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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in SoHo. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. I am really grateful you are here and many thanks to you who have given during our fundraiser. If you haven't, please consider joining the thousands of listeners who value public radio and become a sustaining member.

On today's show, pastry chef Clarice Lam is here to talk about how to marry classic French techniques to pan-Asian flavors. Her new cookbook is titled Breaking Bao. Author Jeff VanderMeer will talk about his latest novel, Absolution. If your mind was blown by Annihilation, get ready. Then we'll speak with Sarah Conklin, whose new restaurant, Radio Star is right next to Transmitter Park, where WNYC's transmitter has stood for over 50 years. That is the plan, so let's get this started with Dominique Morisseau.

A new off-Broadway show takes us to Haiti and explores the relationship between two cousins, one raised in America and one raised in Haiti, who attempt to honor their deceased grandmother's wish for them to reconnect. It's titled Bad Kreyòl. That's spelled K-R-E-Y-Ò-L. It's the official language of Haiti, the first free Black republic in the Western hemisphere.

Simone is a Haitian American woman in her 30s with a finance degree and is "in between jobs". She likes her hair natural and she doesn't speak the language. This and other cultural differences drive a wedge between her and her cousin Gigi, a proud Haitian-born businesswoman who is often hard on Simone for not knowing enough about Haitian culture. Then there's Pita, the glamorous helper/friend who is basically family. He takes Simone under his wing, building a bridge between the two relatives who grew up in different countries.

The characters discuss cultural identity, what it means to belong, and the weight of being Haitian in a world that isn't always kind to the island nation. Bad Kreyòl is a co-production between Signature Theater and Manhattan Theater Company. It's running at the Signature Theater through Sunday, December 1st. The show's creator, playwright Dominique Morisseau joins us to discuss. Some of you might be familiar with her play Skeleton Crew, which was nominated for a Tony. Welcome to the studio.

Dominique Morisseau: Hi. Thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: What did you want to explore about Haitian culture in the show?

Dominique Morisseau: I went to write this play in 2014 with my dad. I visited Haiti with my father because my father's Haitian from Port-au-Prince. I went in 2014 after the earthquake, and I went there to try to write a different play, actually. I hadn't been since I was a young toddler with my grandmother and my aunt. I had never been with my father. My father has since passed. My father passed in 2020. I went there to try to write something. My father has always read all of my plays. I remember him looking at me while we were in Haiti and going, "Now, how are you going to do this one?" I was like, "I don't know, I'm going to figure it out," and then I did not figure it out.

It took me about five years later to even come up with what I thought I would write about. When I realized that what I went there to write wasn't the play, that what happened to me there was the play, I started writing in 2019 when my father was dying, and I finished the play when he passed away.

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Dominique Morisseau: The journey of writing this play, what I went there to accomplish was something very different. It's hard to answer, "What did I go to accomplish?" because I thought I was writing to accomplish something about, I don't know, earthquakes and our relationship to them and Haiti and the US. This play is still about Haiti in the US and the fraught relationship between the two and about Western imperialism. But I just didn't know how I was going to access that until I had to download a lot of what happened to me on my trip to figure it out.

Alison Stewart: What was something you knew that you had to get right about Haiti?

Dominique Morisseau: Ooh, so many things. Well, I had to get the strength and the resilience and the intellect of the people right, I had to get the history correct, and then I had to get the language correct. I mean, there is a lot of spoken Creole in the play along with some spoken English. I knew I had to get Creole in the way that the people are familiar with it, but in this play, I also feel like we go in and out of French, English, and Creole, so I call it-- this play is about Crefranglish. There's a fusion of how Haitians who are international, who travel the world, how they fuse all the different languages that they speak.

Alison Stewart: You also have a job as a playwright to get the message across of the play in the mixture of the-- what did you call it? The--

Dominique Morisseau: The Crefranglish, Creole, English and French.

Alison Stewart: How did you approach writing the dialogue so that it sounds natural, but also got your message across in this mix of languages?

