© 2024 WFSU Public Media
WFSU News · Tallahassee · Panama City · Thomasville
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

E. Patrick Johnson's Play Spotlights Bittersweet Culture Clash

Chicago Tribune

Sweat Tea is a sugary drink associated with Southern culture and hospitality. It’s also the title of a play delving into the unique experience of being a gay, black man living in the region.

E. Patrick Johnson’s one-man show is making a stop in Tallahassee this weekend and bringing with it questions of identity rooted in gender, sexuality and ethnicity. Johnson said the idea for his show started when he decided to document the individual experiences of gay black men seven years back.

“I collected these oral histories between 2004 and 2006 from men that range in age from 19 to 93 and I have used those stories to base a performance of the stories for the stage,” Johnson recalled.

But, Johnson didn’t start his project with the intention of making a stage play. He was curious to learn about the experiences of gay black men growing up as a minority within a minority. He ended up with more than 3-thousand pages of candid conversation.

Credit Signature Theatre
The cover for Johnson's book, Sweet Tea.

“So, I ended up doing 77 interviews over the course of two years and had 3,000 pages of transcript that I had to whittle down to the 600 page book that it is,” Johnson said.

From that 600 page book, Johnson plucked the eleven most adaptable stories, including his own, to spotlight on the stage.  He said leaving the stories in the pages of a book didn’t do them justice. His performance studies background told him it needed to be brought to the stage.

“I met so many colorful people along the way, whose stories on the page I knew would sort of be flattened out, because it wouldn’t capture their speech, the dialects, the mannerisms, so about a year into collecting the stories I decided to create a performance,” Johnson said.

One may expect a lot of the play’s subject matter to deal with the challenges faced by gay black males in small southern towns. But, Johnson said the project has shown him that for all the sour experiences that population faces, there are still some sweet moments.

“It was in the smaller towns that some of these men were the most accepted and when I say small town some of them as small as 2,000, a population of 2,000 or less, where they may be very flamboyant but also the most accepted,” Johnson pointed out.

Johnson said even though the stories seem to speak to an extremely specific segment of the population, black gay men in the south, he hopes everyone in the audience can relate to what he calls universally human experiences. Sweet Tea is playing Friday through Saturday at 8 PM at the Mickee Faust Clubhouse in Railroad Square.