“Jar the Floor” is the latest show to come to the Arkansas Repertory Theatre, a comedy following the story of four generations of African American women as they work through relationships and family secrets.
Here’s our conversation with director Gilbert McCauley; Cecelia Antoinette, who plays MaDear; Joy Lynn Jacobs, who plays Lola; Maya Loren Jackson, who plays Vennie; and Erikka Walsh, who plays Raisa.
Opening night for “Jar the Floor” is Friday, March 31. For tickets and more information, click here.
For starters, briefly describe your characters and what they’re about.
Cecelia Antoinette: I’m MaDear. I’m the matriarch of the family. They moved me up from Mississippi because my husband passed less than a year ago and they’re concerned. It’s my 90th birthday and things are starting to set in — things like Alzheimer’s, dementia, senility and other health issues. I now live in my granddaughter’s house. My daughter comes in and then my great-granddaughter comes in, and the buggy ride starts from there.
Erikka Walsh: I’m Raisa, I’m the “friend” of the youngest woman in the family, Vennie. I’m escorting her home.
Maya Loren Jackson: I play Vennie. Vennie is the youngest generation of this family where basically it’s this structure of super strong women and she’s trying to find how to be strong in her own right. Kind of in antithesis to her mother and her grandmother and her great-grandmother, she’s — for a lack of a better word — rebelling. She’s just trying to find her way on her own terms, and yet trying to figure out how her terms relate to her family. Her main conflict is with her mother, so she’s learning how to be her own person but also have her mother accept her for that person.
Joy Lynn Jacobs: I’m playing Lola, the daughter of the matriarch and the mother of Vennie’s mother. It’s all very confusing. Let me put it this way: It’s four generations of African American women trying to navigate the slings and arrows of being four generations of African American women. They’re living in close quarters, dealing with history, dealing with their history, with the necessary elements of institutional history. Lola’s getting older and dealing with that while trying to look after her mother without actually being in her scope of view. The same goes for spending time with her daughter, but she loves being with her granddaughter because it’s like a rent-a-kid. But they all love each other. The whole thing is based in a great deal of love, it’s just navigating the issues that they have.
Gilbert, tell us about the backdrop these four generations are set against.
Gilbert McCauley: The primary backdrop is that it’s MaDear’s 90th birthday, which is why they’re all gathering in Maydee’s house — Maydee being MaDear’s granddaughter. Her house is in Park Forest, Illinois, and it’s a nice suburban space that Maydee tries her best to control and keep just the way she wants it. It is intruded upon by everybody else in the play, which is set in the mid- to late-1990s.
What is it about the dynamic between these women that makes it unique?
JLJ: Really, I’m not sure how unique it is.
GM: Yes, there are things that have not been acknowledged by these four generations, and so what happens in the course of the play is that those those old wounds get opened up and dealt with. I think what the playwright is pointing to is that to some degree that isn’t so unique, it’s universal, especially with mother-daughter relationships. There are things that you will see that are very familiar, and no matter what background you’re coming from you’ll notice some things about that dynamic. Troubling, disturbing sometimes, but in the lense we’re using, seen through the lense of humor and compassion, it’s very universal.
JLJ: Exactly. The reason it doesn’t necessarily feel to me like some of these situations are unique is because they’re real. What’s funny is each person thinks their situation is unique. Lola and Maydee have this argument in one scene and the next scene over Maydee and Vennie have the exact same argument, just different semantics. You’re so sure you’re the only one with that problem.
MLJ: It’s also having so many women together, women who are representative of different times, different forms of authority. Having a great-grandmother, a grandmother, a mother, a great-granddaughter and someone who is basically an outsider, it’s like an amplified family dynamic. So maybe it’s not so different from a family dynamic that we already have, but because all of these people are together, behaviors and relationships that are already there are ratcheted up to 11.
And there’s something about this specific time. The tension of having a family event we’re supposed to be celebrating makes this moment in time that the play captures unique, really makes for the drama to bubble up to the surface. Everyone’s under a certain amount of pressure to perform some role.
Is there an element in your characters that you really relate to?
