Actor-poet Staceyann Chin likens the artificial insemination process to the mood swings of a toddler.
“The drugs you take, the desire for this kid, the hunt for sperm—it’s really quite ridiculously, hilariously, heartbreakingly...I don’t know. I don’t think it’s like any other experience,” she muses. “One minute you’re, like, ‘Whoa! This is great,’ and the next minute you’re crashing into the depths of sorrow, and the next you’re rolling over, wondering at the beauty of the sky. Anyone with you will wonder if you’re a toddler or an adolescent or if you’re just kind of harebrained.”
What she’s dubbed a “ludicrous” sprint toward motherhood has birthed both her 3-year-old daughter, Zuri, and her new Off-Broadway solo show, “MotherStruck.”
An award-winning spoken-word poet, LGBT activist, and author who made her 2002 Broadway debut in Russell Simmons’ “Def Poetry Jam,” Chin is now staging her fierce examination of what it is to be a single-lesbian-black-mother-artist living in New York City. With Cynthia Nixon as director, Chin will bring to the stage the desire for family in the face of seemingly insurmountable struggle.
The outspoken, self-proclaimed “interrupter” has had to redefine herself as creator on multiple levels for the project. She moved from the abstract notion of bettering the world for the next generation to a “laser-focused” purpose, fueled by Zuri, that meant sacrificing the luxury of “meandering inspiration”—and called for stealing work hours during her daughter’s playdates or in the early morning.
She sent Nixon her first extensive draft of “MotherStruck” at 4 a.m. “I’m going to start the rumor in this article that I do not believe she ever sleeps,” Chin says, laughing. “I sent 70 or 80 pages at 4 in the morning and she had read it by 7. And that has continued. I wonder sometimes if she doesn’t know the script more than I did.”
The detail-oriented Nixon—“She’ll notice maybe I said ‘magenta’ and perhaps something was more violet”—helped Chin punctuate her concepts with hand gestures, thrown arms, and kicking legs. That signature explosive quality is attaining sharper focus in “MotherStruck,” which began as a blog for the Huffington Post that launched just before bleeding 14 weeks into her pregnancy confined Chin to six months of bedrest. As an artist who follows her art and not the other way around, her series of blog posts and poems about Zuri evolved into the play, which, much like the events that inspired it, didn’t come without its share of challenges. Originally scheduled to open in October, the production was pushed to a Dec. 14 premiere due to financial constraints.
“The first draft was written entirely in either poetry or poetics,” says Chin of the show, which finally started previews earlier this month. “We worked hard to ground the story. It’s a very poetic script but it’s also great storytelling. There’s room for you to breathe and to appreciate the beauty of the language, but also lots of room to be really quite viscerally and starkly and literally present in the moment of the action.”
When asked about advice for aspiring writers, she says, “Don’t hang all your bow ties, all your leather belts, all of your hats, all of your baskets on one story.... If you have 100 written and one doesn’t do what you want it to do, you have 99 others to be hopeful about.
“Send it out to different people. Have your friends gather, make a salad, and read it to them. The work can’t be alive if you just have the story in your head or in a binder in your house. I believe art is alive, and that’s why I love the theater; there’s no other place where the art lives and breathes in deep interaction with the flesh as much as it does within the community of theater.”
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