You think you got problems? Problems — by the hundreds — flood Philadelphia advice columnist and playwright R. Eric Thomas’ inbox:
- ·What about the niece who scheduled her wedding for the same day as her grandmother’s 100th birthday?
- Would shopping at a different grocery store help the married person crushing on a supermarket clerk?
- ·How can a 60-year-old man with FOMD (Fear of Missing Daddyhood) attract a younger woman to marry him so he can be a father?
Resolving life’s complicated questions at the rate of three a day, seven days a week, requires a daunting measure of chutzpah, humility and energy, along with lots of fast keyboard work. Really, it’s a wonder that Thomas had any capacity whatsoever for workshopping “Glitter in the Glass,” his play running May 29 through June 15 at Theatre Exile.
Last year, the Tribune Content Agency tapped Thomas to replace retiring syndicated advice columnist Amy Dickinson (“Ask Amy”). In “Asking Eric,” Thomas now dispenses his wisdom answering questions in more than 100 publications, including the Washington Post.
But with less than a year on the job and a play on the way, Thomas is already grappling with just how difficult some questions are to answer.
His solution?
Maybe answers aren’t always required. Or at least that’s the position he’s taking with “Glitter in the Glass.”
“I started this play in 2017,” Thomas said. Premiered as “Nightbird,” the play focused on Chelle, a Black artist answering a commission to create a new monument to replace a Confederate statue. Officials removed the monument from a park near her childhood home in Baltimore.
“It felt like I had to come up with a solution to the active question: What do we do with this painful shared history?” Thomas said. “How do we fix the scar of these Confederate monuments and everything they represent?”
In “Nightbird,” Chelle struggled endlessly with the question, probably because Thomas, as her playwright creator, was struggling as well. Chelle did reach a conclusion by the final act, but Thomas wasn’t completely satisfied with how his own play ended.
So, when Deborah Block, producing artistic director at Theatre Exile, offered him a chance for a do-over, Thomas did just that, refashioning his three-character “Nightbird” into “Glitter in the Glass.”
In his revised version, Thomas decided that the thorny question of how a single monument should express the entire history and legacy of the Confederacy did not have to be answered by himself, or his characters.
“It was too big a task for her — and for me,” he said. “Instead, the play moves toward a release, a feeling of community, as opposed to a feeling of conflict.”
Just as Thomas, the advice columnist, looks at all the factors when answering questions from readers, Thomas, the playwright, also weighed his own emotional situation against the prevailing tensions of our time.
“For me as an artist, I was hungering for something different right now. I was hungering for an experience in the theater that I was being taken care of, as an artist, as a person, as an audience,” he said. “So many plays will ring the alarm bell and shake the shoulders of the audience [as if to say], `Do you see what’s happening?’
“I say, we know what’s happening,” Thomas said. “Here’s a place for us to feel safe and renewed. That renewal is really important to me.”
Non-people characters
Three people act in the play, but they’re joined by two more characters — the removed monument and its replacement.
In crafting “Glitter,” Thomas consulted with Jane Golden from Mural Arts Philadelphia and Paul Farber, director of the Monument Lab, a Philadelphia nonprofit, two groups that cultivate and facilitate conversations about past, present and future public art and monuments.
“One of the most interesting things that came up is this idea of monuments as a site of public memory and also a site of community conversation,” Thomas said. “Sometimes monuments can feel like things that are set in history and set in space by somebody else — by a government or an organization.
“But true monuments come from the community they represent,” he said, describing them as a conversation in the present that is both telling a story about the past and using it to shape the future.
In that way, monuments are time travelers, which brings us to the title of Thomas’ work, “Glitter in the Glass.”
It’s a Star Trek reference!
To achieve the moments when Star Trek’s characters are transported through time and space — as are the ideas conveyed by monuments — Star Trek’s production crew filmed aluminum dust falling through a beam of high-intensity light – glittering in the glass.
For Block, Exile’s producing artistic director, the new title Thomas gave to his work is emblematic of his gifts as a playwright.
“He has a way of bringing up really important social issues,” she said. “He’s attracted to really nuanced ideas, but he has a satirical sensibility, a sit-com rhythm to his writing that allows audiences to enter into serious topics light-heartedly.”
Thomas set “Glitter” in Baltimore, where he grew up. He moved to Philadelphia, then back to Baltimore, and now lives in South Philadelphia, around the corner from Theatre Exile. His husband, Rev. David Norse Thomas, is a pastor at the Swarthmore Presbyterian Church.
For years, Thomas has been sharing hosting duties at The Moth StorySlam, held monthly at World Café Live. StorySlam is an open-mic storytelling competition based on a theme and part of a nationwide array of storytelling events sponsored by The Moth. A New York nonprofit, The Moth is dedicated to the craft of storytelling.
Thomas will next co-host on June 3, when the topic is Hospitality. Doors open at 6:15 p.m., stories begin at 7:30 p.m.
FYI
“Glitter in the Glass,” directed by Ontaria Kim Wilson, May 29-June 15, Theatre Exile, 1340-48 S. 13th St., Phila. 215-218-4022.
