OctaviaButler.net A fan blog for Octavia E. Butler, writer.

"It's not that we haven't always been here, since there was a here. It is that the letters of our names have been scrambled when they were not totally erased, and our fingerprints upon the handles of history have been called the random brushings of birds."
--Audre Lorde, "Wild Women in the Whirlwind"

In 1997, as Seeing Ear Theatre was just coming into existence, Jacqueline Cuscuna was teaching high school at Borough Academies in the Bronx; often, as a Social Studies/American History independent study, she would assign students the work of reading Octavia E. Butler's novel, Kindred.

The power of Kindred, both in and out of the classroom, is that it takes a moment in our history, blurred, distanced, and dulled through time — a moment that all of us know about, but safely, through the faded, torn images of black and white photographs — and makes it present, in one quick-snap gut wrenching blast. Dana Franklin, a modern day black woman, is whisked violently and suddenly back in time to pre-Civil War America, where she discovers first hand the horrors of slavery. Here we are, now, right now, in the middle of history.

Two years ago, Jackie brought the novel to my attention and suggested (read "demanded") that we get the rights and produce a miniseries adaptation, and get Alfre Woodard to star in it. I jumped at the idea. As did Alfre Woodard when we eventually approached her. But our first thought, even prior to "How to adapt such a work?", was that we wanted to figure out a way to incorporate the voices of African-American women who lived, struggled and survived the time of institutionalized slavery.

We wanted to match the historical fiction of Butler's work with some of the historical fact that her novel draws upon. So as you listen to our production of Kindred, you'll hear the words of real African-American women whose powerful memories of slavery live on in their own autobiographical narratives.

These passages are interwoven into Dana's own developing narrative, and are brought to chilling life by the voice talents of Ruby Dee and Caroline Clay. In particular, listen to Ruby Dee as she brings Sojourner Truth to life. Never have we heard an actor so fully inhabit an historical figure as Ms. Dee does here when she shouts, sings out, "I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that?"

In late January, after Tony Daniel completed his graceful and powerful adaptation, we held auditions, cast 19 actors, rehearsed, then recorded all of the voices in three long days in Manhattan. All of the voices were recorded dry, without sounds or music, leaving the actors with the true challenge of the theater of the imagination, performing with nothing but their voices, grunting, groaning, screaming and sighing, and then hoping upon hope that later, when the sounds and music are added, magic would happen.

All of the voice tracks were then taken to John Colucci's basement laboratory, where we spent three weeks sleeping and eating and breathing in sounds and music, tweaking and tinkering with footsteps, crickets, and water faucets. Ohad Talmor arrived with his tremendous original score, and all was finally mixed together...

So here now is our interpretation of Octavia E. Butler's novel, Kindred. Please, visit our Bulletin Board, let's have an open book discussion on all things Kindred: your thoughts about our production, your memories of the first time you read Butler's novel, your feelings about its continued resonance and timeliness in today's world...

Brian Smith and Jacqueline Cuscuna, February 2001