JLJ: The way Lola deals with her mother is very familiar. I don’t have a daughter, but even the way my mother deals with me. It feels very familiar, all of it. And the woman I’m playing, I’m very much playing one of my relatives.
MLJ: I relate to my character to a certain extent. I don’t think I’m as courageous as she is in the show with the kind of renaissance she’s chased, but I definitely relate to loving your mother so much through conflict. It’s perpetual. You’re never going to get rid of them, and nor do you want to, but you also don’t want to have this fight again, but it’s your mom, so tough.
I grew up with this family dynamic. My great-grandmother was alive until I was in my early 20s. And I can even see my mother in some of the ways Maydee thinks things have to be done to achieve in society. My mother is the best woman ever and takes care of everyone, but she does have very particular ideas of how things should be. Every once in a while in life I’ll deviate from some invisible path and she’s like “What are you doing?”
Everyone has that feeling where they don’t want to become their mom, but I’m totally my mom. I’m just going to have to accept that. It’s different times, different circumstances, but I’m made of her. Why should I try and rebuke that? In my 30s, I’m coming into understanding that you accept the good things of the people that you love, because if you try and fight it you don’t get anything.
CA: I think that’s the issue of the play. All of these women in their own way are fighting to be heard and be believed. They want desperately for each one to know and for the outsider to know that who they are matters, what happened to them matters and even though it’s a lot of secrets that start coming unraveled, each one is a chip off of the ol’ block. I think [playwright Cheryl L. West] did a very interesting job of portraying that with all these different little things. It’s like a glove. Each finger connects to the whole hand, but what does the whole hand connect to? That’s what I think is revealed at the end of the play in terms of jarring the floor, it’s what they’re all connected to.
What does it mean to you personally to be putting on this play at this moment in time?
CA: It’s interesting doing this show in Arkansas. Originally MaDear is from Mississippi, right next door. She’s just moved up to the North, so all of her sensibilities are really still down south. That means a lot of the family’s sensibilities are still down south, even though they’ve moved to the North to get away from it. Then baby girl literally brings Mississippi back in through the door. The very things that they think they’ve escaped, they haven’t. The more we run away from things, the more things catch up to us. That is, until we deal with it.
And as for the climb of the times now, we are in a very strong woman-voiced time. There are aspects of women’s voices that are finally, like I said earlier, being heard and being believed. A lot of these issues are coming up, they are uniquely what the individuals in this family are dealing with, but they are universally images that women are dealing with no matter what color. From health issues to cultural issues to arts and entertainment to life and survival, it’s the same: What do you do to pay the rent? What do women have to do to keep a roof over their heads in tandem with a man or in absence of? I think it speaks to that in a very unique way, to use your word.
MLJ: I have to say, I don’t know that this is directly related to the times we’re living in, but for me, I think it’s a special honor and privilege to do a show that represents women that reflect the women that raised me and taught me. To be in a cast with people who also are similar to the women that raised me and taught me, as a young black woman, that’s not something we’re gifted with very often. In institutional theater and when you’re in university theater, it’s not something that is often programmed into your education or that you have the actors for. Even when you get out in the world, it’s just such a privilege to be in a room with people who reflect different parts of who you are and how you came to be.
In doing so, I feel like it’s helping me to affirm my voice in a time that is a little uncharted. We have very intelligent, strong, different women that are part of this ensemble that aren’t here right now, like our production team. To be in a room with women who share some cultural and artistic overlaps with me, and also to be working with people on the other side of the table who are strong in their own right, it is just a unique privilege to be fed by that at this time and to hopefully take that forward into whatever’s going to happen next.
GM: There’s also this aspect of it that, yes, there’s this need to be heard and be believed and understood, and I think there’s also this other important reason that [Cecelia} mentioned because it also reflects this relay race that each generation takes it as far as they can take it and the next generation has to then pick up that baton and carry it further in their own way. That does demand a kind of a courage to do whatever that is, to take that on. I think that’s a good understanding for us to have now because we are at a time now that it will demand some courage to see how we can go further than this, rather than just to get stuck here and feel victimized just as these women do. They take the cards they’ve been dealt and go a little further and pass it on, and there’s this going further of each generation. That to me speaks both to legacy and to what is to come.
