Like, Quiara Alegría Hudes was a part of it-she brought us to see In the Heights when I was in middle school. I grew up in Philly and we had this group called Philadelphia Young Playwrights that a bunch of Philly playwrights came up through. I guess I was just curious, when did you accept, “Yeah, I’m a nerd, I write plays”?ĭave Harris: It’s funny, because my answer ties very directly to why I wrote Exception to the Rule. It is not a career trajectory that I planned on. Mansa Ra: I think it is wild that we are two Black people under the age of 50 who have spent a significant amount of our time writing plays. If the dialogue in their new plays flows freely and thoughtfully as this conversation, audiences should be in for a treat. Harris recently had Tambo & Bonesproduced at Off-Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons, and Ra’s last New York production was Too Heavy for My Pocket, also at the Roundabout. But in a recent conversation over Zoom, the two writers found some common ground in their parallel journeys and ambitions, as both come from tight-knit communities that have supported their dreams and inspired their writing, and both have alternately struggled and succeeded in building similar networks of support and connection in the predominantly white theatre field. Their plays have little in common: Harris’s depicts six Black high school kids sparring and bonding in a seemingly endless detention, while Ra’s is a drama about love and loss among three generations of gay Black men under the same roof.
Now they’re back together in the same building again, each with a new play at the Roundabout Theatre’s Off-Broadway space, the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre, where Harris’s Exception to the Rule just opened downstairs at Roundabout Underground, and Ra’s …what the end will be is in previews upstairs at the Laura Pels Theatre (opening night is June 2).
both were in Donald Margulies’s playwriting class at Yale, and both taught playwriting units at Co-Op High School there.
Dave Harris and Mansa Ra first met in New Haven, Conn.