Ahead of Roslyn Ruff’s upcoming reading of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks’ only novel, Maud Martha, we talked to New Yorker staff writer and theater critic Vinson Cunningham about how he abridged the text for the performance — and why Brooks and Maud Martha deserve to be heard by a new generation.
When did you first encounter Gwendolyn Brooks and Maud Martha?
I lived in Chicago for a couple of years during elementary school, and Gwendolyn Brooks is a great Chicago hero. She grew up there. I got a lot of her poetry early from a teacher I had there. I don’t remember the first time I read Maud Martha, but it must have been as a young adult, because I never got it in high school or college and I remember being galled to find out that Brooks had also written a novel that I didn’t know about. I read it with great surprise.
Brooks is deservedly lauded as one the most important American poets of the 20th century. She is less known as a novelist. Sylvia Plath’s only novel, The Bell Jar, is an institution, but Maud Martha has more of a cult status. Why do you think that is?
One reason might be that unlike Plath, Brooks never set out to write a novel. The poems in what was to be Brooks’ third collection were rejected, so she fashioned them into these vignettes that eventually became Maud Martha. This book presents itself, perhaps, as a departure from Brooks’ poetic output, which won her such great fame. Another reason could be that the book speaks about an early 1950s Black urban milieu that has been expressed in other places more famously. For example, a lot of Maud Martha takes place in a Chicago kitchenette-style apartment — tenements where people had to share bathrooms with other families. This milieu is most famously depicted in Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun. It’s one of the quirks of literary history, especially with respect to marginalized communities — we usually get just one great artistic work for one recognizable social situation. It could be that when another depiction of this achieved fame, she lost a regrettably zero-sum regional competition with Hansberry.
Do you feel that the book is starting to get the reputation that it deserves? In what way might it be relevant now that wasn’t apparent when it was published?
A thing that sometimes happens with Black writers is that the so-called “Blackness” of their contribution is immediately understood — it’s easy to look at this as a Black text and recognize its references to racism and economic degradation. But now is probably also a good time to look at it for its feminist themes. The interaction between Maud Martha and her husband, the way she feels constrained by him, the intra-racial dynamics of light skin and dark skin as it pertains to being a woman — I think we’ve gained tools to read that more clearly. I think we’ve also had a class of critics come up who love Gwendolyn Brooks and have been ready to revisit her work. Recently there have been great essays about Maud Martha from critics like Carina del Valle Schorske and Lovia Gyarkye, and of course Margo Jefferson, who will be introducing this program. As often happens, critics can play a useful role in bringing a work back into the cultural bloodstream.
You prepared the version of the text that Roslyn Ruff will read on February 23. I wonder how your own work as a cultural critic informed the process. What were you trying to bring out in the text for this performance?
The text is being read by — for me, as a theater critic — one of the great deliverers of monologues and speeches that we have in the American theater. Roslyn Ruff is a wonderful actor in many different ways, but the way she moves through a monologue and can help you see the thought thrumming through it — it’s very moving for me. One of the prerogatives in making the abridgement was imagining, selfishly, what I wanted to hear her say. But I will tell you, it’s a very unlovely task to have to cut Gwendolyn Brooks. It’s all so beautiful and worthy of being said aloud.
Did you discover anything new about that novel that you hadn’t noticed before?
The thing I noticed most sharply this time — in part because it’s maybe the hardest to translate from the page to the stage — is how artful she is as a narrator, how well she can move from speech out loud to internal monologue. A useful point of comparison might be Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway — this amazing mosaic of thought, speech and anticipation; what we say out loud and what we say inside.
What do you hope the audience of this performance will take away with them after they leave on Thursday night?
For those who don’t know Brooks well, I hope it will send them to all of her work. There are poems like “Kitchenette” or “The Mother,” which was controversial at the time — a poem about abortion — which fit right into the world of this novel. Hopefully it will get people to wonder why they don’t have a recent American edition of this text — in that regard, we could foment a small revolution.
Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha, a reading by Roslyn Ruff with an introduction by Margo Jefferson, will be followed by a post-reading conversation with Vinson Cunningham. See it live on Thursday, June 8. Get your tickets today.