If you’re not in Los Angeles, I want to introduce you to writer, director, and Emmy-nominated actress, Carolyn Ratteray. Carolyn was nominated for a 2019 Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Digital Daytime Drama Series for her work on Riley Parra. In addition, her pilot (UN)CLAIMED had successful runs at Outfest, DTLA Flm Festival and more. You may have seen her on Grey’s Anatomy and Snowfall as well. But right now, it’s all about her award-winning play, “Both And (A Play About Laughing While Black).” I had the opportunity to chat with Carolyn about her one woman play and so much more. Let’s get into it!

Your play, “Both And (A Play About Laughing While Black)” opens this week! What has been your most fulfilling moment with this play so far?

Well, it’s been a relatively long process. One of the most fulfilling moments is the gift of being able to be an artist and to be able to collaborate and create with a group of brilliant humans. At every point in this process, everyone was very supportive of what kind of story was I wanting to tell. There was so much support for that so this has been a very incredibly fulfilling and empowering artistic process. It’s been a leap of faith to really trust my instincts. I think I learned a lot about myself as an artist along the way. And it’s such a different type of story, I think, than what I’ve seen before so it’s been really fulfilling to trust myself that the audience will come with me on this journey. That’s been fulfilling to step into… what does it mean to follow my instincts, create a vision, and to be so supported in that process? It’s really been amazing.

As a writer myself, I want to know what are some pleasant surprises that you’ve seen bloom that weren’t initially in your vision but are now in the play?

That brings me back to collaboration. There’s a bit of clown in this play. I was able to work with Michelle Matlock (the first African American Woman to create a main character for Cirque du Soleil). She and I connected over the pandemic over zoon. When this project started to come intro fruition, knowing that there clown elements in there, it was incredible to be able to collaborate with her, to create with her. Through working on it, through getting up there and playing, she’s such an amazing coach. It was such a journey to be able to develop a part of the story that I hadn’t seen before. Especially since this story takes the idea of the god of laughter and places it squarely in Black history. I was like Black folk don’t like clowns, what are we doing with this, what am I trying to do and say with this? But what has evolved from that is, I find to be one of the most precious parts of this piece.

Because it delves into our history, that’s a heavy topic, so how do you balance the tone of such a heavy topic with humor? 

I have situated this entity, which some people can call clown, some people can call god of laughter. I make it very clear that all of the indigenous people from all over from the beginning of time have had some trickster character or deity that provokes and prods. There’s always some entity in so many cultures across the world that houses our capacity to laugh and pushes us towards laughter when we can’t do anything else. That’s what I really focus on. Black people, we have come through so much pain and trauma. I think humor, the ability to see beyond the pain is what has gotten us through. So I know there are a lot of notions about a clown but the clown belongs to humankind. My whole point with this is that we have to be able to continue to access that joy amidst the struggle. So hopefully it will feel like an encouraging and empowering message and not at all that I’m making light of anything because I’m doing quite the opposite. We’ve been able to persevere and shine and laugh in the face of unimaginable pain. In this particular story, I kind of create a mythology around the clown that she was actually with us in the middle passage.

I love that.

Yeah and it’s a bit of a nod to August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean. I think that is one of his most brilliant plays. I think that he puts at the center of Gem of the Ocean, a recipe for how to heal our pain and move forward. His play, along with Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop that are direct inspirations for this play. In a nod to August Wilson, I say that she resides underneath the waters in the middle pasage. She couldn’t come with us in the same way but she’s still with us and she’s always there to help us. If we learn the lesson of what it means to let go and not carry the generational trauma but to honor it, we are released to an unimaginable freedom. She is a healing figure. She is a constant companion. In my small effort, trying to add to the mythology around a healing practice for Black people separated in the Americas and that’s one of the things you’ll see in this play.

That’s great. I was actually going to ask you what your favorite plays were and how they helped you nurture your craft as a playwright?

So August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean is a direct nod to the play and I am such a fangirl for Katori Hall. When one of the characters in The Mountaintop talks about crossing over and seeing God for the first time, she describes her as a beautiful Black woman. There’s a moment in my play as well, this is a very loose autobiographical piece, there’s a moment when I cross over and also see this divine god of laughter. She’s a giant. It’s a small nod to what Katori Hall was doing in The Mountaintop.

In terms of playwrights who inspire me, oh my god! Lynn Nottage, Katori Hall, and August Wilson are definitely in the canon, they are classics. As an acting student, I grew up on them. Their use of language… I’m such a language nerd. Their use of language is constantly inspiring to me.

So I’m wondering as a writer, actor, and director, how did you fall in love with each of these mediums?

Ah, that’s a great question! I have been first and foremost, an actor. It’s the thing I wanted to do since I was little. It’s the thing that I went to school for, undergrad, grad school. It’s what I teach now and I’m very grateful I’ve been able to stay in this craft of teaching acting and performing. It is my first love.

I was in New York for awhile about 15-20 years ago and then I came out to LA. I very quickly learned that I had to widen my skillsets. I didn’t know that I was intentionally doing that but in NY, I was an actor and that’s it. In LA, it’s, “What else do you have?” That’s when I took my first improv course, a clown course, a writing course. I came out here about 13 years ago. Coming here, there was something about pursuing the arts here that I needed to and wanted to see what else was in my arsenal.

