Reimagining ‘Rachel’ for a modern audience
Patrick FolliardTheater
‘Rachel’
In person and streaming Sept. 10-26
Rapid Lemon Productions
Motor House
120 W. North Ave., Baltimore
$24
Rapidlemon.com
In 1916, brilliant, biracial, lesbian writer Angelina Weld Grimké was asked by the NAACP to respond to G.W. Griffith’s film “Birth of a Nation.” Both innovative and popular, the seminal silent work was technically groundbreaking but also blatantly racist in its celebration of Black stereotypes and white supremacism. Grimké, an established writer from a prominent family, accepted the challenge. The result was her play “Rachel.”
First produced in 1920 in D.C., “Rachel,” broadly classified as an “anti-lynching” play, centers on a young woman who learns the horrors of racism in a personal and immediate way. Set in realism, the drama deals with motherhood and children and how racism and bigotry impact children. The work is Grimké’s appeal for compassion for Black families.
A century later, Rapid Lemon Productions, a Baltimore-based company focused on new works, has commissioned playwright Aladrian C. Wetzel to write an adaptation of Grimké’s play, and after pandemic-induced delays, Wetzel’s “Rachel” is poised to make its world in-person (and streaming) premiere at Rapid Lemon’s home Motor House, a nonprofit arts hub in Baltimore, on Sept. 10.
“I keep Grimké’s original themes in my adaptation,” says Wetzel, 39, during a recent phone call. “Sadly, the work remains all too relevant. Black people, I’m Black, we understand racism. I remember having race conversations with my parents when I was just five or six. I knew people were going to have different expectations of me – or not – because of the color of my skin. For me, it’s very important to get the story out there.”
Set in Baltimore, the new “Rachel” is purposefully close to the source yet peppered with contemporary local buzz words. The first act takes place in 2012 when Black Lives Matter was on the cusp of becoming a larger part of the American ethos, and the second act is five years later in 2017. The interim is a reckoning in terms of BLM, the killing of unarmed Black people, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, moving from Obama to the Trump administration and the rhetoric behind that.
Grimké is described as a lesbian by most historians. She expresses romantic love for other women in poetry and she’s known to have at least once told her father about her feelings concerning women. Reportedly he wasn’t too keen on the idea.
Wetzel is straight but she imagines that “in addition to being a woman of color, independent, a political activist, because Grimké fell on the queer spectrum, it sometimes had to have made it difficult for her to live in that space in the early 20th century.”
When Rapid Lemon’s managing director Max Garner brought “Rachel” to Wetzel to consider for adaptation, she was quickly convinced. “I identified with her hesitancy,” she says. “Mostly my plays are about race and issues surrounding fertility. In ‘Rachel,’ Grimké writes about a Black woman who questions the idea of bringing a Black child into the world, she’s concerned with them being killed, hurt, or called names because of their skin color.
“I’ve been trying to have kids for the last couple of years. I write from the place of being a Black woman going through infertility. A lot of those feelings expressed in Grimké’s work came to the fore for me during last year’s summer of unrest.”
Before writing plays, Wetzel acted, stage managed, and directed. Eager to do more, she became part of a playwriting fellowship, and with the support of a dramaturg and director, wrote her first original full-length play over nine months followed by a staged reading in 2018.
Wetzel, who lives north of Baltimore in Belair, Md., admires how Rapid Lemon champions original works and local artists. “It’s a risk that not a lot of companies are willing to take,” she says. Her first connection with the company was having a piece produced in its 10-minute play festival, “Variations.” Then she was commissioned to write “Thank You, Dad,” a three act about cult leader Jim Jones whose messianic madness inspired the phrase “don’t drink the Kool-Aid.” Technically it wasn’t Kool-Aid, but that’s for another interview, she says.
Wetzel is also executive director of Two Strikes Theatre Cooperative, a Baltimore company whose mission is to give a voice to Black women and nonbinary folks. Oh, and there’s a day job: She’s a longtime project manager within the Army. (Wetzel holds a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering and a master’s in management.)
Looking forward, she sees more writing, producing, and possibly screenwriting. Most importantly, she wants to continue sharing meaningful stories.