If Zora and André could slap us around

When is it OK for a writer to say: “To hell with your expectations, your concerns, your desires! I’m going to write whatever the hell I want?” When is it necessary? How does a writer break free from the demands of editors, publishers, patrons, readers, even society? When is collaborative thinking a trap? When is self-centered creativity foolish?

These questions—for writers and indeed for all artists—compose the central theme in the new, one-act play Rainbow To Your Door by Kenneth Brown, which premiered Saturday night for a limited engagement in Orlando.

For this drama, Brown imagines a (presumably entirely fictional) 1939 afternoon tea conversation between two friends (indeed, between siblings of different mothers:) Eatonville-based writer Zora Neale Hurston and architect and artist Jules André Smith, who at that time had created and presided over an artist’s colony in Maitland.

(For those not familiar with Central Florida: the towns of Eatonville and Maitland share a city limit. They also share a historical divide: in Jim Crow Florida of 1939, Eatonville was the “colored” town, while Maitland was the all-white one with a sundown law.)

In Brown’s new drama, the nearly two-hour conversation between the animated Zora and the provocative André covers a lot of ground, from racism to legacies, and from her WPA work collecting African-American stories, folklore, and folksongs, to his experiences as a soldier in the Great War, where he lost a leg. Their conversation deepens intimately as they challenge each other to be candid about fears, pains, sacrifices, hopes, and dreams.

Yet central to all is the debate they keep relighting, over the responsibilities of artists to be honest with their own visions. That begins as Zora (played in this premier performance by Patrece Bloomfield) teases André (played by Daniel Cooksley) about his relationship to his rich patron. The couple return to this central theme over and over, picking at each other with increasing heat and commitment until they find agreement—a faith in creativity that must be universal to all artists.

At times, the more philosophical discussions of art risk going over the edge into academic, repetition, or even cliché. Wonderfully, Brown always rescues them from those brinks with some passionate statement that only the character of Zora Neale Hurston could have expressed, or with a probing observation that only the character of Jules André Smith could have possessed.

Rainbow To Your Door is a play by a writer-artist, about writers and artists, and for writers and artists.

That is not to say there isn’t something here that everyone should appreciate, starting with just the overall, against-all-odds, loving, friendship of two very different people. Zora’s recollections of the men she met in railroad camps are extraordinary. André’s musings on the organization of war are fascinating. Her defiance of victimhood, and his of pain and disability, are inspiring. Their stories and their teases are often tender and funny.

But we writers and artists are the people likely to hear Zora and André speaking directly to us.

Not just speaking to us, but slapping us around a little.