Tragedy, Solidarity, and the Challenges of Storytelling in “The Potluck”

[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in SoHo. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. I'm grateful that you're here. Stay dry. Stay tuned to WNYC for weather updates. It's going to be a very rainy day. Quick preview for tomorrow's show because it's big. Colson Whitehead will be here to talk about his new novel, Cool Machine. When I say new, I mean the publication date is tomorrow. Cool Machine is the conclusion to his Harlem Trilogy. In it, we see Ray Carney, the furniture salesman and occasional fence, take on one last crime in 1980s New York. That's coming up on the show tomorrow.

Now let's get today's show started with the new musical The Potluck. In 1979, five labor organizers were killed by members of the KKK and the American Nazi party during a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina. The victims were César Cauce, James Waller, William Evan Sampson, Sandra Neely Smith, and Michael Nathan. One year later, a child was born into a community forever changed by that tragedy and named in honor of two of those people. César James Alvarez went on to become a playwright and a composer. That history became the foundation for Alvarez's new musical, The Potluck.

Set in present day, the show follows a fictionalized version of César, played by Anthony Alfaro, who is commissioned to create a musical about the Greensboro massacre. As they struggle to tell the story responsibly, they grapple with memory, legacy, the challenge of honoring those who came before them, and César needs the money. Part family drama, part musical meditation, The Potluck explores the enduring impact of political violence, the complexities of grief and healing, and the meaning of solidarity across generations. The Potluck is produced by Soho Rep and INTAR and is now showing at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater at 416 W 42nd St. That's through August 2nd. Joining me now is playwright and composer César James Alvarez. Nice to meet you.

César James Alvarez: Hello. Thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: Also with us is Anthony Alfaro, who plays César in the production. Welcome, Anthony.

Anthony Alfaro: Hello. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Also joining us is Barbara Walsh, who plays César's mother. Barbara, welcome.

Barbara Walsh: Hello. Happy to be here.

Alison Stewart: This is a musical, César, about writing a musical about a difficult subject. [laughter] Why did a musical feel like the right form for the subject?

César James Alvarez: It's a great question because it's truly the wrong form in many ways. If you were to imagine a theater piece about the Greensboro Magica, you wouldn't think, "Okay, let's write a musical." The funny thing is, is that I stumbled into writing musicals as a composer and as a creator and storyteller. It's the story I've always known that I was going to have to tell. This moment came in my life where someone gave me a commission and said, "What are the stories that you're going to tell?" I was just honest, and I said, "This is one of them." They said, "Yes, do that one." I said, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, but that would be--"

Alison Stewart: No, not that one.

César James Alvarez: Not that one. I got into this situation where I knew I had to do something and I needed to do something that was the most terrifying and painful thing that I could ever imagine doing. I thought then, "What is the point of art making if we're not going to confront these really scary and challenging things?" I tried to apply my art practice to this story. What I discovered was that maybe this event was what brought me into that art practice in the first place. The experience of opening this Pandora's box forever changed me and my art practice. That's what's on stage right now, is a real story of being broken open by facing something that seems unfaceable.

Alison Stewart: So, Anthony, you're in one of my favorite bands.

Anthony Alfaro: Oh.

Alison Stewart: Tony & The Kiki.

Anthony Alfaro: Am I?

Alison Stewart: Yes. I saw you on stage. I was like, "That guy's got a twin, or I'm--"

Anthony Alfaro: Oh my God.

Alison Stewart: To my Instagram during intermission. Amazing.

Anthony Alfaro: Oh, thank you.

Alison Stewart: We'll talk about another time.

Anthony Alfaro: Yes.

Alison Stewart: How did you come to this role?

Anthony Alfaro: Well, let me see. I had been working as an actor and mainly a musical theater actor for a while, but then the pandemic happened and created like a clearing of, "What if I never do this again?" That's how I started my band. I was full steam ahead with that and trying to make that my artistic practice. In the closing of loops of former things, I came across a listing for a new musical. The description was something about a dad with mom energy, and maybe slightly witchy, non-binary, 30s. I was like, "Hmm, that sounds like--" [laughter]

Barbara Walsh: Let's ride on.