Dominique Morisseau: Well, I am Haitian, and I grew up in a household with half of my family, my father's side of the family is all Haitian, even though we're all in Detroit, which is not where most Haitians go. We didn't have a very large practiced culture in Detroit. There weren't a bunch of Haitian restaurants and not a vibe like if you go to Brooklyn, but there is a Haitian community in Detroit that I grew up around. Their vernacular, their language is in my head, even if I didn't understand it. If I didn't understand the French, I still recognized it. Does that make sense?

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Dominique Morisseau: So I know the accent, I know the idiosyncrasies. I know all of the different things about Haitian culture because it wasn't something I thought about. It's just something that I've experienced being raised in it. I didn't realize how much culture I was raised in until you start doing backwards math and start trying to write it, and you're like, "Hey, I know this. I know this is my grandmother, this is my father, this is my aunt, this is my cousin," and I just invoke all of them.

Alison Stewart: You talked about history, that you wanted to include that-

Dominique Morisseau: Yes.

Alison Stewart: -in the show. Tell us a little bit about what we might see on the set, because I told you, I read the play-

Dominique Morisseau: Yeah, that's right.

Alison Stewart: -more than I didn't see it, and I saw little notes in the play about how there'll be certain portraits of certain people.

Dominique Morisseau: That's right. Well, for instance, there's a portrait in this play hanging. It's more like a stained glass, and that's a tribute to my grandmother, who did stained glass work, but my grandmother used to make. My father really wanted a stained glass image of Toussaint Louverture, who was one of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution. Sort of, in a way, Toussaint is in the home, in the Haitian homes, and so is Dessalines, Henri Dessalines, who are our freedom fighters in the way that you might see Malcolm X or Martin Luther King in the homes of Black Americans. That was one of the-- invoking that spirit of Haitian revolution is very present in the play. It especially comes up when looking at the relationship between Haiti and the US we're discussing.

Alison Stewart: A new off-Broadway play that follows two cousins, one Haitian American, the other Haitian-born, as they attempt to reconcile their differences and get closer to one another. It's called Bad Kreyòl. It runs at the Signature Theater through to Sunday, December 1st. We're speaking with its playwright, Dominique Morisseau. All right, these two cousins, Simone and Gigi, right?

Dominique Morisseau: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What's their relationship at the start of the show?

Dominique Morisseau: Simone and Gigi are estranged. They are definitely, they have a lot of tension, and I like to say their tension mirrors the tension between Haiti and the US. They embody that with each other. When Simone arrives back into Haiti to visit her cousin, their dynamic is at play immediately. It's a little bit of a cultural difference like the Caribbean influence. It's very similar to all across the continent of Africa, like the things that we think are impolite are not considered impolite.

Alison Stewart: She comments on her hair.

Dominique Morisseau: She comments on her hair, she comments on her weight. These are things that are normalized. They're not like your hurt feelings are not a thing like that. They're immediately navigating the differences of like, "Hey, I didn't mean anything by that, why are you getting a-- it's not a big deal," to like, "You're cutting me deeply." But in the midst of all of that, there's 100 things that they're navigating.

Gigi has one way of doing things. She wants this reconciliation to be on her terms in a Haitian way, and Simone wants a reconciliation her way. Not only are they not speaking the same actual spoken languages, but they're not speaking the same heart language, and they're not speaking the same love language. This play is about language, the multiple ways in which language connects or divides us.

Alison Stewart: Simone wanders into her store, wanders into Gigi's store. What are her expectations for the trip? She has plans, sort of.

Dominique Morisseau: Yeah. She wants to connect with her roots. She wants to feel like Haiti is her country and so she wants to get her hands dirty, as she says. She wants to work with NGOs, which are non-government organizations. She wants to try to do good and I think quickly in this story, the concept of American do-gooderism is brought into question. Like, are you doing the good you think you're doing if you are inserting yourself in places that-- in a culture that you don't fully understand?

That's a complicated question for someone who is Haitian American, because there are things that you do understand, and things you don't understand, and things, it doesn't even matter what you understand. You have your own inner compass that tells you what you believe in as well. All of those things are brought into the chaos in the midst of the story.

Alison Stewart: What does Gigi want when she sees her cousin?

