Sneak Peek: Timothy Johnson Podcast

Timothy Johnson: Eulalie Spence! She was able to specifically and personally write her characters in such a way that she made the "ordinary everyday person" extraordinary. And she did this because she was indeed so painstakingly honest about portraying them as human beings, not as some cardboard copies of what someone might think someone who lives in Harlem is like. No. Every single character in these plays that we're presenting are so fully realized. And along with it, she wrote these characters with dialects. And I celebrate the way she did that because as we know, this was a time of the Great Migration where so many moved from the South to the North in hopes of a better life. And my mother was one of those very people who migrated from Salvisa, Kentucky to Cleveland, Ohio. And Jo, I hear my mother in the dialects of these characters. There are these rhythmic patterns in the dialects of her characters that inherently create beats of sound and thought that transmit beyond time and space, connecting the character and the listener to something more which is ancestral and spiritual.