AMERICAN THEATRE | Peace, Rage, and Humor in ‘Bust’

Playwright Zora Howard and director Lileana Blain-Cruz don’t want to give too much away. As they discuss their upcoming production, Bust, premiering at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre Feb. 13-March 16, before heading to Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in the spring (April 19-May 18), they keep the details simple: Retta and Reggie’s relaxing evening on the porch is interrupted when they witness a neighbor in an altercation with the police.

“Everything goes how we expect these things to go for Black people,” Howard said, “until something very unexpected occurs. The rest of the play is about figuring out what really happened.”

Howard, whose first play, Stew, was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, said that her aim is to create familiar worlds, but on a tilt—to draw audiences in with people and situations they think they recognize before giving them something else entirely.

As she was crafting Bust, Howard said she knew she wanted Blain-Cruz to direct. They hadn’t met, but Howard had followed the director’s work and appreciated her ability to balance carefully crafted intimacy with grand design and big concepts. During the Covid shutdown, the two spent time together in Cape Cod, absorbing both the serenity of their environment and the turmoil ravaging the country.

“That experience—peace and rage coinciding—has manifested inside the DNA of the show itself,” Blain-Cruz said. “I’m really moved to bring that provocation into life.”

Howard noted that sometimes writers feel doomed to repeat their early success. As she looks back at her growth since the close-knit family drama Stew, she said she was grateful for the time she’s had since to tinker with the play form. She compared her process to “a little kid on the floor with blocks. I move things around and build weird things that tilt to the side, so when I come back and build a house, it’s a really special house. It’s a stronger house, or it’s a more complex, dynamic house.”

One essential layer in this structure: laughter.

“Kind of inherent to the Black American experience is the humor that mitigates the horror—not even mitigates, but is a vehicle for survival,” said Howard. “My prayer is that this production can create a safe space for both of those experiences in one sitting. That is our challenge.”

Jerald Raymond Pierce is the managing editor of American Theatre.