Teaching Artist Leah Reddy spoke with playwright York Walker about Covenant.
Leah Reddy: What is your theatre origin story?
York Walker: My parents took my siblings and me to see Disney on Ice as kids, and I was obsessed with it. I would come home and try to recreate it in my basement with the cassette tapes of the soundtracks of the movies. My mom would babysit other kids, and so when we came home from school, there were two or three other kids there, and I would force them to do plays in my basement. I got really serious about it. And I was very upset when they didn't take it as seriously as I did. I've just always wanted to be an actor on stage. As far as I can remember, that was just the thing that I fell in love with. In high school, I was in band, so I wasn't really doing theatre stuff, but I ended up doing a student-directed play at the end of my junior year, and the drama teacher came up to me and she was like, “Where have you been?”
It felt like Steven Spielberg had just asked me to be in his next movie. I did every play my senior year, and then studied acting in college, and then I did an acting apprenticeship with Actors Theatre of Louisville right after I graduated. After that program, I moved to New York for a year and realized that I needed more training if I was going to be the serious actor that I wanted to be. I went to [American Conservatory Theater] ACT for three years, and that's where I wrote my first play.
But the first time I ever really wrote a script was in Louisville. They forced everyone to do a 10-minute solo show called a Solo Mio. I had no interest in doing it, but somehow, I pulled something together. And it went really well, and people laughed, and I was like, “Oh, okay. This is interesting.” Still had no interest in being a writer and didn't write again until grad school, but that's the long version of the origin story.
LR: What caused your shift into playwriting?
YW: I was in my first year of grad school and I was in the process of coming out of the closet. I grew up in a very religious household, and so I was trying to figure out what my relationship was with God now that I was accepting this thing that had been with me since I was a kid, and I didn't know what to do with it. I just decided to write a play. It was called Summer of '63. It was my first full length, and it was about a preacher in the '60s who was gay, but closeted, and was the preacher of this church. He had had one very short-lived relationship with a man the previous summer, but it ended very badly, and so he came back home to his town and took over this church and focused his life on God. And at the beginning of the play, that lover shows up to town to try to make amends, and it just kind of throws his whole world out of loop. It had a lot of comedy in it despite it being a drama, but I think it just gave me a place to put all that angst and confusion. It gave me a place to funnel it. I also wrote the lead character for myself, because I knew playing an openly gay character, was going to be a challenge. There was something about the honesty and vulnerability that it was going to take to do it, that intrigued me.
I wanted to write something for myself that would be challenging and fulfilling to do. And I also had a best friend in my class in grad school who was plus-sized, and they told her that they didn't know what to do with her and that there weren't any roles for her. And she was just really frustrated, and she was like, "I'm always the funny friend. I never get to be in love. And I always have to play roles that have to do with my size." And I was like, “You know what? I'm going to write you a role where you can be funny and sexy, and your weight will never be mentioned in the entire play.”
I wrote those two roles for the both of us, and we did a bunch of readings of it and that's sort of how it all started. When I first heard the play out loud it was like, “Oh, this isn't terrible. There might be something to this writing thing,” and I just kept writing plays from there.
LR: What inspired Covenant?
YW: A lot of things. I find that when I'm writing a play, there are a bunch of different elements that are coming together to make that thing, so I'll try to hit a couple of them. One, I was just curious about what it would be like to write a play that had horror in it with Black people at the center of the story. We don't see a lot of horror on stage these days, and I know back in the day that used to be a thing, but we don't really get it now.
And we certainly don't get it with Black people. I had gone to see Us, Jordan Peele's movie, and the reaction of the audience watching this horror movie together—and it was a mostly Black audience—was incredible. I felt like the electricity would be bumped up a notch if the action was happening in front of you and you're breathing the same air as the performers. I was also driving for Lyft here in LA and miserable and broke, and I got this image in my head. I was on a long ride. I got this picture in my head of this Black girl in a blue dress, and I didn't know who she was or why she was popping up in my head, but I was like, “Okay, maybe there's a play here.” I kept thinking about her, and over time I was like, “Okay, there's something interesting about this girl, and I wonder if she lives in the world of this horror play. Maybe that's what this is.” So all these things are talking to each other in my brain. Then I remembered the myth of Robert Johnson and him selling his soul to the devil. And I wondered if maybe that girl could be connected to the myth. That's kind of how it started. And to this day that Black girl in the blue dress is the opening image of the play. And Covenant sort of spilled out from there.
LR: Why do you think people are fascinated with the myth of selling your soul to the devil?
YW: I just got out of a meeting with the director [Tiffany Nichole Greene], and Steven Buescher, who's going to do our movement and we were talking about this. I think everyone has their own relationship to religion, and ghosts, and otherworldly things. And we all have thoughts about what we believe is real and what we think is a hoax. But I think we are all just curious about the possibility of another world existing that we can't see. For me, coming from a religious background, I’ve always believed that the devil was certainly real, and now that I’m older I don't really believe in it in the same way. Part of me is like, “Oh, no. All of those things that they thought were possessions were just mental health issues, and we didn't have the language to call it what it was.” But then there are also some things that have happened that can't be explained, and that is where I get a little nervous. And I'm like, “Okay, I don't know what to call that, but there's clearly something going on that cannot be explained by science.” That fascination about the things that we can't explain, I just think it pulls us in to want to know more, even though what’s on the other side of our curiosity could be terrifying.
LR: Is there anything about the time and place of Covenant that's particularly resonant for you or that you were interested in exploring?
YW: It is a lot less profound than I would like it to be. When I was in that Lyft thinking about this girl, I was like, “Okay, this girl...” She was in a dress that didn't feel present day. It was like a period dress. So I knew it wasn't going to be set in the present, but I was like, “Okay, so there's a girl in a blue dress.” And then a thought popped into my head and said, “She lives in the town that The Color Purple takes place in.” Literally, that was the thought. I was like, “Okay, I can picture that town. She seems to fit there. Great.” That's where this play takes place. I wish I had some deep dramaturgical reason or time period that I was interested in exploring, but sadly that’s how it happened.
I will say that I am fascinated with period pieces, especially period pieces with Black people. I'm so curious as to how Black people lived their lives in the past and got through all the terrible things that were going on, and especially Black queer people.
LR: What advice do you have for young or emerging playwrights?
YW: Lean into what excites you. I think one of my favorite things about being a writer is that you are in control. The possibilities are endless. You get to sit down and decide what it is that you would like to see on stage. Every time I start working on a new play, I think, “What is it that I have not seen on stage that I, as an audience member, would love to see? What is a genre that I would love to see? Who are the people I want to see? What kind of an experience do I want to have if I was going to be sitting down to watch this play?”
It’s also good to experience other people's work. I am very much inspired by other playwrights and going to see their plays and movies and TV shows, and even things that don't have anything to do with the theatre, necessarily, like going to see live music. I just think it's good to take all of those things in because you never know what's going to influence something in your work or spark an idea.
Then the last thing is, I would say keep a notebook, or in your phone, a note section for each of your projects so that when an idea comes, you can write it down. I heard this story once about a songwriter. About how he could hear a song idea coming over a hill and that he had to get to a pen and paper so that when the song ran through him, he could write it down, otherwise it would go to the next songwriter. I feel the same way about plays and good stories. If I get a good idea or good nugget that could be a play, there’s a reason that the idea came to me. And I need to write it down so that later I can figure out how I can bring it to life.
Published on October 19, 2023.