Anthony Alfaro: Who can sing? I was like, "I know that I'm trying to go in a different direction now, but this seems like hard to pass up.

Alison Stewart: Meant for you.

Anthony Alfaro: Even though César and I are very different people there, we have so many weird connections and intersections of who we are and things like that. Yes, I just read that. I think I sent César a message on Instagram. I was like, "I see this--"

César James Alvarez: Immediately. Videos of Anthony were pinging around the creative team, and we were like, "Wait, this person's amazing. This would be incredible." We haven't looked back.

Alison Stewart: Barbara, you are a Tony-nominated actress.

Barbara Walsh: Yes.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: What was unique to you about The Potluck?

Barbara Walsh: I am in the kitchen, 2022, listening to material that was just sent to me. Luminosity was the first thing I heard. Song that was cut from the show, and I'm still angry about it, [laughter] but that's okay. I was blown away by everything about it. Then I listened to the second song in the offer, which was The Myth, which would have been my song. My husband walks in the kitchen, and we're both listening, and he says, "Would this be your song?" I went, "Yes." He just said, "You have to do it." I said, "No kidding, I'm going to do it." I just said yes right away.

It's incredibly different from a formulaic musical, which I have done. Not all formulaic, like South Pacific. The form has been broken here and there in various things I've done, but not like this. Just from that first reading that we did and listening to the whole piece, and so many of those people are with us now, which I love. That's 2022. It gave me shivers. It made me weep constantly.

Not dramatically, but I was so touched and deeply moved by the Mandela song, for instance, and so many. The five people who died, the presence that-- I'm so glad that's been more developed over the years because I think it balances beautifully what we're putting on now. It takes my breath away. I have shivers just thinking about this show and the gift of being able to do it in a room with these people, with all of César's genius and Sarah, our director, incredible collaborator for you. It's a gift. Nothing like it.

Alison Stewart: César, how did the script for this show evolve from when you originally realized, "I have to do this," to what we see on stage today?

César James Alvarez: When you go to the show, the story is actually-- you see me or my character played by Anthony, actually crashing into this assignment, which is actually uncomfortable and excruciating, which was, "How in the heck am I going to write a musical about this painful, terrible catastrophe that happened to my family and that I grew up inside of?" What I do is I try a lot of different tactics. At a certain point, what I realized is that I actually have to deal with the spiritual side of this, which is that I'm trying to tell the story of these five folks who are no longer with us. How do you talk to the invisible world?

That that actually happened, which is that in the process of writing the musical, I actually went through this transformation where I turned my artistic practice away from something that was more musical and experimental and intellectual into something that was actually spiritual. When I went through the spiritual process of actually trying to talk to these folks, they talked back. It actually shattered the way that I was thinking about the story, the way that I was thinking about myself as a human and as an artist. I never was the same.

Then I was trying to figure out, in the context of writing a script to a musical, how do I tell that story? What does that story say about the catastrophe? What does it say about the possibility of our form, which is musical theater, which is such a beloved and derided form? I find musical theater to be, at its highest, an opportunity for musical togetherness and ritual togetherness that actually allows us to look at the scariest things, and all my favorite musicals have very strange, dark and scary things.

Alison Stewart: You mentioned that in the show, right?

César James Alvarez: Yes, at the center of them. I think by the end of the show, I'm trying to unveil this transformation. The question, how did it change over the course of it? is mapped out in the show, which is by the end of the show, I'm actually a different person.

Alison Stewart: I was curious, Anthony, what did you want to know from César to create the character of César?

Anthony Alfaro: I think something that has come up from when we started it to now is around the spectrum of queerness and the spectrum of gender and how our upbringing affects that. I think because of who I am and my lived experience and who my parents were and what my interests are, I have a different entry point to my queerness than César does. I think that the thing is that this whole story for this character, there is this, what am I? I don't fit in to perceived boxes. Whereas I feel like Anthony does fit into some of those boxes, of being non-binary or being androgynous or exploring both genders. Getting to know where--

Also meeting César, César had already been transformed through this. I was like, "Who were you when you started this? Who is this person giving this monologue? What is it like to have three kids and a wife and then to be like, "Um, wait, I'm this." That was a huge thing. Then also, César is incredibly brilliant and intellectual and an academic. That was always something that-- I'm a showgirl. [laughter] I don't know that I use words like Barbie's, like polemical and-

Barbara Walsh: I know. [crosstalk].

