When Kisha Bundridge’s “Beyond the Oak Trees” has its world premiere at Crossroads Theatre Company this month, the playwright’s mother, Stephanie Berry, will be on hand for support.
A few weeks later, Bundridge will return the favor, watching as her mother’s latest play, “Sarah Sings a Love Story,” makes its world debut at Crossroads.
Berry has only praise for Bundridge, and vice versa. They know they’re unique, mother and daughter playwrights premiering shows back-to-back at the same theater.
“It’s a little surreal, but I’m incredibly proud of her,” Berry said of the back-to-back openings. “I am so proud of her for using the arts to empower others.”
Said Bundridge, “I have big shoes to fill.”
Both playwrights interpret the African-American experience in their latest works. “Beyond the Oak Trees” is a contemporary look at Harriet Tubman’s life beyond her work as an abolitionist and leader of the Underground Railroad. Berry’s “Sarah Sings a Love Story” details the relationship of a long-married couple –inspired by Berry’s brother and sister-in-law — through their love of the music of New Jersey-born jazz singer Sarah Vaughan.
That shared focus isn’t a coincidence. Berry has long been politically active. In the 1960s, she was introduced to the anti-Apartheid movement by her older brother. She remembers learning the African Boot dance and feeling the power while performing it. She remembers watching “Blood Knot,” a play set in South Africa during that time, and feeling moved.
“The live people on stage were telling these stories that were so passionate and they made me think and they made me feel,” she said. “I realized the power of the arts to change, to influence and possibly motivate how people think.”
Berry, who is also a dancer and actress, was 19 when she gave birth to Bundridge, now 45. She took the infant everywhere.
“I remember marching for the Attica prisoners with her on my back,” Berry said. “She was with me at protests, at marches, at meetings, always there with me, even when she should have been in bed asleep.”
Bundridge was also raised in the theater. Sometimes the young girl slept “piled under blankets and coats while I rehearsed,” Berry said.
Bundridge said she was “pretty much embedded in the whole theater world” at a young age. She remembers being nervous before her mother performed.
“I used to look at my mom like, ‘Wow.” I thought she was the most fantastic, beautiful thing in the whole world,” Bundridge said. “I’d watch with my mouth open.”
Berry encouraged Bundridge to write, even if it was only in a high school journal.
“Seeing so much theater, being exposed to the arts, I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing,” Bundridge said. The 2012 play “Iced Out Shackled & Chained: Still Looking for the North Star,” which Bundridge co-wrote with Mo Beasley, was her first professional production. Berry was one of the stars of her daughter’s play, which enjoyed a run at the National Black Theatre in Harlem.
Bundridge was inspired to create her latest work after reading about the efforts to have New York’s Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged declared a new national park. She began to think of Harriet Tubman as a person, a woman who overcame great obstacles.
“We grow up thinking we know a lot about Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, but I realized I didn’t know anything. The Underground Railroad became the beginning, middle and end of her story,” Bundridge said. “Was she nice? Was she kind? Was she scared? She was a woman with two husbands, who had every day problems and a life, and that was something different and interesting to me.”
The show is set in both the past and present, with Tubman making her last Underground Railroad run with passengers as a group of tourists visit the Tubman historic site.
Berry’s play, too, mixes history with contemporary times, with Vaughan serving as a muse for the play’s female lead. The two influence each others’ lives.
Berry based the main couple on her real-life brother and sister-in-law, who have been married for 60 years. Their relationship inspires her, she said.
“She still sits on his lap. They tease each other,” Berry said. “One morning, I called them and they were both on their way to the hospital. They’d been out all night salsa dancing.”
Beyond the Oak Trees
Crossroads Theatre Company
7 Livingston Ave., New Brunswick
Tickets: $25-55, available online at https://ticketcentral.com/. Feb. 16 – 26
Sarah Sings a Love Song
Crossroads Theatre Company
7 Livingston Ave., New Brunswick
Tickets: $25 – 55, available online at https://ticketcentral.com/. March 9 -19
Natalie Pompilio is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia. She can be reached at nataliepompilio@yahoo.com. Find her on Twitter @nataliepompilio. Find NJ.com/Entertainment on Facebook.
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