally and spiritually, but that was a transformative experience." That's my goal. It's really a magician's job. And building ensemble for me is important.

I try to honor the words he's written, and the poetry and the lyricism, and the rhythms of the language. Because I know as a poet he worked very hard to find the specific rhythms of his lines. I watched him in rehearsals for Seven Guitars and Two Trains Running. I'm not trying to recreate what they were doing; I'm trying to rediscover for this particular cast, and for myself, what the blues rhythms are that are embedded in his play, and how they unveil the lyricism and musicality and spirit of the people and celebrate the culture they come from. And don't correct the English. [laughs] Find why he said it that way. You know "First, there was the word."

It's like Shakespeare. I spent a lot of time at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 11 years. And August even said to me, "The actors that know Shakespeare, but also come from our culture and understand my language do the best work on my plays." Because they see the metaphors that are embedded inside of it and the poetry, but they also can bring the cultural rhythms. You start there and then do a lot of research on the world of the play and what was going on in the minds and the lives of the characters, so that we can truly transport ourselves to the specific decade that he's looking at and see why and how people might move or behave, or think differently or have physical relationships with each other, or to the food that they're eating.

And then to realize that it's not realism. I mean, it is realistic, but the style of the play is more heightened than that. So it's finding the way to ground it in realism and then let the lyricism and spiritual power of the play transport it up and out of that, versus just doing it non-realistically. Which I think doesn't entirely work with August - but doing it realistically also doesn't work. [laughs]

I would imagine the hardest thing about directing Wilson's plays is getting that balance right. Because if it's tipped too much in either direction the production won't really work.

It's exactly true, and that has been my journey. As I've matured as a person and as an artist, these plays begin to evolve and open up in new ways to me, so I'm just having a ball coming back to this one right now. One thing that I track through all of these plays is where the characters are at spiritually, in terms of their relationship with their African roots, their spiritual journey towards self-determination, and their own sense of worth in the world. How does that change decade by decade, and therefore how does that affect what the emphasis of the play is? The earlier plays are more connected to spirituality. The later plays end up being more connected to different social and civic issues, because we've moved further and further away from our African ancestry, in a way. But it's still always there.

And the music on this show I'm having a really fun time with, too. The music in his plays tells you a lot about the rhythms that are gonna go on throughout the whole play. The music in Gem of the Ocean is some of the most spiritual and heartfelt music of all of his plays, and we've added some other pieces of music for characters to give us windows into what they're thinking and feeling. So it's really rich in that way, too - musically.

TheatreWorks' 2022-23 season hasn't been announced yet, but is there anything you can tell us about that you're especially looking forward to?

I can't really talk about it yet because we're still in process on it, but we're the third-largest theater in the Bay Area so we feel a responsibility to serve a wide range of audience members. My interest is in finding out how we can seek a more diverse and younger audience to add to the audience that's been with us for so many years, to build on that and to welcome an even more diverse group of artists in. TheatreWorks has had a history of producing diverse plays and having diverse stories told, but I'd like to get more people at the table who are bringing different cultural perspectives and open that up.

I think people will begin to see the tent opening even wider as we go into next season. The challenge coming out of COVID is the numbers are all shifting so that it's harder to predict. We'll probably be producing some smaller shows next season than we might have in the past, but I think the shows will still have a wide range. There'll be musicals, there'll be comedy, there'll be contemporary plays and a couple of world premieres. I'm very committed to us developing new work, and that will be reflected in next season.

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TheatreWorks Silicon Valley's production of Gem of the Ocean Lane runs April 6th to May 1st at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View, CA. For tickets and additional information, visit theatreworks.org or call (650) 463-1960.