A Slam Poet Takes the Stage

About the author:
Staceyann Chin, known for starring on Broadway in Russell Simmons' Def Poetry Jam, made the leap from downtown slam poet extraordinaire to off-Broadway sensation with her new solo show Border/Clash: A Litany of Desires. Chin, who is Jamaican by birth and now resides in New York City, wrote her one-woman show reluctantly at first. After all, it's the story of her life--not the easiest tale to tell. Of course, Chin is a born writer. She is the first poet commissioned to perform and write with the renowned Dance Africa Chicago group, the winner of the Chicago People of Color Slam, the Lambda Poetry Slam, two-time winner of Slam This! and winner of WORD: The First Slam for Television. She has also been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Pittsburgh Daily. Here, the poet recounts her journey in deciding what to keep and what to shed in the creation of Border/Clash.

Border/Clash began as a bit of a weird experiment. Five years ago, Allan Buchman, head cook and bottle washer over at the Culture Project, approached me after a slam competition at a bar on 13th Street called Bar 13. He had a rather radical idea to posit. He wanted me to come to his theater and do a one-woman show. I laughed in the face of this short, stocky balding white man and walked away, marveling at the absolute randomness of things in the city. Allan the persistent did not stop there. He invited me to dinner..and lunch…and odd readings he happened to be having at 45 Bleecker. Eventually, he wore me down. I agreed to line up 20 poems in some sort of discernible order, and I allowed them to light the reading--and there began my first romance with the world of theater.

Three years, later I was invited to be a part of the Russell Simmons' Def Poetry Jam on Broadway. I spent eight months learning the process of showing up on time and finally deconstructed the mysteries of stage left and stage right. I adjusted to sharing the process of my performance with a director, a stage manager, lighting and sound designers. After the whirlwind swirl of the Tonys and the press and the ego-swell of being a part of a show that made history, I needed a moment to breathe. That moment lasted 10 months. I was now ready to take on the challenge of my own show.

It took me two months to write the first version. It is the hardest thing to figure out what parts of a life are relevant to the telling of it. More so when the life is still being lived. In an evening of theater, there is only about two hours, about one hour for a one-person show. Do I tell about my father? What should I say about my mother? There is so much one can say of 32 years of survival. I wrote and wrote and wrote until I had about a million hours of material. I pulled my meeting with my mother out. I pulled my father out. I put him back in. We needed someone to help me decide what to keep and what to leave for another show.

Rob Urbinati was drawn onboard and we were off. We rearranged events, dropped some of the mother stuff, put back some of the father stories and did a quick litmus test of a performance at the Women Center Stage in 2004. Most people thought we had something there. I went back to the drawing board and rewrote some of the stories, edited some of the poems and ended up with more text than we needed.

We invited Carolyn Allen to help with the dramaturgy. We put parts of my mother back in. We pulled parts of my brother out. We put parts of my brother back in. We kept at it and one year later, after about 6 million drafts, I started learning the script. Garin Marshall lights and set and Emily Wright sound joined the fray and hours and hours and hours of tech-time produced a world tailored to the life and times of Staceyann Chin.

At first I was unsure if I was going to make the leap from slam poet to the more vulnerable performance of the young Staceyann. We worried that my fan base would not connect with that persona. I worried I would not be able to live inside my grandmother's body with the honesty that was so important to me. I worried that the poet in me was becoming an actor.

But we opened anyway. And the reviews were honest and affirming and challenging and thorough. I am learning all the time. The work is still a life being lived. As Allan keeps mumbling to me, Billy Crystal maintains they were still writing 700 Sundays four days before closing. I stand mortal in the wake of a work in progress. I am only human, my story is broken in places, but whole in most, most days, I am simply trying to tell an honest tale in a way that is both entertaining and not too embarrassing for the people who still see me as family.