Graphic by Roxanne Cubero
This article contains spoilers for Ada A.’s play “The Reverend Dr. Paul(i) Murray.”
How does current knowledge change what we know about the past? This is a question many anthropologists have dedicated their careers to answering.
Traditional academics are not the only people grappling with this question, however. Ada A. is a Houston, Texas-based Catholic playwright who uses theater as anthropology. In her own terms, her work “prioritizes honesty over propriety and sincerity over grandstanding.”
“I like to think of theater as very much applied anthropology,” she said. “Anthropology is the study of cultures and how people live, but it’s much more than that. It’s (asking) what are the actions and habits that scaffold the behaviors of a society? By understanding the scaffolding, you’re able to discern what building has been erected in this culture, metaphorically. There is something in anthropology, this curiosity about something outside of you, and wanting to really grasp, why do people act this way? What does it mean?”
Ada spent the entirety of her collegiate career engaging with anthropological work at the University of Chicago. In her last year at the university, she took a playwriting class and fell in love. “Every week I wrote 10 pages,” she said. “I liked the story I was telling. I thought, ‘Oh, this is interesting.’” She took another playwriting course the following semester. “I was halfway through that class and I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I think I like playwriting.’ And I realized I was good at writing plays.”
So, write plays she did. Her work has been produced at Los Angeles’ Echo Theater Company and Chicago’s Prop Thtr. She was a 2022 semi-finalist for Black Theatre’s Future of Playwriting Prize.
In an interview with grain of salt mag, Ada discussed her one-act play “The Reverend Dr. Paul(i) Murray.” Valiant Theatre in Chicago, Illinois commissioned and produced the work, and it was later produced at the Overtime Theater in San Antonio, Texas. In February, it was one of four one-act plays featured in Abingdon Theatre Company’s third annual Virtual Festival of Short Plays, where it was directed by Chari Arespacochaga.
The play is the epitome of Ada’s playwriting as anthropology. It examines a key — but often forgotten — figure in the civil rights movement, Dr. Pauli Murray. Born in 1910, Murray was a writer, activist and professor. They were on President John F. Kennedy’s Committee on Civil and Political Rights as a part of his Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, and they co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) with Betty Friedan and others in 1966. A decade later, Murray became the first “Black person perceived as a woman” in the U.S. to become an Episcopal priest.
Valiant Theatre in Chicago commissioned Ada to write a play about Murray’s life because of the recent academic and anthropological discussions surrounding their gender identity. Based on recently released private correspondence, many historians now believe Murray identified as a transgender man, but due to societal restrictions, they were unable to come forward with their identity. Pauli was their chosen name, and according to Murray’s historical society’s website, “throughout the 1930s, Murray actively questioned his gender and sex. But, he was denied gender-affirming medical care.”
For the purpose of this article, Murray will be identified using they/them pronouns, to utilize the most gender-inclusive terminology.
Ada’s play looks at this discourse through the eyes of a graduate student named Kalina, and questions the morality and ethics of using “present” terminology and discourse when discussing prior marginalized people. It brilliantly asks the audience to grapple with their own preconceived notions and, as a work of theater, functions as anthropology.
In the early stages of writing the play, Murray “was brought up as someone who a lot of people don’t know (the value of),” Ada said. She also discovered that Murray was “a very queer icon in the civil rights movement.”
After reading her autobiography, Ada said she was shocked that nothing about Murray’s queerness was reflected in the text. “Not once did she mention she was gay,” Ada said. “Not once did she mention she had gender dysphoria.”
So, Ada turned to a more recent book discussing Murray’s personal queerness. “I had to read someone else’s reading of her to get to this element of her life. I remember thinking, ‘Why wasn’t this in the autobiography?’ But that wasn’t included, obviously, because of the time period, and the conflict of that. I realized, ‘Oh, this is the play. The play is this journey that I myself went on.’”
As the show begins, we meet Kalina, played by Kristin Watson, who is arguing with her professor, played by Jeffrey Grover, about Murray’s place in queer history. Kalina continually refers to Murray as “Paul” with he/him pronouns. Since Murray never comes out with their gender identity, Kalina’s professor claims that her research is null. At the start of the play, the audience is positioned to defend Kalina’s understanding of Murray and the historical situation.
However, Kalina ends up traveling back in time and meeting Murray, played by Rema Webb, who is surprisingly opposed to Kalina’s thesis. Murray says that they want to be identified on their own terms, regardless of whether or not there is a futuristic, more accurate vernacular they could be using.
“There is a place for me in 2022, but maybe that place wouldn’t exist if I didn’t have to be who I am now in 1971,” Murray says to Kalina at the end of the play.
In writing the play, Ada wondered about Murray, “this limitless, self-determined person, what would it look like for her to confront a future generation that’s looking to box them in, who’s looking to sort of define her for herself, and using this language? We’re doing this in the present moment, not out of a sense of hatred; we’re not trying to put them in a box, but doing this because the next generation needs to value their contributions. I think there is this tension between the contemporary moment of advocating for people who are dead, in this sort of chutzpah way, versus people in that generation. How would they think about it? Would this be a battle that they even want to enter? I was thinking very much in that line.”
Ada’s play combines notions of modern-day liberalism with ethical questions of who gets the privilege to rewrite history. The conflict that emerges alters the audience member’s perspective of what is ethical and correct when engaging in historical work. It brilliantly uses theater as anthropology in order to examine forgotten stories.
“The Reverend Dr. Paul(i) Murray” shows that, whether it be through academic or artistic mediums, as people continue to discover stories that were written out of history, they must find an ethical way to write them back into it.
Stay up to date with Ada A.’s work at https://adaaplaywright.com/.