Dominique Morisseau: I believe Gigi wants a connection. She wants to, one-- she's dutiful, right, so she wants to do what the grandmother asked. She's like the good cousin, if you will. She's the grandmother's favorite, in a way, in her mind anyway, and in both of their minds. I think she wants to find a way to bond with her cousin and connect and do it on her terms. I think that that's where they're bumping, because she has to learn some things about herself as well and Simone's Americanisms, although they agitate and they're disruptive, not in the best ways, in some ways, who Simone is, just at her core outside of country is who Gigi has to learn to see and respect.

Alison Stewart: In comes Pita right away. He's a helper to the family. He's such a lively persona. He immediately starts a friendship, a kinship with Simone. What does he see in Simone?

Dominique Morisseau: Pita represents a community in this story that is under told, which is the LGBTQ community in Haiti, but he also represents another community that most people don't know about, which is restavek. Restavek in Haiti are children who are sent to the city who were maybe raised in a country or whose families are poor in the country. They're partnered with a family in the city to end up hopefully working for that family and being afforded education and a better opportunity at life. In many cases, that goes into abusive situations.

Pita represents a former restavek who is now just a part of their family and it's complicated. Gigi and Simone have a different way of understanding Pita's history in their family and they have to reconcile with that, but Pita himself is proud and independent. What he sees in Simone is someone who also is searching for family, much in the way that he has a blended family in this family, and he wants to help her find her way in.

Alison Stewart: He doesn't really hide his personality.

Dominique Morisseau: No.

Alison Stewart: But he's not completely open about his sexual orientation.

Dominique Morisseau: No.

Alison Stewart: What are the dangers for openly gay folks in Haiti?

Dominique Morisseau: When I was In Haiti in 2014, I met with an organization named Kouraj.

Alison Stewart: It's in the play, yeah.

Dominique Morisseau: And it's in the play. We talk about Kouraj in the play. When I spoke with them and with my father actually translating for me, we talked about the protections that did not exist for Haitians in the same way that they exist for the US, folks who are openly gay in the US, and all the binaries and all the non-binaryism that exists in the US. There's a protected class here, that that does not exist in Haiti. That's not legislated. There are no legal protections for the LGBTQ community, so a hate crime is not considered a hate crime there. Thus it makes them much more vulnerable to violence and to harm being perpetrated against them, because there's not really a legal penalty for it.

Alison Stewart: Yeah, it's interesting because Gigi and Simone argue about this.

Dominique Morisseau: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Argue about Pita's openness.

Dominique Morisseau: That's right. Yeah, and they're both-- I'd like to say Gigi and Simone both have an idea on Pita's wellness and safety. They're both very committed to it, but from two very different vantage points. One from the American vantage point of, "Go find your affinity space, be free, and be free to be you," and the other from, "Do not disrupt and make yourself a target for harm." Those are two different cultural worldviews but they're both speaking a core value, even if they're not speaking the same love language.

Alison Stewart: We just got a really nice text that says, "I saw a performance of Bad Kreyòl and was blessed to finally meet Dominique. She's one of my sheroes and absolutely one of my favorite playwrights. Funny enough, today, while I was texting a friend who heads an employee affinity group at a major tech firm saying, do a group outing to Bad Kreyòl, the promo for today's segment came on. I'm spreading the word about this awesome play far and wide."

Dominique Morisseau: Aw, thank you so much. I'm so honored by that. Affinity space is a phrase that comes up in the play humorously and then not, but it's about-- so we look at a lot of different affinity spaces inside the story, but we're also curating affinity programming around the place. At Signature Theater, we have different nights. We've had Haitian Community Night. Tonight is Black Theater Night. We have LGBTQ+ Night. We have a Haitian Vendor Market coming up. We have all these different nights to be able to allow for an understanding of what it means to have affinity space with different groups while they're watching shows.

Alison Stewart: What do you think this cast has brought to the play that maybe even surprised you as the playwright?

Dominique Morisseau: Four out of five of my cast members are Haitian, Haitian American, and that is unique because they speak better Creole than me. I speak bad Creole to be clear. This title is a call out to the self. I spoke it in Haiti, but I was willing to try and this cast to be able to play Haitian on a stage. One of the things that keeps getting refrained to me, especially when I talk to Haitians, is they cannot believe that they are hearing or speaking or experiencing their language on a stage on 42nd Street in New York City. That is blowing a lot of people away for that.

