Sikivu Hutchinson’s Play about Jonestown, 1978, as told through the voices of Black Women
By Julyza Commodore
In 1978, Peoples Temple, a progressive, Black multiracial church perished in the Guyana jungle named after its leader, The Reverend Jim Jones. Writer-director Sikivu Hutchinson’s play, White Nights, Black Paradise (2015), told through the voices of Black Women, is being performed Nov. 17-19 at The Blue Door, 9617 Venice Boulevard in Culver City, Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 3 pm. https://rb.gy/g1oqzn
Sikivu Hutchinson is an author, playwright, director, and musician. She is the author of Humanists in the Hood: Unapologetically Black, Feminist and Heretical (2020). She writes about race and gender issues, as well as atheism and atheists in the Black community, for whom she is an advocate.
Sikivu Hutchinson (Photo courtesy of Sikivu Hutchinson)
Hutchinson spoke with Stage Raw contributor Julyza Commodore in October.
Julyza Commodore: White Nights, Black Paradise. What inspired this title?
Sikivu Hutchinson: So the title of course is twofold. “White Nights refers to the siege that the People’s Temple Church believed that it was under, and this transpired during the period when the church had transitioned to Jonestown, Guyana.
There was a lot of suspicion and paranoia that they were going to be invaded by outsiders, ranging from the federal government, to dissidents that had broken off from the church, to media. And what they really did was escalate this hysteria and frenzy and violence to ensure that members would stay with the church and remain subservient and docile. The way that it played out was in literal performances of them being invaded, and Jim Jones being jeopardized in some way. And they had a whole brigade of young people who would patrol the settlement with firearms to ensure that these outsiders were repelled. So, that was the first part.
Black Paradise is an evocation of the diasporic imaginings and expectations that Black church members had about what Jonestown was going to implement for them once they migrated there. They believed that this was going to be the promised land and the antidote to the White supremacy and racist oppression and disparities that they were experiencing economically in San Francisco and some of the other communities they were coming from. The title is attempting to evoke all of the turbulent underpinnings of the culture of this particular church, contextualizing it with regard to the upheaval that was going on in the late 1970’s.
JC: This show been put on before and is going back up in November. What do you think makes this story relevant today? What inspired you to cover this specific subject matter?
SH: I think that it’s relevant on a number of fronts. Sixty-eight percent of the congregation was African-American and about that number died in Jonestown. That is unfortunately a fact that is not widely known, because so much of mainstream media has focused on the pathological trajectory of Jim Jones, his crazy charismatic leadership and the fact that folks were “drinking the kool-aid” and dying. There’s no sociopolitical or historical context provided for that act. So that was something that compelled me when I started to dig into the trajectory of Peoples Temple.
The church existed for about three decades prior to the tragic demise in Jonestown and again, it was powered by Black women and Black families. You had multigenerational Black folks from all over the country, specifically from the Deep South and many of them were Great Migration migrants and they were really looking for some form of relief from the racial and sexual terrorism that they had experienced in the Jim Crow South and the segregated Midwest. So California signified this space of resurgence in terms of having opportunities for jobs, education, housing, and all of these ideals were really fixed in the minds of African-American folks coming over from the South to the West Coast, so Jonestown and Peoples Temple symbolized that promise.
JC: I know that you wrote, produced and directed this. What challenges have you encountered, if any, when it came to putting together this show?
SH: Funding has really been a huge issue as you can imagine. Scrambling to get some grants for this. Back when we did the 2018 production and I actually hired a director, that was completely self-financed and we never saw a dime of our ticket sales. That totally demoralized me and that was during the period where we were transitioning into the pandemic.
I did get a grant at the end of 2019 from the California Humanities foundation and we were supposed to go to San Francisco and work with the Museum of the African Diaspora. That got totally scuttled by the pandemic, so here we are, five years later, finally doing something in person at the Blue Door. That is partially due to a grant from the Culver City Cultural Affairs Commission and some other partners, as well as some self-funding. It’s been very difficult being an independent [producer].
Casting is also always a challenge. As a small producer, you have to develop trust within the acting community and fortunately I have some great multi-generational talent that is also predominantly Black Women. So I’ve had a lot of challenges launching as a small independent Black Woman producer-director.
JC: What inspires your storytelling overall?
SH: I think a desire to see intersectional voices portrayed. For example, in the play we have two sisters that are both secular, one is atheist and one is agnostic, one is professional and one is a skeptic. That particular characterization is not one we see in mainstream African-American cultural productions. I’m also interested in the kinds of spaces that Black folks carve out.
JC: When they leave from seeing the show, what do you want audiences to take away from this?
SH: Well, I want them to maybe marinate in the nuances that we’ve talked about, and the fact that we’ve had all of these complexities and paradoxes operating in this movement and that, in many ways, those complexities and paradoxes inform contemporary American Society.
JC: If I asked you to describe the show in three words, what would they be?
SH: Confounding, paradoxical and I hate to say it, but tragic. That would be my third.
WHITE NIGHTS, BLACK PARADISE | Written and directed by Sikivu Hutchinson | The Blue Door, 9617 Venice Boulevard, Culver City | Nov. 17-19, Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 3 pm. https://rb.gy/g1oqzn
