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The Burn to Write

Michael Phillip Edwards’s Blood returns to the Hollywood Fringe this summer

By Deborah Klugman

Michael Phillip Edwards. Top image: Marie Tomas and Phrederic Semaj in Edwards’s play Blood

Michael Phillip Edwards is a writer, director and performer for stage and screen, and a multiple NAACP Image Awards nominee. His one-act plays, Blood and Sister just closed at Theatre/Theater in Los Angeles. Blood is returning in the Hollywood Fringe this summer.

A supernatural fable, Blood tells the story of an African-American man and an Irish woman whose marriage in Jamaica was officiated by a voodoo priestess. Unbeknownst to them, she’d bound a third party to their union, a succubus called Blood. Now, years later, the sex-starved spirit has risen up, threatening them with death unless they resurrect their now moribund passion.

Sister, a solo show, is a gritty tale set in here-and-now Hollywood. The central character, Denise, is an aspiring actress who makes ends meet by prostitution. There are other characters whose narratives are woven into hers – other hookers or ex hookers and their johns or boyfriends.

Edwards’s play Runt received the Edinburgh Fringe Festival Scotsman Award, establishing him as its first black writer/performer awardee. He wrote and directed I Am Not Sam, which was workshopped in the Stafford Room at the Geffen Playhouse, The Good Negro at the Stella Adler Theatre, Paula Neiman’s Nat Turner, featuring Roger Guenveur Smith at Greenway Court, and Burn, with Ingez Rameau.

Besides Runt, Edwards’s other L.A. stage appearances include Long Bridge Over Deep Waters at the Ford Theater.  He has directed seven feature films, most recently a feature documentary for Netflix,  Haunted Jamaica, as well as the feature film Murder 101, now in wide release and on VOD.

STAGE RAW: Where did the spark for Blood come from?

MICHAEL PHILLIP EDWARDS: I woke up one night and saw a shadow “humping” my nether region. At first I thought I was dreaming but then I realized I wasn’t and shoo’d whatever it was away. I saw it fly into the corner of the roof. I rolled over and went back to sleep.

Next day, I catch my wife on a chair putting holy water around the house. She saw it too. After that, I became fascinated with succubus lore, did some research and waited for the inspiration for this play to arrive.

SR: What are the Caribbean/African influences?

MPE: The Caribbean and Africa have a lot of fables and cautionary tales. Blood is me writing an adult version of a cautionary tale while facing the tail end of a marriage I’m no longer a part of. A lot of my films and plays come from an early Jamaican childhood. We lived in a very rural area. My family had a servant named Parson and he would tell my brother and me cautionary tales meant to keep us safe from riptides, flash floods, dense fogs, strangers at night etc.

And my God, were some of those stories scary. Super strong spirits that could carry you out over the ocean and drop you, vicious creatures that lived between the walls. All of these grotesque characters, according to Parson, existed to warn us, help us on our journey. But they didn’t suffer fools. Fail to listen and they’d either eat you or . . . whatever. And over time I’ve come to realize how much that world is trying to communicate with and help us.

An abandoned Caribbean plantation reputed to be haunted.

SR: Are there parallels between these tales and European ones, do you think?

MPE: If you go back to true Grimm’s fairy tales or true Aesop you’ll see it’s nothing new that I’m doing.

Did you intend to write a black comedy or was your focus on writing a drama with dark comic elements?

The short answer is that I thought I was writing a very funny comedy with a cautionary element. Sitting with audiences I saw something much darker than I had intended. 

Were you intending a comment about the relationship between the sexes?

This alpha male wanted to write a play that investigated the possibility that a woman’s sexual appetite is far greater than mine, and the likelihood that my ego could not handle her releasing who she really is.

The two characters are relatively privileged people, rather spoiled to my mind.  Is that intended as a significant component of the story?

It’s important these two have all the free will in the world. I enjoy channeling characters who consider themselves “free.” Having the African-American “He” character not bear the stigma of being downtrodden financially – and yet still have to deal with internal racial issues – was important to me.

How important is the bi-racial element of the story?

It’s important. Both characters are wealthy, accomplished individuals able to have what they want. “He” reveals he wants a white woman because he was told as a child in 1960s Alabama, he could not have this. She reveals an attraction for either black men or anyone she believes to be “a hard warrior type” willing to die for something they believe in. Irish- and African-Americans have a long history of “warrior attraction”; you’ll see me reveal that in plays and films from me yet to come.  I thought I’d play with it here as well.

What does the play say about people generally?

That we are and always will be children to the greater truth that awaits us. These two are children (and to some degree spoiled) but aren’t we all?

The larger point being . . . ?

Enjoy your life, flaws and all, but leave a little space for humility. Respect the unseen potential to get to the next level of truth within and without. 

One critic has commented on the “sprinkling” of Beckett he sees in this play.  Do you agree?

When it comes to “minimalism,” I’m honored to be compared to the author of post-modernism. But my real influence comes directly from Second City in Toronto; When I was 17 years old, watching Mike Myers – before he was on Saturday Night – perform live on stage, commenting on the current events of the day. George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Whoopi Goldberg, Spaulding Gray are also great influences.

What kind of theater stirs your admiration?

People creating theater out of nothing; idiosyncratic micro-movements without set or props communicating something that was obviously burning inside to come out. Athol Fugard once spoke of watching theater in the poor Apartheid-afflicted townships just outside of Capetown. In a tiny room packed to the rafters, he’d watch two actors on a stage, with only one or two chairs, create some of the most intense theater he had ever seen.  I think the “burning to communicate” is the trick. You don’t need much when a story’s burning to come out.

How do you write?

My writing process is simple. I have an idea, a visual non-linear idea. I wait for it to start burning. Then I sit down and don’t do anything but eat, sleep and write. No matter how long it takes I don’t let anything interrupt. I stay in until the play, screenplay is done.

Erica Gimpel in Edwards’s play Sister

And where did Sister come from?

Sister, like my other one-person play Runt was written in anger. I had a family member fall into prostitution. She was sexually assaulted by an elder family member at a young age and never fully recovered from the incident growing up. I spoke with her while she was on the street. I listened as best I could to some of the craziest stories I’ve ever heard. I listened because most of the family would not. She didn’t stay there long, but the stories she told me stayed with me.

Were you intending to make a social statement with this play?

Not against prostitution. If you’re a liberated woman and it’s your desire to be a free-minded courtesan, so be it. What I’d like to see harshly dealt with here is the failure of the family to protect children from the commonly practiced subhuman habit of incest or in-house sexual assault. This robs children of light. It leaves them broken. It limits the choices the children make when they grow up and then we as a society judge those choices as though we had nothing to do with it.

The play isn’t a sermon on this. Society knows everything under the sun already. Working with the incredibly meticulous Erica Gimpel (who told me she refused to play a victim), I’m proud to have developed with her what I believe to be an organic character study of a woman forced to create her own path to light and free-will, while dealing with the aforementioned circumstance of having her life dimmed in childhood.

Sister isn’t a play about victims. It’s a love letter to Los Angeles and to all the warriors who come here from somewhere else seeking a higher version of themselves. Some with stories like my sister’s, some not.  

What’s next?

Developing a future for Blood and Sister is first. Blood is scheduled for the Hollywood Fringe in June.

I’ve recently delivered a feature documentary I directed to Netflix titled Haunted Jamaica, which is due out in July. I have two new narrative screenplays I’m shopping around. And in the theater world look for a new one person play I’ve completed. Casting that now. The burn continues.