The Select Equity Group Series on Theater

 

From the developmental production of In Darfur at the Pubic Theater, New York, April 2007. Directed by Joanna Settle. All images courtesy of Winter Miller and the Public Theater, New York.

Winter Miller stood out among the new playwrights seated around my seminar table at Columbia seven years ago. She had white-blonde spiky hair, a wicked sense of humor, and an outrageously bold intelligence—”sassy” would be the 1940s word for it. She was a fresh talent, and her work was a mix of black humor and a complicated look at sexual identity. She also had a real-world “day job” at the New York Times working for Nicholas Kristof, who won a 2006 Pulitzer prize for his reports from Darfur.

After graduating, Miller quickly became part of the new group of playwrights making the scene in New York. She is a member of 13P, an extraordinary company devoted to doing new work. Her Penetration Play presented a daring, dark, and disturbingly unexpected sexual triangle and established her as a smart, hip, new writer.

Her day job has also continued—she has done interviews for the Times and starts on the City desk this fall.

This spring, Miller’s play In Darfur was given a workshop production at The Public Theatre and was performed this summer at the Delacorte in Central Park before an audience of 1,800 people. It was a project that she started with The Guthrie Theatre, with the collaboration of Kristof, who took her to Africa to see the devastation.

I’m not sure I was prepared for the power of the play that I saw. It presented three characters: a journalist determined to tell the story of the genocide; a doctor working to just keep people going; and an African woman who risks her life to talk to the journalist. The genocide in Darfur was presented in stark, complicated, and highly emotional terms. Never didactic, but nevertheless a call to action, this was a profoundly theatrical piece rooted always in the truth of the story. I was knocked out. The Public had given it a sensational production—and had presented an important new piece.

There is a real excitement when you see a writer “come of age”—take on a big subject and pull it off. It also signals to me a new beginning of a kind of theatrical exploration that looks at tough political issues. We need more of that right now. I undertook this interview as a former teacher, friend, and fan.

 

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