A new play, "The Language of Dolls," premieres at Antioch College's Foundry Theatre in Yellow Springs this week.
In the play, the characters (Lizzie, Louise, and Peggy) stay overnight in a cabin in the woods. Offstage, you can hear the sounds of rain and birds.
Louise: Did you know that this place was on the Underground Railroad?
Peggy: Underground Railroad?
Lizzie: I read that they used to dump toxic waste here.
The actors are longtime friends who went to Antioch College together in the 1970s and went on to careers in the theater. Louise Smith and Lizzie Olesker are white, and Peggy Pettitt is Black. In the drama, they play versions of themselves. Over this one day, the women struggle with the history of race in their lives and in America.
Two years ago, the women knew they wanted to collaborate on a drama, Smith said.
“Peggy’s work, she was really interested in how our identities are formed by these early experiences of playing, these early messages we get in our education, particularly around Black children and the kind of messages they get.”
Then Olesker and Pettit went to an exhibit of Black dolls from the 1850s to the 1940s. These dolls were all hand-sewn by black women. They had a spiritual presence, said Pettit.
“But I felt in many ways that they weren’t just dolls, that people had lost members of their families through that slave experience, and maybe sometimes they were recreating for themselves, a mother, an aunt, an uncle.
Those dolls were so alive, that they carried something.
And the way the buttons for the eyes, the fabric itself, you wondered, did that belong to somebody’s brother? Did that particular material belong to someone’s sister?”
Without saying a word, the dolls spoke for those left behind, said Lizzie Olesker. “This idea, well if the dolls could speak what would they say? Giving language to something that doesn’t have it.”
In the play, the women find a box of black-and-white dolls in the cabin. It’s experimental theater. Sometimes, the women are themselves, telling their stories.
Based on their conversations, the women wrote monologues and dialogues. They refined these scenes through improvisations that they taped, transcribed, and revised through more improvisations.
When Smith bought a Black baby doll at a sale, she had an idea for a scene between her and Peggy.
“I can buy a baby doll that’s Black,” says Louise during the play, “and now that’s my baby doll, and I can play with that baby doll however I want.
"Initially, when I proposed it, honestly, I think my colleagues were a bit appalled, and that was one of those moments where they were like, “I don’t know…,” Smith said.
It's really a reflection of how I think that’s what happens in the larger culture around white privilege.
In the improvisation, Peggy went with her gut response. “She became much more than just Louise, " said Pettitt. “It became symbolic of an attitude that I can play with any doll that I want. And, you know, just responding to her the way that I felt on the moment. Put it down.”
Peggy: Okay, you’re trying to say that we can’t keep our babies safe? Are you saying that I can’t keep a baby safe? What are you saying?
Louise: I’m not saying anything about you.
Peggy: Yeah, well I hear ya.
Louise: This is about me.
Peggy: Put it down. Put it down! We’re all supposed to be able to pay with dolls, but don’t be, don’t be going all over…
Louise: I can play with whatever baby doll I want to!
At the end of this scene, Louise chooses to walk out, but Peggy can’t leave. She remains at the table.
“Nobody wants to stay at the table,” said Pettitt. “But we must! The table in a way is like the trunk of a tree to me. It’s like the roots of this whole evening is at this table. This table is a tree trunk, and everything grows out from there.
“And we realize how fragile things are, and that nothing can be assumed, that everything needs an active maintenance, and I think this piece is part of an active maintenance of a hope.”
Language of the Dolls plays this weekend at the Foundry Theater at Antioch College.
This story was produced at the Eichelberger Center for Community Voices at WYSO.