Eisa Davis brings ‘Bulrusher’ home to Berkeley Rep
For Eisa Davis, to have her play “Bulrusher” come to Berkeley Repertory Theatre is like coming home.
Davis is a Berkeley native and Berkeley High alum who now lives in Brooklyn. Her mother is a civil rights lawyer, and her aunt is prominent activist and scholar Angela Davis.
She also has a long history with Berkeley Rep, co-starring in the rock musical “Passing Strange” from its world premiere at the company through its hit Broadway run that was made into a Spike Lee film. As a playwright, she participated in the theater’s Ground Floor summer residency new play development program and contributed an audio play to its “Place/Settings” series during the pandemic shutdown.
“Of course, we would go to see Berkeley Rep shows when we were kids,” Davis says. “And I worked there as a telemarketer. Oh god, I was a terrible telemarketer. It was right as we were graduating high school.”
“Bulrusher” has deep local roots of its own. It’s set in Mendocino Country in the 1950s and suffused with the unique “Boontling” dialect of the small town of Boonville. It’s the coming-of-age story of a clairvoyant biracial foundling who was set adrift on a river as a baby and grew up in a nearly all-white town. Her whole world changes when she meets a Black girl newly arrived from Alabama.
“It’s a pretty mystical, poetic love story about identity and self-discovery,” Davis says. “There’s a deep love of the nature of language and a real rumination on what family is.”
Rich in poetic musicality, “Bulrusher” became a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Drama after its premiere at New York’s Urban Stages in 2006. In fact, playwright and then-Pulitzer-juror Paula Vogel stated in a series of recent Facebook posts that the Pulitzer jury voted that the prize go to Davis. Instead, the Pulitzer Board gave the award to David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Rabbit Hole,” which hadn’t been among the jury’s three finalists.
“Bulrusher” has actually played Berkeley before, making its West Coast premiere with Shotgun Players in 2007.
A coproduction with McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, New Jersey, the current production comes to Berkeley Rep direct from a run at the McCarter and is directed by its associate artistic director, Nicole Watson.
“It means a lot for me to have it come back, and I feel like I understand the piece in a new way than I did when it was out there in 2007,” Davis says.
She’s been spending a lot of time with “Bulrusher” in recent years. She directed an online production in 2020 as part of the digital theater series Bard at the Gate launched by Vogel. And she’s been working with composer/co-librettist Nathaniel Stookey on adapting “Bulrusher” into an opera that West Edge Opera (formerly Berkeley Opera) commissioned and plans to premiere in Oakland in 2024.
“The thing with the opera that is challenging is that the music does the work, and the words are there simply to facilitate the music,” Davis says. “So that means that I have to really find a way to strip bare the language. And the language itself is really rich and complex on purpose. These characters have created a language that is complex in order to talk to one another and entertain each other.”
“It’s so tough, because the play as I’ve written it is in a very precise rhythm,” Davis adds. “There’s music in the language of the play already. So I have to be able to let that go as much as I can and let him create a new rhythm for it. It’s been a musical puzzle more than anything else.”
In a way the opera is also coming full circle, because “Bulrusher” began in song.
“I had been writing a lot of poems at Cave Canem, which is this organization for Black poets,” Davis recalls. “A friend of mine, Daniel T. Denver, who’s a composer that I had collaborated with on some music, wanted to write a song cycle for soprano and piano and asked if I would write the text. And so I wrote these eight poems that he set to music, and in those eight poems, the plot of the play arrived. It just started to emerge from the skeleton of those poems and become this fully fleshed story.”
The Boontling dialect was something Davis read about in a book, but Mendocino County’s Anderson Valley is a place that has become part of her.
“I started going up there with family when I was young,” Davis says. “It’s really been a haven and a refuge for me. It’s really the first place that I spent time by myself for long periods of time in the woods, and really got to know myself as a spirit, and also really where I felt the courage to be an artist, even when there were many forces against me saying, don’t do that. I feel like that place has given me so much strength and nourishment.”
Davis credits a fellow playwright with helping to make the “really beautiful homecoming” with “Bulrusher” happen.
“The reason why it’s happening is not because of me. It’s because of Paula Vogel, who has been this huge champion for the play, and is such a warrior for it. She’s been on this mission to get the play up, so she can see it.”
And if that means Berkeley audiences get to see the play, again or for the first time, it’s a victory all around.
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.
‘BULRUSHER’
By Eisa Davis, presented by Berkeley Repertory Theatre
When: Oct. 27-Dec. 3
Where: Berkeley Rep’s Peet’s Theatre, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley
Tickets: $22.50-$134; 510-647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org