When the Hayti Heritage Center was floated as a potential location to stage The Minutes, Tracy Letts’ 2017 darkly comic play about the fallout from a town council meeting, Rajeev Rajendran and Caitlin Wells became even more certain they wanted to put on the play. The Minutes, they felt, would take on added resonance when set in that historic space.
Wells grew up in Raleigh. Her dad worked in Durham, and she remembers coming to the city for things like Durham Bull games, but there was much about the city’s history she wasn’t taught in school.
“I didn’t know the story of the redlining,” she said. “I didn’t know the story of this vibrant [Hayti] community that was literally knocked down. And to be doing this play in this space, where you have Washington Duke up in that stained glass window, [placed] higher than Jesus, and thinking about the impact that his son James B. Duke had on the people in this state, and the tobacco farmers, many of whom were Black.”
The Minutes is the latest work from playwright Tracy Letts, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2008 for August: Osage County. Originally staged at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago in 2017, The Minutes—which was a finalist for the same Pulitzer Prize—is now coming to The Triangle.
Produced by Bulldog Ensemble Theater and co-directed by Rajendran and Wells, the play will have a November 5th–13th run at the Hayti Heritage Center, followed by an additional November 14th performance at Chapel Hill Public Library.
The play takes place in a single 90-minute act, set in the room of a small-town city council meeting as the council members plan the Founder’s Day celebration. The newest member of the council, Mr. Peel, missed the previous meeting and has some questions about why the minutes haven’t been distributed. As for that answer, and what unfolds the rest of the play: “No spoilers,” say Wells and Rajendran.
Both Rajendran and Wells saw parallels between the questions they asked themselves while considering setting the play in Haiti, and the questions the audiences of The Minutes may grapple with: What does it mean to excavate truths about the founding of a town? What are the stories that we tell ourselves about where we’re from? Who gets to tell the stories? And how do we wrestle with history so that we can move forward?
Rajendran, who also grew up in the Triangle, was the one to suggest the idea of timing the performances close to the midterm elections. As Rajendran read the script, he kept imagining many of his favorite local actors in the juicy council roles.
“The cast is incredible,” Rajendran says. “There’s a lot of depth to the script, and they’re really putting so much of themselves into this.”
The directing collaboration between Rajendran and Wells is a natural extension of the collaborative ethos that has defined the rehearsals and preparation for this play.
“For me, the directing was born out of this sense of bringing the right people together into the room and then being the outside eye,” said Wells.
To that end, The Minutes is choreographed by performance artist Aya Shabu— founder of Whistletop Tours, which offers guides of historic African American neighborhoods in Durham—and Marie Garlock, a researcher and multi-disciplinary arts activist. And because The Minutes deals with the erasure and genocide of native peoples in the Americas, Garlock consulted with Philip S. Deloria, a Lakota Elder who founded the Commission on State Tribal Relations and has a deep history of working to bridge the gap between native communities and state governments.
The cast and crew are interested in how the audience might connect with the play, especially at this political moment in time.
“A writer I discovered in college, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, has this idea that art is a laboratory for real life where we test out new ways of being and experiment with possible practices for liberation— a way of building a new future that had previously barely been imaginable,” said Wells. “And for me, theater is the clearest, most direct way to do this, because the audience is watching the performers try out these different ways of being, live and in real time.”
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