“One of the most startlingly original voices belongs to this year’s Pulitzer winner Jackie Sibblies Drury, who has had a breakthrough season with two critically acclaimed plays on the New York stage—most recently, at Lincoln Center Theater, the exhilarating Marys Seacole, a time- and continent-hopping look at the tradition of African American women as caregivers, seen through the prism of the real-life story of a Jamaican British nurse in the Crimean War.
While Drury is delighted at the attention she and her peers have been receiving, she has some qualms. “All of us are still in a lot of ways writing for white spaces,” she says. “I wonder what that work would be if that wasn’t an inherent part of creating theater right now.” That dilemma is at the very heart of Drury’s Fairview, a brilliant, audacious deconstruction of the soul-warping power of the white gaze (and the work that earned her the 2019 Pulitzer for drama). It stunned critics and audiences last summer, becoming the subject of fervent debate (not to mention the hottest ticket in town—it returns to New York this month for a limited run at Theatre for a New Audience at Polonsky Shakespeare Center).”
READ THE ENTIRE VOGUE ARTICLE HERE.