Love Philly? So do we. Let’s be friends. Sign up for the Billy Penn newsletter today.
Playwright James Ijames’ grandmother, Sherleen Williams, 90, isn’t doing the cooking anymore.
MaMaw’s done with all that. Even her prized turkey dressing is now made by others.
“The big meal in our family is Christmas and for the last several years, it’s been at my grandmother’s house,” Ijames said. “Everyone comes and makes the food and she’s just there. We gather around her house. The house is very central” – as is MaMaw, “still very vibrant. We’re not expecting her to go anywhere anytime soon.”
But it does raise a question – one that comes up in many families and one that’s key in the world premiere of Ijames’ latest play, “Wilderness Generation” at Philadelphia Theatre Co. April 10 through May 3. What happens when the center no longer holds? What keeps cousins – first, second, once-removed, twice-removed – connected?
For Ijames, that question was first sparked by an article in The Atlantic magazine titled “The Great Cousin Decline,” published in December 2023. Families are shrinking. Fewer kids means fewer cousins.
It would take Ijames more fingers and toes than he has to count all the people he considers cousins, in addition to five first cousins. There are also the descendants of MaMaw’s five siblings and that doesn’t include the non-related cousins, children of his mother’s close friends.
These deep and interwoven connections, he said, are particularly prominent in Black families, creating a sizable roster of people that are known to each other. It’s not just one member of the family; it’s all the aunts and uncles and partnership and their families.
“It’s a relationship that is unique,” he said. “It feels really deep and really close. It can feel like a sibling relationship. I was curious about what it would look like on the stage.”
How it looks in “Wilderness Generation” starts with a wily grandmother determined to strengthen cousinly connections. She summons four cousins to her Tidewater South home. But when they show up, she isn’t there. Instead, there’s a note.
“She gives them tasks to complete, so those things start to put them in a relationship,” he said.
People feel isolated today, Ijames said, but there’s a solution – with “Wilderness Generation” providing a heartfelt and comic how-to.
“You are not alone,” he said. “If you feel alone, you have tools available to try to repair that. I want to remind people that they have access to that” kinship of cousins, whether related or not.
Sometimes, he said, it starts with an apology.
“Sometimes, it’s having a difficult conversation. Sometimes, it’s putting yourself out there and knowing you might get hurt, and knowing you might be embarrassed, but that’s the risk of living with other people,” Ijames said. “We don’t want to feel those things, yet those things are what helps us remain human.”
“I try to show people working through that messily in the play,” he said. “They ultimately do it. They look at the hard questions dead in the eye. Every generation has to do it.”
The southern feel and the family dynamics in “Wilderness Generation” somewhat echo those in “Fat Ham,” Ijames’ take on “Hamlet.” It won him a Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2022. At the time, he was a co-artistic director at the Wilma Theater. Ijames, who now primarily lives in New York, has deep ties to Philadelphia and earned his master’s degree in fine arts from Temple University.
When Philadelphia Theatre Co. co-artistic directors Taibi Magar and Tyler Dobrowskyfirst approached Ijames, who they’ve known for years, about doing one of his plays this season, they had another one in mind. But, instead, Ijames offered them the first crack at this one.
In a video published on the Philadelphia Theatre Co. website, Magar, who directs the play, talked about how much she enjoys working with playwrights in general, and Ijames, in particular. Her role, as she sees it, is to help bring his vision, expressed in the script, to the stage.
“He’s such a generous, quick, smart and sure-footed writer,” said Magar, who described the play as “ecstatically funny.”
Ijames, she said, “knows what he’s deeply after with the play and is also extremely open to the process of it evolving.”
“Wilderness Generation” is the final play of three Ijames works staged in Philadelphia this theater season.
“Good Bones,” Ijames’ play about the impact of a stadium on a Black neighborhood, finished an extended run at the Arden Theatre Co. on March 22.
“The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington,” closed April 5 at the Wilma and will be available for streaming April 9 through May 3. In that production, the titular Martha Washington, who owned enslaved people who were promised freedom upon her death, worries that they are trying to kill her. Totally funny. Totally serious. Totally thought-provoking.
The three were part of a new experiment – a cross-theater subscription plan to see all three Ijames works through a citywide James Ijames pass sold through the Philadelphia Visitor Center website.
“I’m glad it’s happening in that city which has had such impact on me as a human being,” he said.
Theatergoers have purchased more than triple the original goal of 100 passes, according to Billy Cook, a publicist from En Route, a marketing agency which helped devise the Ijames plan.
Ijames said Philadelphia is rich with prolific playwrights who would make perfect candidates for future Philly citywide series.
“Bruce Graham, Jackie Goldfinger, Michael Hollinger, AZ Espinosa, Erlina Ortiz are doing plays and Robi Hager, MK Tuomanen,” he said. “There are a lot, lot, lot of folks who are writing.”
“Wilderness Generation,” April 10-May 3, Philadelphia Theatre Co., Suzanne Roberts Theatre, 480 S. Broad St., Phila. 215-985-0420.
