Write what you know, the chestnut goes.
New York author and playwright Brooke Berman applies that advice in a drama set at the landmark Detroit high-rise where her late mother Marilyn lived. Rehearsals of "1300 Lafayette East" are under way at the Plowshares Theatre in Midtown, where it will be staged in March after a West Bloomfield premiere in three weeks. (Details are below.)
Brooke Berman's mom told her "how wonderful it was to live in that building all together with Diana Ross." (Facebook photo)
Detroit News columnist Marney Rich Keenan speaks with the 44-year-old dramatist about conversations with her mom that led to the new work:
With notebook in hand, Brooke prodded her mother to tell the stories of when she lived as a newlywed in the historic high-rise apartments with its majestic views during the city’s vibrant heyday. “She described it as magical and wonderful place,” Brooke says. “One day she’d be in the elevator with Diana Ross, the next she’d run into one of the singers from the Temptations.”
The magic ended one summer night in 1967. . From her high-rise window, Marilyn watched as the city burned.
The next year, pregnant with Brooke, the family moved to Huntington Woods. “My mother was incredibly proud of being a Detroiter, and yet she was part of the white flight that deserted the city.”
A blurb at its first theater's website shows how that real-life context shapes the play:
Detroit, 1967. In the gleaming lobby of 1300 Lafayette East, the Supremes are fighting, a young Jewish housewife is pining for something new, and Reena Walker -- an aspiring Motown singer -- is locked out of her apartment in a peignoir set paid for by a married man.
Can a two women, one white and one black, forge a friendship atop this powderkeg of a city?
In her News interview, Berman says:
“I wanted to focus on what these two women could be to one another and what they could not be to one another because of history and because what it is about to happen with riots. It looks at what the rules were, both spoken and unspoken.
“I think the white woman could pick and choose to see things about the world in which she lived. For, my mother, at least, all she talked about was how wonderful it was to live in that building all together with Diana Ross. How they were all one family and they were all equal. I don’t know when she really understood at a vitriol level what it felt like to walk though the world of a Diana Ross.”
Performances:
- West Bloomfield:Jan. 29-Feb. 23 at the Jewish Ensemble Theatre in West Bloomfield, (248) 788-2900.
- Detroit: Plowshares Theatre, 3663 Woodward, in March.
