PLAYwright's  note

This play began on January 3, 2020 with an email. The subject read "Do you know about this?" 

I was studying Art & Public Policy at NYU Tisch, exploring where I stood at the intersection of performance, writing, and transformative justice. 

My then-professor, Anna Deavere Smith, sent me and another student an article about a group in Brooklyn that was reading anti-lynching plays in response to the most recent wave of police brutality cases. (We would later come to realize that the article was from 2015 though it read like 2020 without a second thought) 

I had never heard of anti-lynching plays before, but the parallels between the past and present were way too loud to ignore. I ordered the book Living with Lynching by Koritha Mitchell and set out to understand as much as I possibly could about this genre of theatre. 

 Dr. Mitchell's research stunned me: 

“The content of the scripts provided a training manual for black communities, encouraging African Americans to rehearse an understanding of lynching that allowed them to mourn because it helped them to maintain a sense of themselves as upstanding citizens unjustly under siege.”

“ Through the genre of lynching drama, modern readers have access to embodied practices of black belonging … Given the intensity of racial violence at the turn of the century, it is within African Americans’ homes that practices of black belonging become most visible, and lynching dramas spotlight this space in two critical ways. First, the scripts utilize the black home as setting. Second, because most are one- acts published in periodicals, the plays encourage amateurs to use the black home as performance space. As the scripts preserve the embodied practices of characters in the play, they register the presence of at least two sorts of embodied practice in the lived world. On the most basic level, the actions of the characters become archival evidence of the fact that blacks existed who behaved in these family-centered ways." 

Learning about anti-lynching plays made me want to become a playwright. I had never written a full-length play of any sort before, but I was inspired by these playwrights, predominantly Black women, who exemplified the artists’ role as witness, as truth-teller, and as historical recorder in times of crisis. 

So I set out to write a 21st century anti-lynching play. Even more so, almost ALL of my work at the time became about an artistic vision to create what I call “ community-centered theatrical statements” powered by a series of dramatic questions: What does an anti-lynching play look like in the 21st century? What kind of unique, theatrical experiences are birthed out of the quest towards global, Black liberation? What are we as a society in desperate need of rehearsing? 

My first attempt to answer these questions for myself would become what you now know as R(estoration) I(n) P(rogress). The first time this play was ever read out loud it was the day the world found out about Ahmaud Arbery. A month later would come, Breonna Taylor. Shortly after, George Floyd. 

There will be a day when anti-lynching plays can rest as solely archival. I LIVE for the day when the institutions that harm us become so foreign that the future must dust off our scripts to understand what we lived through. That day is possible. That day is much closer than you think. Use your time in this theatre to rehearse it. Envision it. Here, we can prepare for our liberation.

Thank you to Judy Tate, Anna Deavere Smith, Kathy Engel, and Grace Aneiza Ali - the teachers who guided, supported, and lovingly challenged me during the formation of this work. Thank you to my family and my ancestors. I am because you are. Thank you to my friends and fellow artists who make life possible. Thank you for coming. 

With gratitude,

Andrea