For Lileana Blain-Cruz, one of the big joys of being a director is the practice of transformation. Take for instance the Alliance Theatre’s world-premiere production, BUST. In the show there are spaces that, for most audiences, may seem familiar — a living room, a balcony, a school.
Blain-Cruz is fascinated by the challenge of making these spaces feel real while also imbuing them with heightened theatrical magic when the show takes an unexpected turn. The show’s creative team has worked intentionally to bring these seemingly regular locations to heightened life through design.
“One of the joys of this project is figuring out how we move between these spaces in surprising ways,” Blain-Cruz shares. “In doing so, the spaces create a meta-theatrical metaphor of how we move through our world as humans.” She goes on to say, “In BUST, we have the important experience of recognizing ourselves in these characters. We get to live inside their humanity, and the absurdity of what it means to be alive.”
The premiere of BUST runs February 13 through March 16 on the Alliance’s Coca-Cola Stage before going to the Goodman’s Albert Theatre in Chicago.
What’s it about? Playwright Zora Howard and Blain-Cruz are cautious to reveal too many details about the plot of the play. The show opens with Retta. A mature woman of a certain age, she is sitting on the porch of the modest apartment she shares with her husband and grandson. Retta is partaking in one of her favorite pastimes — minding the business of everyone in the neighborhood from the safety of her porch. She has a glass of wine, a smoke, and the activities of the neighborhood to keep her occupied.
That isn’t saying too much about what the play is about. What the description does, however, is provide some idea of who, or better yet, the kind of people we see in the play. While Retta, along with the other characters in the show are fictitious in nature, they are still quite real.
“They are composites,” she said. “They are pieces of characters in my own life.”
Growing up, Howard remembers listening to her mother, aunts, and other elders tell stories.
“[They] would come home with whatever mess they dealt with throughout their day, and they would talk about it,” she remembers. “The way they told their stories — sparing no ugly detail and still, somehow, cracking jokes throughout; it was a healing practice I learned early on.”
BUST is a meditation on and an homage to those moments.
“There is some real ugly stuff that Black people have to navigate living in this country,” said Howard. “And yet there is an artfulness to how we move through it all — with humor, with deftness, with style.”
Humor is present throughout the play. In some respects, it’s a character within itself. And it’s not just for entertainment purposes. In the same way the examples of her childhood utilized humor to navigate their realities, the same is true in this play.
“Humor, how it is able to cut through the muck of even the most dispiriting human experiences, has always been my way into the world,” said Howard. “Confronting my own rage and grief through its vehicle terrifies me, but the notion that others may be able to do the same in the spaces that I write fuels me.”
Howard admits there were times when writing the play when the characters fought for their authenticity. It was her job, she said, to get to know them. This became especially important for the characters who say “some of the harder things to swallow in the play.”
Nine times out of 10, said Howard, the character would say, “I wouldn’t say that. It didn’t sit right with them.’
While Howard and Blain-Cruz are both hesitant to prescribe their hopes for the audiences who experience BUST, Blain-Cruz does admit that she hopes audiences walk out of the theater examining and recognizing.
“What I love about theater is knowing that there are a million individual stories existing inside the audience. What’s beautiful is when those whose lives may be very different understand something more, and the people whose lives may be similar find themselves being seen,” she said. “There’s a real invitation at the center of the play to experience something new. There’s this kind of really amazing, thrilling, complicated emotional journey that happens at the center of this play, and I hope audiences are on the ride to encounter something that they had never considered before.”
Howard wants the play to meet people where they are.
“For those audience members who relate to the subject matter, I want them to feel seen. And for those who maybe don’t see themselves to have something stirred in them; maybe even move them a bit and push them some.”
BUST will premiere on the Coca-Cola Stage February 13 through March 16, 2025 – learn more.
