Playwright on Playwright
AriDy Nox discusses their new play A Walless Church, the Black Woman’s Guide to Making God which opens September 21 at Pillsbury House + Theatre
TyLie: Hi AriDy! Congratulations on your upcoming production at Pillsbury House + Theatre.
AriDy: Thank you so much! I am so thrilled to be here. It’s really the ideal place for this work, and just a dream to work at.
TS What attracted you to begin a career in theater?
AN I have been a writer since I was a very young person, like, elementary school. And I have been a semi-serious theater kid since middle school. And in high school those two great loves really melded and I started writing plays. I consider myself a storyteller, but I love theater as a medium because it gets to be embodied. We get to become the story, or at the very least active witnesses to it. And that feels really wonderful.
TS What theater practitioners do you admire and why?
AN Oh, this is such a hard question, and I will try not to go on and on. I think the theater practitioners that have influenced me the most are pretty varied. Lin Manuel Miranda was the first person I saw who made me feel like I could write the kind of theater I wanted to be writing. Aleshea Harris, Ngozi Anyanwu, Jillian Walker, and Ntozake Shange are all people I encountered early in my professional writing career who shaped how I thought about craft and practicum and form in really definitive ways. a.k. payne, Fran Da Silveira, and Nissy Aya are just some of the really incredible artists I get to be in community with who I think about on a weekly basis when it comes to building a canon and challenging what theater can be in the world. And there are so many more. I think we are living in a generation of truly beautiful and socially conscious creators, and if I named them all it would take forever, and I am really excited to be part of this cohort, this upcoming canon, because I think it's really going to change the way people think of theater and what it means to tell stories.
“At the core of the story is black women being in relationship with each other, but ultimately it's applicable to everyone.”
TS Yes, that is a diverse list of playwrights! What led you to write A Walless Church?
AN I was inspired by spoken word artist Ashlee Haze who said on Facebook once “Black Women are a Walless Church.” I thought it was such a beautiful sentiment that I knew the meaning of, on a somatic level, but not on an intellectual level. And then I got the opportunity to write the play, and the characters arrived fully formed, which was quite a delight. At the heart of the work is this exploration of what it means to be in a good relationship with each other. At the core of the story is black women being in relationship with each other, but ultimately it's applicable to everyone. And so much of me writing the play was exploring that: what I think it means to be in a good relationship, which isn’t always happy or easy, but is always full of integrity and dignity.
TS Your work has been described as ritualistic, how important is ritual in your storytelling process?
AN I am of the opinion that all theater is ritual. We are all coming into a room, doing a thing, over and over, with our specific roles and rules with the goal to be together and create something that didn’t exist before. There are definitely ways I fold in more concretized rituals into a lot of my stories, but everything I do is rooted in that belief. And if we’re always doing ritual, I think it's important to be intentional about what that ritual looks like and what it's meant to accomplish. A Walless Church is this ritual of “creating God,” but what that really means is how do we see the divine in each other? And how do we, as regular people, embody the divine? What are the practices, the steps, the rituals we need - to be in good relationship with each other (which is ultimately what this play posits God is) and how can we do them, not perfectly, but with rigor and love? Ritual, for me, is only as important as what it is creating, so my storytelling is always oriented towards that.
TS How would you describe your aesthetic?
AN I am a magical realism baby. I love finding the mystical in the mundane. I love good language and silly jokes. I love ensembles. I do love a good ritual, and I adore a good family drama. I don’t know if that’s an aesthetic, but that’s definitely what I like to write about.
TS Plays go through many iterations in development, how has your relationship to the text evolved since its workshop at the Playwrights’ Center?
AN Oh, I kind of took a long break from the work after the workshop. I have been with this play for a long time, and the workshop was so beautiful, and it made me feel so full, and it also highlighted for me that the play was at a stage of development where what it most needed was other people shaping it. Which is why I was so grateful for Pillsbury House. This play was begging to be done, in its fullness, and they offered me that. So in preparation, I actually really stepped away from the work and waited until we were in rehearsals. And even after our first read-through, I was like “oh, maybe it’s done.” But when we started getting on our feet? That’s when the play started revealing itself to me again, and I could really get deep into editing once more. And now there are two new scenes, and a new ritual, and a lot of fine-tuning of the characters. So it’s evolved quite a bit in this last month and a half, but that was partially able to happen because I let it rest.
TS We are relatively isolated as playwrights, what do you do to sustain your social health?
AN I have been living as a nomad (though I am still based in New York) for the last two years, and that has actually resulted in me being VERY social. I have been doing a lot of development, and a lot of artistic residencies, so I have been getting to be around so many creatives and really reveling in how amazing we are. And I am a phone nb, for real for real. I love a good, long, loving telephone call - as any of my beloveds will tell you. So I call people I love every day unless I’m very intentionally inviting solitude in my life.
TS Any advice for young creatives eager to break into the industry?
AN There is no one way to do this. There is no one way to do this. There is no one way to do this. Find your way. Figure out what feeds you, what makes you feel empowered and invigorated and aligned with your purpose. Do not get overly attached to what makes you feel safe. But do not abandon your wellness or security, because the best art comes from a strong, well-resourced foundation. Be brave, but let bravery be rooted in compassion and interdependence, not recklessness. And FIND YOURSELF SOME COMMUNITY. Because the industry is an industry. It will not love you. It will not feed you in any substantive way. It is not built to care for you (yet). So you need community. You need it. You need it, you need it.
TS What projects are you working on? What’s next?
AN Oh my God, so many things. Honestly, my Patreon and my moonletter are the best places to keep up with my work. I am really prolific. I am constantly writing, and I am always working on multiple projects. But what’s next is a mini-presentation of some songs from my musical Black Girl in Paris at the National Alliance for Musical Theater Conference.
TS Where can audiences follow you on social media?
AN @aridynox on instagram!!
TyLie: Thanks, AriDy!
AriDy: My pleasure!
AriDy Nox is a multi-disciplinary black femme storyteller with a variety of forward-thinking creative works under their belt. Their tales are offerings intended to function as small parts of an ancient, expansive, awe-inspiring tradition of world-shaping created by black femmes and with black femmes at the center.
Previews for A Walless Church, the Black Woman’s Guide to Making God begins Thursday, September 19 at 7PM Featuring Nubia Monks, Essence Renae, and Aimee K. Bryant, directed by Signe V. Harriday