Anthony Alfaro: -the injury of the event and things like that. I'm more like, "Where do you want me to stand? What note am I singing? Am I smiling? Am I happy? Am I sad?" Whatever. To explore that and to own that and to--

Barbara Walsh: Too funny.

Anthony Alfaro: Also, I just want to say that it's a braininess that is also very-- has a sort of puppy dog energy around it and a gentleness and a playful thing of teaching and learning at the same time. That's really fun to tap into.

Alison Stewart: Barbara, you're portraying a real person who's still alive.

Barbara Walsh: Sally.

Alison Stewart: Where did you begin your creation of being César's mom?

Barbara Walsh: In all the readings I had-- The thing is about the piece, it's Brechtian in that it doesn't have that, "I'm talking, and now I've got to sing, because it's been set up in the script and now I have to sing." We don't have that here, which is fantastic. A bit of a dilemma for an actor as well is finding the way in-- I've only recently, since we've been up and running, I've found a better way in and more specific way in based on the way--

Let's see, the first lyric at the end of the first verse is, "There's a little boy and the ideas that imprison her." That tells the tale. Then at the end, it's, "There's a kid and the spirits that precondition her." Everything in between, it had to be a moment-to-moment discovery or pursuit of understanding for her. Because prior to that, in the scene with the parents and César, César has rewritten it, embellished it. You see the fight, you see the friction in the relationship, and it's not hateful. It's all loving, but it is distinct.

I think, how does a mother wrestle with that? Perhaps a homophobic mother give any point. She's on her own journey, and so for me, it was about, "I've got to land that beat." That's what I'm finding, actually, more and more, which is not-- It's not making a big deal to anyone else but me. It's like, thank goodness, Sarah, the director, helped me with that. It's subtle, actually.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the new musical The Potluck. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All of It.

[music]

Alison Stewart: You're listening to All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. A new musical grapples with the 1979 murder of five labor organizers by members of the KKK and the American Nazi Party. Playwright César James Alvarez is here with me alongside actors Anthony Alfaro and Barbara Walsh to discuss The Potluck. The Potluck is now showing at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater at 416 W 42nd St. César, in the first act, you break the fourth wall. A video screen comes down, and you invite the audience to watch a documentary about the massacre. It's about seven minutes. Or you invite them to leave and participate in a ritual out in the lobby. Why did you decide to give the audience that chance?

César James Alvarez: Thank you for asking this. One of the most treasured parts about the piece, actually, is that we have this opportunity to share the creative work my mother did. Sally Alvarez created this documentary about the Greensboro massacre in 1981 while I was in utero. She did her work to tell the story in her way, from her perspective. In that movie, she put in a really beautifully edited and complex portrait of the moment of the actual massacre. We tried to do the piece without that, and we tried to do it with it-

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

César James Alvarez: -and both had problems. When we did it without it, a lot of people were having a hard time understanding what really happened. When we did it with it, a lot of people get sent, and they can't actually watch that type of footage. What we did was we tried to create a pathway in the piece for you to see the piece and experience the story in two different ways. I'm so excited about what we found because it's actually, to me, using the form of theater, which is about togetherness as a container to say, "We're going to, as a community, deal with this thing that happened. We're going to acknowledge that there might be different reasons that you need to deal with this differently."

How many times have we looked at a really, really horrifying video alone on our phone and had to deal alone with whatever that brought up? Instead, we're saying, "We're going to look at this video together, and then we're going to spend the next period of time thinking about it and processing it and figuring out what to do with it. If you can't watch the video for whatever reason, we're going to give you another pathway, and then we're going to come together and all be part of it."

Which gets to actually a big point of the piece, which is about solidarity, which is about a potluck, which to me, a potluck is a participatory theater idea where everyone's going to come together and everyone's going to bring something, and everyone has a shared purpose, which is to eat. As a result of that process, what's on the table is an assemblage of things you might not actually intentionally pair together, which is actually what happens in the piece.