In retrospective, I remember taking my first writing course, I think it was a UCLA Extension course and I remembered when I was in college and I took a play writing course and my teacher was like, “Hey, you could do this. Do you want to do this? Send me another draft of your script.” I said, “Nope, I just want to act!” I shut that down.  I remember being in high school at a Shakespeare festival and I won Best Director and I was like, whatever, back to acting! When I was auditioning for colleges, one college didn’t take me on for acting but did take me for directing. So in retrospect, now that I’m doing all of it, I see that there were seeds. There was a clear pathway for it earlier but I had blinders on because I just wanted to perform.

When I came out here, I started teaching adjunct at Pomona College. They were the first to ask if I could direct and I said yes even though I had no idea what it was. But since then, I’ve directed things in the Southern California area for other theatres. Falling into these other modalities happened quite by chance at first and then, I fell in love. Because I just love story. My wife and I will watch TV, pausing so much, because that was a great moment, they did XYZ. I love story.

That’s also why this process with Boston Court Theater which started in 2020 was so amazing! Jessica Kubzansky, the Artistic Director at Boston Court, we were talking one day. She asked me what I have. I told her a one woman show. I was going to produce it myself and go the fringe route but she told me to send it to her. I’m so grateful that she asked for the play. A couple weeks later, she got back to me and said, “You have something here but it’s not in the right framework to do all of the things that you want to do.” She has a brilliant dramaturgical mind. She invited me to a longform play development process. That was September 2020 – May 2021 and it culminated in Andi Chapman as my director came on pretty early. I would come in with pages and I had to find a new frame. People who are nerds about what makes a good story and why. And I have no problem killing darlings. Okay, I have a little bit of a problem, but I don’t have much! They asked me really pertinent questions that always honored my vision and I would come back every month with new pages. It was a totally different frame before. This is much stronger.

There are a few things I want to touch on here. You mentioned your teaching. I want to know what’s on your syllabus. What is required reading for your students?

That’s a really good question! Well, I guess I should ask which class because I teach Beginning Acting: Black Theatre and I also teaching a General Beginning Acting class.

Black Theatre.

So, you know who is on my syllabus…we start with (W. E. B.) Du Bois. Because…I love him. I love that man. Black art owes so much to his mind and questions. When he wrote that article in The Crisis Newspaper asking what is Black art and laying out the criteria of what it should be, he used that as the model to help promote and create Black theatre and Black theatre companies. I just think that is brilliant. So many icons in American theatre and Black theatre came through him. The way he evolved his thinking and constantly asked questions, saw right through racism in the system and linked it to capitalism right away, the framework he laid out is amazing.

So I have my students start with, “What is Black art?” as a conversation starter. Then we look at at least 2-3 articles from The Crisis Magazine. Then we read a short play by Georgia Johnson. There’s an article by Zora Neale Hurston, I’m a fangirl of hers as well. There’s an article from Barbara Ann Teer, the Creator and Founder of the National Black Theater. She has an amazing article about what she was trying to do with the National Black Theater and the four stages the audience had to go through. I’m not saying that I agree with all of the stages but it is an amazing question to pose to students; if you had create your own four stages of human evolution like Barbara Ann Teer, a visionary artist…it is a way in to talk about who we are and how do we move and evolve and become the best versions of ourselves. So those are some of the things I have on my syllabus.

Wow. I want to take your class now.

Come take the class!

And what else should be on the radar of someone new to LA looking to get into the theatre scene and supporting Black creatives?

Sophina Brown’s Support Black Theatre (#SupportBlackTheatre) has become a cultural event here in LA in the last handful of years. It has become a hub of all things that are going in with Black theatre. There’s Towne Street Theatre, Collaborative Artists Bloc, AMMO Theater Company isn’t all Black but it is deeply melanated, Ebony Rep, Lower Depth Ensemble… there’s so many companies. I would point people there, everyone is doing such incredible work and such different work. There’s room for everybody. Black folk aren’t a monolith, we are wildly different humans, so everyone tell a story. It’s going to paint a deeper and richer fabric of our histories, cultures, values.

Outside of theatre, what are your favorite queer spots are in LA for the LA transplants who may feel the queer space here is male dominated and daunting to find that community.

They’ve got to follow Cuties LA which is Black owned. There are so many BIPOC spots they promote and they have a newsletter with details on queer game nights, rollerblading nights, they have a lot of events. Since Cuties, I’ve also experienced Queer Aunties LA which is deeply BIPOC space. Between those two, you will certainly have a deep foot into the happenings.

Finally, outside of the play, what else is flowing creatively for you right now?

I have to pick back my short, (UN)CLAIMED which is very queer and very poly. That had its run around a lot of festivals, which was amazing! But I got so wrapped up in the play that I didn’t quite get to finish the mission there, it’s an episodic project. Then, I can’t wait to act in a play with other people. I’ve been doing this one woman show. *laughs* It would mean so much if I could get the play picked up in D.C. or outside of LA. And finally, I will be continuing to write another play, maybe a but more lighthearted. *laughs*

Get Tickets Here for “Both And (A Play About Laughing While Black)” playing at Lovelace Studio Theater, The Wallis in Beverly Hills, CA January 13, 2024 – January 28, 2024.