At the beginning of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s “Head of Passes,” Shelah Reynolds has it all figured out. Beset with a terminal illness, the Southern matriarch is determined to set everything right concerning her deceased reprobate husband with her dysfunctional family, including her two sons, Aubrey and Spencer, and her prodigal daughter, Cookie. A strongly devout woman, she doesn’t allow the word “devil” to be spoken in her house, which is located where the Mississippi River flows in the Gulf of Mexico, thus giving the play its title.Then all hell breaks loose. Shelah’s comfortable understanding of faith becomes highly uncomfortable. Her faith is shaken much like the raging storm that brings apocalyptic destruction to her home and family. Based on the Book of Job, McCraney’s play evolves from a conventional family comedy-drama into an existential meditation on suffering, with Phylicia Rashad, as Shelah, giving an acclaimed career-defining performance.“Head of Passes,” which is at the Public Theater through April 24, represents yet another provocative work from McCraney, whose eclectic career has encompassed “Wig Out,” “Choir Boy,” and the “Brother/Sister Plays,” which launched his career in 2007. This one is also his most personal. He has dedicated the play to both of his grandmothers, who are, aptly enough, named Grace.In a recent conversation with ARTINFO, McCraney, spoke of the Book of Job as one of mankind’s seminal stories and why he jumped at the chance to write about it when Tina Landau, who directed the production, first broached the idea. What was your first understanding of the Book of Job?It was through a song we sang in youth choir: “Old brother Job who was sick so long/till the flesh fell off his bones.” And I wondered, “Who was this guy named ‘Joe’ and why was he waiting so long?” I was always very curious and trying to unpack these very complex stories and narratives in the simplest way possible but not undermining their complexities.What was the appeal?The Book of Job is really a meeting point of many religions. It’s one of the few pieces of text that even Buddhist and Hindu scholars think about. It’s something of an origin tale, a part of the early cosmology of human beings, which talks about suffering and fate.What was your immediate impulse when you began writing?I knew I wanted to write Job as a woman of color. In my discussions with Tina Landau, we knew that we weren’t looking to match the events of Job one to one but to get at the conversation of faith and suffering: What does it mean to endure until morning? What does faith look like when the unknowable is all around you? Instead of trying to tie all this up in a neat bow, we had to go to the unanswerable in a stronger way.Why a woman of color as the lead protagonist?Well, you write what you know and the people with the strongest faith in my life are women of color. There were men of deep faith but I couldn’t feel it as palpably as through my mother and grandmothers. So it just made sense that if you were going to have a person with deep reserves of faith at the center of the play, who was going to have conversations with God — literal or imagined depending on who’s watching — that it be a woman of color.How did these women explain suffering to you?They didn’t explain it. That’s the thing. The conversation was that hard times were actionable, watchable, seeable, and teachable moments. My [maternal] grandmother passed away from lung cancer and none of us knew. She only told my great aunt about it and it hurt my mother to know her mother had suffered alone. But my grandmother felt it was her load to carry and no one else’s. That was an example of the way they took things on. If it had happened to the men in my family, we’d have known about it! What was the source of the resilience? Faith. It called upon them to be alive and not shrink from life. My grandmother on my dad’s side is ninety years old and she’s in intense pain from bad arthritis, and yet she will not stop walking around the neighborhood. Why? She’ll tell you it’s called living and she’s not going to stop. It’s also learning. Suffering will make you perfect, it will ready your soul for perfection. We are made better through these edifications. They didn’t preach it, they lived it.What is the lesson of Job to those who are agnostic or atheistic?Whether there is faith or a lack thereof, there are some themes that are the same: we are all trying to explain the unexplainable, trying to deal with the unimaginable. And when that happens, we try to lean onto understanding. But what happens when that understanding goes? The Bible says, “Lean not unto your understanding.” And that’s really what I came away with. Understanding is not always going to provide succor or provide salve to what is hurting and in giving that up sometimes we feel that we lose so much. That was what became clearest to me. It had been clear to me before in an abstract way, that there’s a reason for everything. But then it really dropped in for me. We all have a moment when we have to let go of what we think we understand and that happens to all of us.And then what happens when you let go?You wait. My grandmother always used to say, “There is working in waiting.” I remember that phrase very well. There is something active in waiting. Asking God to hold onto me because I will let go at one point. I am human. I will let go of my faith, let go of my hold on what I think is higher. But the real prayer to that [higher] power is to hold onto you. I’ve heard that my whole life, it has resonance now and it will for the rest of my life.When Shelah emerges from the wreckage of her life, does she have a new understanding of faith? It certainly will be new. For me, that’s the crux. Shelah has spent the whole play telling us what the plan of action is going to be. Then she’s had to wrestle with the idea that the purpose of her life becomes uncertain, unknowable. What does it mean when that isn’t clear? How does life go on?How does it?At this point it has shifted because I’m coming to an understanding that what is greater than us is within us. We have to remember that we are stardust. Billion-year-old stardust is part of our being and that allows us to illuminate ourselves even in the darkest hour. That’s how I feel about it now. But check with me in 30 years, I don’t know how and if it will still resonate with me [laughs].
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