There's all of these different ideas and aesthetics that are next to each other, because the idea in the form of The Potluck is a proposal around solidarity. When you have solidarity, when you have different groups of people coming together for shared goals, you have dissonance, you have difference, you have a bunch of things that you might not pair together, being together. That feels to me like a requirement for how we move forward as a society. The intention with that two track moment in the piece is exactly that, we're going to hold everybody and give people safe ways through this and ways with different levels of intensity so that by the end, we can all stick together.

Alison Stewart: Anthony, we're going to play the song Lavender Shirt from the musical. Would you set this up for us?

Anthony Alfaro: Sure. In the way that it exists in the piece right now, it comes out of a moment where César is communing with the spirits of the five and coming up against whether this is the right thing to do, how to commemorate the story, how to tell this story. Is this a part of the revolution? Then something else that comes up is this idea of hatred and how hatred is so built into this horrible event.

Then one of the ghosts asks, "Do you have any hatred?" That brings up, "Yes, there is this hatred of self of a piece of me that is connected to all of this in whatever way through the cosmos." I see it as César peeling back the onion and just exploring, "What is this piece of me and where did it come from?" César revisits a memory, maybe the first time that they experienced gender euphoria. I feel like the song highlights the distance from that one beautiful moment to where they are now and the distance that maybe they want to travel to get back to it.

Alison Stewart: This is Lavender Shirt from The Potluck.

[music]

Salt Shadows spreading

I didn't care they put up my hair

I could smell their shampoo when they did my eyes

What would happen if I came to the Marxist study group in drag?

What does desire have to do with that?

I may be a machine but I'm a desiring one

I may be a machine but I'm a desiring one

I'm going to haunt the mainstream

I'm going to the mainstream

The children aren't the future.

Alison Stewart: That's Anthony Alfaro playing César in The Potluck. It's interesting, César. The words are projected on the screen throughout the whole show. Whose idea was that? It was ingenious, myself, I thought.

César James Alvarez: That's a really important part of my process. I've been for the last, really, four or five years working very hard to project lyrics on all my shows. It's a really intentional act around both accessibility, but also access to the ideas inside of the show. It's extremely hard on the performers because they are having to be compared to the script in every moment of the show. It's so much work for them, muscular work, to wrench their performance away from the script. It's really hard. Also, I cannot tell you how many people have come up to me and said, "Thank you for projecting the lyrics because I got to live in the story in a completely different way."

People come up to me and they quote the lyrics because they got to live in the script. Also, there's a million moments. We don't say this in rehearsal because we're trying so hard for everybody to nail it. When the text does drift away from what's projected, you feel the liveness and you feel the way in which the performers are working so hard to animate something that is just a piece of text. That multidimensional quality is inherent and part of the storytelling and part of the work.

I'm just really trying to create experiences which disrupt. This is Sarah Benson's really big frame for her work is to create disruptive acts where we are interrupted from treating things casually or normally. When the lyrics are projected, we're wrestling and reckoning the entire time with the distance between the authorship and the activation and the presence and this moment of togetherness. I think it's really important. I wish more theater performances would be captioned, because I feel like I miss so much sometimes, particularly if you're hearing something for the first time.

Alison Stewart: It also reminded me when I was a kid, this may show my age, but we used to get the album notes and the album liner notes, and you used to read long when you heard a song.

Barbara Walsh: Yes, Joni Mitchell.

Alison Stewart: It was so great. It was like another dimension.

Anthony Alfaro: Yes.

César James Alvarez: When I watch shows, I always put the captions on because I want to see what's written. I want to see what the words are and what the ideas were in the text. I honor you all both for-- and all the actors in this show for the strength it takes to perform beside the lyric. It is hard.

Alison Stewart: Barbara, we're going to hear you sing next.

Barbara Walsh: All right.

Alison Stewart: You mentioned The Myth. What was it about this song? Earlier, you said your husband said, "You get to sing that?" What was it about the song that spoke to you?

