‘Fairview’ sets stage for difficult discussions, dramatic impact

An antique dining table, an upholstered ottoman, and a blanket draped over an armchair with calculated effortlessness. It might look like your great aunt’s house, but it’s the set of Fairview, a Pulitzer prize-winning play by Jackie Sibblies Drury. DeRon Williams, PhD, is directing the show at Loyola this spring.

This set is designed to feel familiar and welcoming. That’s also the objective of the show—to draw audiences in to observe what at first feels like an easy, charming comedy about a Black family preparing for grandma’s birthday dinner. Hijinks and antics ensue and the audience laughs along, until the sitcom-style storyline starts to glitch and crack.

First, white voices and then white bodies intrude. Then, in the third act, the reality of the play crumbles along with the fourth wall as Keisha, the family’s daughter, played by Trinity Bryant, delivers a searing final monologue.

At the beginning of a recent rehearsal, Williams sat with Bryant at the dining table on stage.

“Who is Keisha?” he asked her.

“Well, she’s confident,” Bryant said.

As other cast members filtered into the theater that evening, Williams and Bryant, along with assistant director Avery Thompson, continued to talk about her character. Then they broke down that important last monologue phrase by phrase, word by word.

Williams has been conscientious and intentional with his cast from the beginning. The themes of the play—racism, surveillance—are sensitive and nuanced, and the idea of acting out the more difficult moments provoked nerves among some actors.

“I knew that we had to facilitate a brave space,” Williams says, “a space where people felt brave enough to let down their guard, to be open for dialogue, and to allow these characters to come into their body.”

This kind of work is what Williams cares about. Whether he’s on the stage or in the classroom, he’s a mission-focused educator at heart, and he has been from the beginning.

“When I was little, I used to line up my bears and teach them,” he says. Williams grew up in Pensacola, Florida, and Augusta, Georgia.

His interest in theater grew in college, along with some important questions that have since informed his work and scholarship. “I went to a predominantly Black high school, and then I attended a historically Black university, Albany State University, in southwest Georgia,” he says.

He later received a master’s degree in arts administration from Eastern Michigan University and a PhD in fine arts with a specialization in theater and performance from Texas Tech University.

But it was back at Albany State where he began to interrogate how theater was taught.

“One thing I quickly learned was that a lot of theater history really centered around Eurocentric ideas and inventions and playwrights and artists. And it struck a curiosity in me as to why HBCUs don’t have more graduate programs to facilitate the research of Black culture and performance centered around theater.”

A guiding question emerged: “How can I contribute to this body of work?”

Williams has since co-edited an anthology of writing titled Contemporary Black Theatre & Performance: Acts of Rebellion, Activism, and Solidarity, published in 2023.

“As a scholar, as a person, I’m interested and invested in theater and performance that reflects the contributions of African American artists and scholars and just great thinkers.”

This ethos led him to Fairview, which he has taught in two of his classes and is bringing to the stage for the first time.

Fairview is part of a movement of theater that centers the Black experience in overt ways. The play, Williams says, is in conversation with other works, such as What to Send Up When It Goes Down by Aleshea Harris. “At the very top of that show,” he says, actors address the audience: “It’s ‘Hey, welcome to the show,’” he says, paraphrasing the opening. “‘I’m sorry, white people, but this isn’t necessarily for you. Please stay in the space, but know you might feel some disconnection. It’s our space to commune together, find joy, find mourning, and catharsis.’”

As audiences will see, Fairview flips parts of that dynamic on its head while still providing a catharsis for Black viewers.

To help the cast become comfortable with the issues that provoke such joy and mourning in Fairview, Williams brought in Justin Wright, an anti-oppressive pedagogies specialist at Loyola, and Cristin Carole, an instructor of theater at Loyola who works with intimacy on stage. Both led workshops that helped the students comfortably approach the material and each other.

Judi Nwonye, who plays Beverly, Keisha’s mother, says that Williams himself has also been instrumental in creating this feeling of welcome.

“He opens the floor for anyone to talk—Black, white, whatever—to share their own experiences,” she says. “He shares his own experiences with race, and we can piggyback on that with experiences of race or gender and sexuality.”

Dramaturge intern Kate Wexler felt similarly. She described how white actors are asked to mimic certain racist stereotypes during the play.

“There’s going to be discomfort in that,” she says. “He helped create the safe space to be uncomfortable, to portray these characters in the way they’re meant to be portrayed, to pay homage to the characters, with the themes it tackles. It’s not easy, creating a safe space.”

And this work has paid off, Nwonye says. “All of us are coming together to create a gorgeous and intimate show where we’re talking about hard topics and still able to laugh at the end of the day.”

There’s comedy and tragedy in Fairview, and both elements help bring us to the goal of the play, or any play, as Williams sees it.

“On the most fundamental level, I want audiences walking away thinking about their position in this world,” he says. More specifically, he says, “I would love for this play to serve as the launching pad for community change and community conversation,” where people are “able to learn about each other’s background and where they come from and understand that these differences are beautiful.”

As for the cast, he is seeing many changes already. At the beginning of the rehearsal process, Trinity Bryant, who is playing Keisha, used to “do whatever needs to be done and leave right after,” Williams says. She was “very shy, very reserved.” But Bryant, a dance major, has started to open up on stage and elsewhere, he says.

At a department-wide meeting, Bryant’s dance professor approached Williams. “She said ‘Thank you so much, because I can see a big difference in Trinity,’” he recalls her saying. “‘Since being a part of this play, she has opened up. She has blossomed a lot more.’”

Bryant knows that Keisha is confident. Throughout rehearsal, that confidence came alive. During a scene in Act 1, Bryant was center stage. She delivered a smartly timed monologue about the pressures of adolescence and then bounded off stage with a dancer’s lightness.

With Fairview, Williams aims to provoke this kind of growth in his cast and beyond.

“Our hope is to change the entire world,” he says. “Let me start with those around me.”