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PrintMatters of the spirit
"The role of the playwright is to tell the truth—to make people uncomfortable."
Theater arose from ritual, the sacred acts that for untold ages have connected humans to the otherworld. But theater, which the Greeks invented, springs from the soul, too, from the great depths where rivers of revelation feed us continually, allowing for the possibility of change.
Playwright Chiquita Mullins Lee is acquainted with those deep waters. In her play, “Pierce to the Soul,” she conjures the spirit of Columbus’s Elijah Pierce, the late, great woodcarver, philosopher, barber and man of God. The one-man show, which she began researching and writing six years ago, had its first full production at CATCO in the spring. It’s lyrical and whimsical, spare and laconic, funny and witty, generous in its wisdom, marvelous in its unassuming simplicity, but deceptively difficult for all that. It calls for breathing life into a mystical woodcarver from another age.
“Like Elijah, I had to do all this carving to get at the heart of the story,” says Lee. “There were many nights I was up until 3 or 4 am editing the play, struggling with a single sentence, struggling with a single word.”
Lee, who grew up in Atlanta, had no clue she was going to end up a playwright. But there was a glimmer of her destiny in the fourth grade, when she conceived a play called “Children Around the World,” based on a book of the same name.
“I directed and starred in the play,” says Lee, who levels an incandescent smile while sitting backlit in a fading sliver of light at a Short North cafe. “My mother had given me the book and it was full of illustrations of children from all over the world. I was fascinated by the different-sounding names and colorful clothes from places like Holland, Spain, the Congo and Egypt.”
In high school, Lee was the editor of her literary magazine. At Vassar College, she majored in drama and psychology and wound up working in public television for many years. At Ohio University, she got a master’s degree in radio and TV and later earned a second master’s in journalism at Ohio State. Along the way, she felt the fires of imagination for fiction and music, writing short stories and songs whenever she could. Yet her work with theater holds a special significance. And she’s taken it in unusual directions.
For the past eight years, she’s presented “Faces of Grace” at her church, New Covenant Believers’: dramatic monologues about women from the Bible. So far, she’s written and performed four on women from the Old Testament and five about women from the New Testament, including one she presented recently about a woman who continually bled for 12 years.
“Like so many women in the Bible, this woman had no name,” says Lee. “But she was hemorrhaging. And because of Jewish ideas around blood, she was ostracized and rejected from the community. She was considered unclean. But she heard about Jesus and heard he was healing people. So she decided to find him. Her faith was so strong, she felt that if she could just touch the hem of his garment, she would be healed. And she did that and was healed.”
For Lee, a devout Christian, combining theater with church is a natural pairing. The sacred element of the latter ensures a careful reception for the former—and allows for dramatic experimentation.
“My theater work has strong spiritual components. Elijah Pierce is an example. He was a preacher. But at first he didn’t accept that. He ran from the calling, which we always do at first,” she says, her amber eyes flashing. “But in the play, Pierce talks about his experience and relationship with God. He looked at things through a spiritual lens and realized that God was directing his life with a greater purpose. And that appealed to me.”
As a storyteller, Lee takes her calling seriously. She’s out to awaken people, to plant the seeds of change.
“The role of the playwright is to tell the truth—to make people uncomfortable, to make people think about their own lives and about existence,” she says. “My role is to raise questions and have people challenge themselves and think in a different way about the world around them.”
Jory Farr can be reached at joryfarr@gmail.com.
