Artist Interview: Director Bianca LaVerne Jones
The CRUMBS FROM THE TABLE OF JOY director talks about the play, her directorial process, and what she hopes audiences will take away
Lantern Theater Company is delighted to welcome Bianca LaVerne Jones to Philadelphia as the director of Lynn Nottage’s Crumbs from the Table of Joy — onstage November 9 through December 17, 2023. An accomplished performer and director, Jones studied acting at SUNY Purchase Acting Conservatory and the Yale School of Drama, and she became the first African American woman to earn a master’s in directing from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Her stage and screen work has been seen around the world, across the country, and on Broadway, where she was the associate director for Chicken & Biscuits.
Lantern Resident Dramaturg Meghan Winch caught up with Jones to talk about her work on Crumbs from the Table of Joy and what she most connects with in the work of Lynn Nottage.
Meghan Winch: What was your relationship to Lynn Nottage and to this play before you started this process?
Bianca LaVerne Jones: My relationship to Lynn Nottage has been as a lover of her work and an avid supporter of her productions. I’ve seen all of her work, from Intimate Apparel to Clyde’s to MJ the Musical. I worked at Columbia University and directed Clybourne Park while she’s been teaching playwriting students at Columbia University.
MW: What do you think makes her work so special? What do you connect with most?
BLJ: I connect to the chronicled history that she’s able to capture so greatly in Black life. She has always been able to pluck out human behavior, whether fiction or nonfiction, and give her characters such a full life through real American history that includes Black people and Black women, and show us in many different facets of life. That’s what I love the most about her work. In Crumbs from the Table of Joy, I really connected to Aunt Lily and the way that Lynn Nottage set up the history of what has been accessible to Black women and what they are known for doing for work. My paternal grandmother was a nurse, my maternal grandmother was a hairdresser. And so, when Lily talks about wanting to be something else, stepping outside of the box as a big thinker, that really attracted me to this play.
In every production that I work on, I try to find the pattern in the writing. It’s like finding the right key to unlock the work for me. When I realized how the memory play functioned, it was illuminating for me because then I had a structure that I was able to follow. It’s almost like playing jazz. I found the rhythms of her play inside of the repeated quote, “At least I wish they had,” where Ernestine imagines what growing up in Brooklyn could have been, or how she wished it would’ve been, when actually there was a world happening that felt very traumatic to her. So for those moments that pop out in the play with “At least I wish they had,” I learned how to make the moments that precede it pop with flare, with music history. One thing that I love about plays are surprises. So it was extremely surprising and super fun for the audience when these special moments pop out in Crumbs from the Table of Joy and literally give you a crumb from Ernestine’s table of joy.
Ernestine says, “Years from now, I’ll…” and then she communicates who she becomes. That really helped me frame the structure from the patterns that I pulled from the show. So, I worked backwards to find the beginning.
I loved creating the play, at least when I finally cracked the pattern and figured out the structure in my own brain. Lynn Nottage definitely took me to school with that. And it was a class that I was dutiful in and prepared to conquer.
MW: In your director’s note in the Crumbs from the Table of Joy program, you wrote that the Crumps’ journey North resonated with your own, being from North Carolina.
BLJ: It resonated because I’m from North Carolina, and as a teenager moved to New York — not under stress and duress, but for college. And it was an incredible experience to be in that sort of culture shock where nothing is the same, but the people look the same. The language is really different. The food is different. I even got sick when I moved to New York because the food was not what I was used to in North Carolina. Culture shock!
My story is also similar in that all of the Black people that I have been around in New York, all of my neighbors in Harlem, were all from North Carolina. Miss Connie, the doorman, Mr. Brown, everybody was from North Carolina, you know? And so the migration North — with everybody wanting to live a different life and have a certain freedom, have a different sort of freedom — resonated with me.
MW: How did that lived experience affect your directorial process and what we see on stage?
BLJ: Hopefully I was able to connect and have tons of empathy and respect for my lived experience and what these characters are going through, because it was so similar. I think that might’ve been the biggest thing — I was empathetic and compassionate to what the characters were going through. And so when there might have been a disconnect in the room about what a moment was about, I think that’s where my compassion and empathy kicked in the deepest and the strongest to extrapolate the story for the actor.
MW: Speaking of the actors, you’re a performer as well as a director. How do those two practices affect one another in your work?
BLJ: Well, I’m an actor’s director for sure, because I know what it takes to be in the exact position that I’m asking of people — to be vulnerable, to be bigger than life, to hold a moment, to extrapolate a slice of Black life. Again, I’m using the word “extrapolate,” but when I think of the word extrapolate, I think to unpack — to unpack a bag. And so when I’m asking them to unpack, I know what it is to do that. And because I have a 20+ year career in doing that as an actor, it makes it that much easier for me to guide a fellow actor through the process.
MW: Can you talk a little bit about what you and the performers learned from audiences? How did the preview performances before opening help shape your work?
BLJ: The work in the beginning felt very intimate. And so I would say that I was learning if instincts were on par by listening to the play once I stepped back. When the audience heard them and responded in the affirmative, that is exactly what we and I wanted. That’s exactly what we needed, you know? It helped me affirm the actors, to say, “Yeah, go further. Go, go, go further.”
What I’ve also learned from being in Philadelphia’s audience of Crumbs from the Table of Joy are many wonderful stories about Father Divine that I had no idea of. I had never heard of Father Divine until I read this play. So, from the previews, I was taken back into history, into the 1950s, by audience members who were alive during that time who recounted to me their personal stories and real-life experiences with Father Divine and how they benefited from his meals and baptisms and his generosity to the community, all through the word “peace.” Offering peace to one another. These audience members remember being Ernestine and Ermina at that time in their lives.
MW: What do you want audience members to walk away with from this production?
BLJ: I love a good anthropological, historical moment. Learning about Father Divine, I think, is intriguing. Father Divine was someone who was a Black man in the 1950s who garnered real estate — large, humongous real estate — and was able to feed thousands of people with quarter meals and 45-cent meals, while only asking them to have peace and to live virtuously. And I think that’s to be applauded, and it’s historic in what he was able to do in such a time of division and Jim Crow and communism and McCarthyism and the things that Black people were up against. And so, being that he made such strides, he may very well be God-like and we missed it, you know? He very well may have been a real God-like figure on this Earth. I love a good unknown Black history moment like Father Divine.
I also love how Lynn Nottage captures Lily’s track of coming to Harlem and wanting something better for herself. Please take away the historical track and the musical track the play follows with gospel, jazz, bebop, and soul. I took artistic liberty with the top and bottom of the play with gospel and soul music. I end the play with Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” It felt more than appropriate to me.
I also love the migration arc — everything moves. Everyone has an arc in the play because it’s a memory play. Everybody grows. So, I love the growth arc of Godfrey, the father, migrating from one space to the next, growing out of his mourning into what he considers his own personal happiness. I just loved all the growth. That growth story really surprised me and was really beautiful to me.
I think that Crumbs from the Table of Joy exemplifies how memories take place. The fire of love of family, and the fire from family that can burn you also. This play illuminates one young Black woman’s journey through religion into education and motherhood into her own coming of age story. Lynn Nottage is brilliant to have crafted this play and to have used Father Divine as a vehicle to get us there.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
More great reading: See other recent articles and interviews on the Lantern Searchlight blog
Lantern Theater Company’s production of Crumbs from the Table of Joy by Lynn Nottage is onstage November 9 through December 17, 2023, at St. Stephen’s Theater. Visit our website for tickets and information.