So if there was only one conversation that you home audiences have after this show, what would it be?
JLJ: I would love to hear them compare their lives, especially women, to what they just saw on stage. The most unique thing about the world of the play is that the audience is looking in on it. The things we say on stage are not the things we would really be bringing out in front of strangers, no family would. I hope they leave the theater thinking about how it relates to them.
MLJ: I feel like I would really want people to go back to their families and ask people what their stories are. I’m realizing that in the last few years I had with my grandmother and my great-grandmother, I took them for granted. I did not spend the time to find out what was the motor of their life, and I regret that so implicitly now.
That’s something that happens in this show. There’s some unveiling of things; shame comes from not speaking things, from keeping them deep down. If you’re able to speak out those things, you’re allowing someone to carry your burden with you, but also part of that relay race is having something to pass down. It is a terrible thing to let fall between the cracks of generations. I would hope that seeing this show would really encourage people to talk, to call your grandmother and ask her what her first job was, who her first boyfriend was, what she wanted to be, what she did on Saturdays.
JLJ: It’s funny that you didn’t have those conversations because I couldn’t stop my family from telling their stories if I tried. … They would tell me whether I wanted to hear it or not, but if nothing else, they told me. If they saw me crossing a line, they would say, “Sit down, this is what you don’t know.” I was privileged, I guess, because I heard all about it.
I have 51 first cousins on my mother’s side, and at the third family reunion, we had 1200 people. They did all this family research, and because black people were property, it was much easier for us to trace our roots. We were reading tax records and they found the bill of sale for my great-great-grandmother. I carry it with me because when I first saw it, it hit me viscerally. You know this happened, but to have it directly connected to your blood… And mind you, I said great-great-grandmother, not great-great-great-great-great-great-great. It’s not that far back.
I have the bill of sale for her and her two children because they were sold at auction when their master hadn’t paid his taxes. To have that connection that I heard about constantly, I was always very rooted to the realities of who we are. I can’t say I ever took it for granted. It was always just understood. … People who haven’t experienced these things can only come at it from a point of observation, but I have lived it. This playwright has done a wonderful job of showing how it’s lived and not just observed.
CA: When MaDear was born — if the play takes place in the mid-90s and she’s celebrating 90 — she would’ve been born about 1905 in Mississippi. Even though she may not have been born into slavery, the area is still very entrenched in sharecropping and such. MaDear has seen a thing or two because she’s done a thing or two. That history, even though she’s losing her memory, you feel it because the little bits that she does remember that she tries to express comes out in little snatches. It comes and it goes, but it’s there.
I do think this play will resonate with audiences. I think most people will come out with a visceral reaction of this happened to me or to someone in my family, or maybe an appreciation of family and lineage, and I hope that we are heard and believed and that others will let their own lack of being heard find a place from that moment on. There’s a very diverse tapestry of people here in Little Rock. … I think that this play will resonate with the audiences here in Arkansas in a way that, if we do our job right, both men and women will leave here having heard and with a desire to be heard.
But here’s something I wonder about. If this play were about four generations of white women, would its issues resonate the same?
EW: I feel like the women in this show, as is, there are many things these women deal with that I connect to and that resonate with me and my family in ways I didn’t expect. That would change the dynamic, of course, but I think what makes the playwright really brilliant is that this story has its uniqueness and is absolutely rooted in the race of the women, but it’s already a story that any woman can connect to in some way.
So what I hope that the audience can take away is there needs to be acknowledgement of things in your life and of things around you, and people need to be heard, but nobody can be heard if there is nobody there to listen. That’s one of the great things about my character is that I come into this home and I’m supporting Vennie, but most of the time I’m just sitting in that space with them, observing. You need both sides of that. That’s how we have community is because people who need to be heard need to be listened to.
GM: You’ve got to have a storyteller and a story-hearer. And I think that the play, even the title “Jar the Floor,” has to do with this notion of connection. Jar the floor means basically to make somebody be able to feel your presence in the room. There is this connection where even though this phrase is colloquial, that connection is universal. We all get that on some level, we all understand making your presence known, being felt. We get that. I think all of this points to the fact that this is a piece that will resonate with folks on a lot of levels.