marys seacole

Written By Madison Pollack

What is it?

A fractured biodrama centering the Jamaican nurse and contemporary of Florence Nightingale, Mary Seacole (if you don’t know who she is, take writer Jackie Sibblies-Drury’s advice in the play’s stage directions and “look her the fuck up”). Very very loosely inspired by Seacole’s autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), the play hops through time to examine the many tiers of caregiving, and upon whom the burden of selflessness tends to fall.

Where?

The hip stepchild of Lincoln Center, also known as LCT3

When?

April, 2019

With whom?

By myself. It was too early in my relationship to take my BF to something this batshit crazy.

What do you remember best?

The wild transition during which dirt and toy corpses suddenly dropped from the ceiling onto the stage, prompting the three white women in the cast (including the queen of faces Lucy Taylor) to run around the stage shrieking while Mary lipsynced to a distorted version of Whitney Houston’s “I’m Every Woman.”

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 Talk about it, please.

Marys Seacole commences with Mary Seacole (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) standing center stage and turning her withering stare upon the audience before her. She introduces herself (“I” ­– big pause – “Me,” – another big pause – “I”) as a Scotch-Jamaican woman of great importance born sometime in the 19th century. She recites from her autobiography, pulls up her Victorian skirts, and reveals a garish pair of nurse’s scrubs. From here, the play fractures and catapults itself across history into a spare and fluorescent-lit hospital room, the Jamaica of Seacole’s youth, a modern-day playground, and the Crimean war, to name a few of the vignettes presented. The figure of Seacole morphs in and out of herself, assuming endless forms of the many different caregivers from whom society demands selflessness, such as mothers, nurses, nannies, women in general, and, more specifically, Black women.

I recently reread Suzan-Lori Parks’ The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, a play whose central figure also spans decades (Black Man with Watermelon, the “absolutely last living” Black man “in the whole entire known world,” was born a slave, spearheaded the Civil Rights movement, and in the present-day dies over and over again at 38 years old, the same age that Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were when they died), and when I started thinking about Marys Seacole again, I couldn’t help connecting the two plays and their similarly-executed crescendos that meld past and present into one explosive moment. The physical presence of the past is key to both, for that past provides the source material for why the present looks the way it does. In each play, the past might be read as the body of the central figure on stage – the figure coded as Mary belongs to another time and yet keeps popping up in scenes taking place in the present, while Black Man With Watermelon continues to exist despite time passing. In both plays, things repeat: of course, in “Elements of Style,” Parks talks about writing in her preferred structure of repetition and revision, which creates what she labels “a drama of accumulation.” In Marys Seacole, Drury also uses a kind of accumulation, though the repetition she utilizes is not in language, but in historical situations.

The echoes of Mary Seacole take the form of the five other figures in the play: Mamie (Gabby Beans), May (Lucy Taylor), Merry (Marceline Hugot), Miriam (Ismenia Mendes), and Duppy Mary (Karen Kandel). Unlike Mary, Mamie, and Duppy Mary, May, Merry, and Miriam are white. The two sets of women have certain things in common: there is a representative from three generations in each, they are all, at turns, mothers and healers, they take turns shifting from nurse to nursed. The burden of caretaking takes a visible toll on each. However, historical hierarchies repeat themselves both in the past and present-day vignettes, showing us just what Black women have inherited from America’s past.

In one neatly organized scene, Mary and Mamie are nannies watching the white children they care for from a bench while they compare pictures of their own kids who live at home in Jamaica. Their conversation is interrupted when a white woman, Miriam, playing an anxious new mother, bulldozes through the playground and sits between them, taking the opportunity to relinquish her suffering upon the women sitting upon either side of her. As Miriam wails at length about her exhaustion and loneliness, it becomes clear that the reason she feels comfortable for unleashing has everything to do with who she is talking to. It’s no accident that she planted herself between two women of color – though she is a mother and therefore a caregiver herself (which can no doubt be a difficult and isolating role), she makes her pain Mary and Mamie’s burden and expects their emotional support without offering anything in return, echoing the more chilling historical burden of unpaid caretaking.

In Mary’s first monologue, Duppy Mary, the menacing mother figure, slowly approaches and plants a Bluetooth device in Mary’s ear, and then her own. The earpiece serves as a connection to Duppy Mary, to her past. Throughout the play, Duppy Mary calls, then the calls get dropped, for Mary’s connection to Duppy Mary, her mother’s ghost, is as tenuous as this country’s own to a past we’d like to collectively forget. The latest controversy in the Bachelor franchise is reminiscent of this. Rachael Kirkconnell, this season’s supposed winner (and likely the partner of the first Black bachelor), has as recently as this year displayed problematic behaviors and views on race via social media. While images of her wearing culturally appropriating garb and screenshots of her “liking” photos of friends standing by the confederate flag have surfaced, the most damning evidence against her is a picture of her dressed in a hoop skirt at an “Old South” party in 2018, two years after campuses banned gatherings of this kind (those that celebrate a time and culture where Black people were enslaved. If understanding why this is wrong is difficult for you, imagine receiving an invite to an “Old Germany” party). That Kirkconnell didn’t know that celebrating the “Old South” undermines the historical impact of slavery belies her unforgivable ignorance but also betrays a larger issue at hand: that this country is quick to forget, rewrite, or completely gloss over its past with lessons about how the Civil War was not really fought over slavery, but over states’ rights (states’ rights to own slaves, tyvm). When we forget history, we fail to notice when it repeats itself in less recognizable ways. Plays like Marys Seacole place the past right next to the present to show us just how little certain dynamics have changed.

By the time Mary lipsyncs to “I’m Every Woman” and hell (dirt and body dummies falling from the sky as white women shriek) encircles her, it has become clear that she certainly is not every woman, or if she is, it’s a curse rather than a blessing. To take on the burdens of others and to “do it naturally” has become a historically persistent role for women of color, whether it is their occupation or not.

I’d like to take this moment to acknowledge that while ***VirUses dO nOt DiscRimInAte***, America does, and the legacy of racist systems in this country has rendered people of color far more vulnerable to COVID-19’s negative effects on their health and financial well-being. If you have the means, please donate to or support organizations and funds that alleviate the mental and financial burdens of Black women during the pandemic. Here are some links:

Marys Seacole was written by Jackie Sibblies-Drury, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, and ran at Lincoln Center Theater LCT3 in March and April of 2019.

Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Madison Pollack
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once on this island (2018)