Playwright Nambi Kelley Finds the Love: Adapting Richard Wright’s Native Son for the Stage

Playwright Nambi Kelley Finds the LoveAdapting Richard Wright’s Native Son for the Stage Tasha Hawthorne (bio) This conversation was conducted via Zoom on Thursday, March 10, 2022. Playwright Nambi Kelley was in New York City, and I was in New Haven, Connecticut. These are edited excertps from the conversation. Hawthorne. So, I’ve read the play. It is provocative, it is thought provoking. It is many, many things. It’s pretty incredible. So, if you would just give me a sense of—walk me through your decisions. I have two questions: (1) your decision to embody—have W. E. B. Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness, and then, (2) why Richard Wright, and why Native Son? Kelley. I’ll start with why Richard Wright? why Native Son? and then go on to the second question or the first question. I first discovered Native Son when I was probably about seven or eight years old. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago—part of my childhood. My mother had the book on a shelf, and I was looking for you know something to do because I . . . I have older brothers. They’re much older than me, and so you know . . .. They’re not much older than me now that we’re grown, but when we were kids, they were practically adults, even though they weren’t. So, I was left to my own devices a lot. So, I used to read a lot because I was that kid. And I opened it [the book], and well, first of all I took the book off the shelf because I recognized the writer’s name, because oddly, enough, we had read in school an excerpt from Black Boy. And I was like, “Oh, my God! That must be for me, Richard Wright. I know that name!” So, I pulled it, and I start reading it and you know it’s like, “Oh, my God!” [imitates crying]. [End Page 114] But as I started reading it, I kept reading it because I recognized the street names because it’s the same neighborhood that I spent part of my childhood in. “Oh, I know Cottage Grove,” you know. I know these streets. So that was kind of cool. I was like, “Oh, this is where I am.” And then I got shocked, and then my mother took the book because she caught me reading it. Hawthorne. Appropriately so. Kelley. And I never saw the book again until high school. But that was my intro to it, and I loved it. And it was one of those things, I probably didn’t understand. You know three-quarters of what I read because I was seven! But I loved it, and I loved Bigger. So cut to I’m a grown woman in Chicago and working with this theater company, and they came to me, and they said, “Nambi, would you like to adapt Native Son?” And I just said “Yes!” But then, I was like “Wait a minute, how much money are you going to pay me?” And I agree to it, and I was kind of scared of it, you know, just a little bit because “My God, I love this book and it’s so iconic. So, I just jumped in and so that’s why, Richard Wright. Richard Wright was given to me in whatever grade I was in at that time, whoever my teacher was at that time. At Doolittle West on 35th and King in Chicago. The school is not there anymore, but it’s still in my heart. So that’s why Richard Wright, and that’s why Native Son. It was just given to me. It’s one of those things that was a full-circle moment. In terms of the embodiment of Du Bois’s double consciousness theory. So, I was in New York and my father is a historian. I was at his apartment on Riverside Drive. I didn’t grow up with him. I mean he was always in my life, but I wasn’t raised in a home with him, but he was the...