Barbara Walsh: Musically, it had this simplicity, and yet it had a beautiful arc, a build musically. The lyrics blow my mind. The poetry, it's very dense, and that can be a hindrance to get into, which it's never been a hindrance for me, but I wanted to make sure-- Captions or not, now I'm thinking, "Oh, yes, the captions, they're not looking at me anymore. Oh, well, and I've worked so hard." No, I'm kidding.

César James Alvarez: They're definitely looking at you.

Alison Stewart: No, we're looking at you. It's okay.

Barbara Walsh: You know what I mean? It's the music and the lyrics so brilliantly put together. The arc of the whole piece, it's stunning. .

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to The Myth from The Potluck.

[music]

There is a need for a simple solution

There is a need for someone to blame

There is a need for a way to determine

If the thing that we need has a name

There is a stick held up by another stick

There is a bridge held up by a brick

There is a myth held up by another myth

And it's hard to mess with the myth you're held up with

There is a stick held high by a hail

There is a stage and a script and a band

There is a kid and the spirits that precondition her

Turn up the sound of the air conditioner

There is a stick held up by another stick

There is a bridge held up by a brick

There is a myth held up by another myth

It's hard to mess with the myth you're held up with

Alison Stewart: That is from The Potluck. In addition to being a musical, The Potluck is also a call to action. This is a question for each of you. César, what action do you hope audiences take after seeing the show?

César James Alvarez: Oh, I want to just thread something out, which is that one of the discoveries in writing the show was that my parents organization had a party line which was homophobic, and they viewed queerness as a distraction from the revolution. This wasn't something that my parents agreed with, but it was something that was really painful inside of the organization and which I, unbeknownst to me, inherited this weird legacy where I understood that was part of the belief system inside of that moment.

I think I had to deal with that in the piece and I had to deal with that in the relationship with my parents and in my own gender journey and identity. The reason I bring that up is because there's a question that can emerge at the end, which is like, this is supposed to be about these five murders. Why are you talking about your identity? That's actually exactly the question that their organization asked. Which is like, we're fighting for a revolution. Why are you thinking about identity? It's a really scary question. I think, to me, the answer to your question is freedom. If we were talking about freedom, economic freedom, or any type of freedom, all the different dimensions of freedom are interwoven.

We don't get to get free at the same time that other people and parts of people aren't free, which is why it's not all about my gender or my queerness. However, noticing the ways in which our liberatory impulses aren't encompassing and thinking about a really, really multifaceted definition of freedom is a loss. I think what I'm hoping is that people really think about freedom, and they think about what parts of them aren't free, and they think about what would be required to get together, indifference in assemblage, in disagreement, and fight for all kinds of different kinds of freedom. That's what I'm hoping for, is that contemplation and maybe some tears, because the tears make space for that contemplation.

Alison Stewart: Anthony, what do you hope people take away from The Potluck.

Anthony Alfaro: Maybe all of my work, I think that I'm connected to queer liberation and queer joy and how living in your full, authentic self, whatever your identity is, how that models for the audience. I think César wrote a piece that beautifully illustrates how to be who you are and then be who you are on purpose. I think I would like for people to maybe leave and question whether are they being who they are on purpose and how much further can they go in that direction?

Alison Stewart: How about for you, Barbara?

Barbara Walsh: I just feel that it's so wonderfully not AGI prop pushy or believe this and don't believe this, thank God. It's not political. Yet, what's going on in the world that is so fraught and so divisive and so horrendous, to me, this is the antidote. This is a bomb. This is a relief from that because you see human beings who might be different from you, but they're the same. We are the same in so many ways. We just put up walls where there are no answers in the walls. I just think it exudes this beautiful humanity.

Alison Stewart: The Potluck is produced by Soho Rep and INTAR. Showing now at the Peter Jay Sharp theater on West 42nd St. through August 2nd. Tickets are available at sohorep.org. I've been speaking with playwright and composer César Alvarez and Anthony Alfaro and Barbara Walsh. Thank you for coming to the studio.

Anthony Alfaro: Thank you.

César James Alvarez: Thank you.

Barbara Walsh: Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

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