I am certainly not the only Haitian American playwright creating work. There are so many that deserve amplification, especially right now. I would like to see all of them get the shine that they deserve, and also, I recognize how rare it is, even with all of us out there doing it, how Jeff Augustine, Diane Exavier, France-Luce Benson, so many of us are working and yet our stories are not that amplified, and this is sort of a rare experience.

Alison Stewart: When you spoke with director Tiffany Nichole Greene and you talked to her about envisioning this show, what did you want to see? Because I understand the stage turns, which is kind of interesting.

Dominique Morisseau: Yeah, that's a little secret trick and Tiffany didn't want to make it a trick. She wanted to just start off with it and I was like, "No, you got to save it." We negotiated that because her vision is really strong. What I love about Tiffany Nichole Greene is that she's just one of the most capable people. She's a really gentle giant, as I say, and she's really clear. She is specific and clear in her intention. She wanted to make sure that the way this world existed, that we are able to feel like we are traveling through Haiti with Simone.

The way she is using the set and negotiated the set with our incredible set designer, Jason Sherwood, is to say, "How can we go on the trip like Dominique went on the trip, like the character Simone is going on the trip?' So the audience gets to feel like you are truly, even though we're only in a theater-- and if you've never been to Haiti, you probably know very little about Haiti. When you leave here, you're going to feel like you took at least like a one-day trip there.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk A little bit about music in this show and dance of the show. It sent me down a rabbit hole on Google.

Dominique Morisseau: Oh, yeah.

Alison Stewart: Tell me a little bit more.

Dominique Morisseau: The music team is my favorite thing. The sound design team is one of my favorite things to talk about because one half of the sound design team is my husband, Jimmy Keys, J. Keys, and the other is Curtis Craig. This is my third show together with them as a team at Signature, and I just love the way that they think and work. Jimmy went on to Haiti with me with my dad in 2014, so we were both there together for the first time. He's been to the same places that I've been to. He shazamed a song when we went to a club and he was like, "I'm going to put that song that I heard in that club." So he's grabbing songs and music-

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Dominique Morisseau: -from Haiti that we heard there and also songs that are traditional, songs that I've heard in my family, and then also songs of contemporary artists. The music itself and the story and the sound was playing on a car in Haiti. Curtis is really great about natural sounds. He'll like a car is going to buy to play that song that Jimmy brought to him to play. It's just like this great-- they're a great team and there's a great fusion. You really feel like you're in Haiti and around Haiti, what Haitian families listen to at their events, holidays or things, and also what contemporary Haiti is probably listening to.

Alison Stewart: Can I bring politics into it for a moment?

Dominique Morisseau: Oh, yes, please.

Alison Stewart: Haiti's become a political subject this election. Presidential candidate Donald Trump has lied about how Haitians behave in this country. He has used profanity to describe Haiti. There's discussion in this play about how the rest of the world views Haiti, but there's a lot of pride in the play as well. How did you think about including a counter narrative to the news that we're receiving about, or some people are receiving, about Haiti right now?

Dominique Morisseau: It's interesting because I did not obviously write this play in any way, shape or form to respond to foolishness about those things that are said about Haitians, especially not that particular foolishness on that debate stage, but I have been hearing this kind of foolishness all my life. I didn't need the debate stage to know how the world has perceived us and the other. The anti-immigrant, anti-Black, anti-Haitian hate that I have experienced throughout my life is nothing new and I don't desire to qualify our humanity to anyone. I don't desire to respond because it is an indignity to respond to that.

What I do want said though, I do want to allow for folks to speak, Haitians to be able to speak for themselves. And it's tough because when you're misrepresented, the burden of representation becomes high. I have a lot of concern and protection around my Haitian American cast who are feeling the weight of the representation really high. It makes them put a little pressure on themselves that they shouldn't have to have. I want them to just be free to be artists and not feel like they have to dispel myths that were not theirs to dispel or not theirs that they made.

I grew up experiencing people talking, making negativity out of treating vodou, because that's where they're getting that BS from. They're getting it from what they assume is voodoo. I've been hearing voodoo be-- this fake witchcraft of voodoo be invoked all of my life and all of the racist tropes that go with it. I think it's time to call out the racism of those things and also not have to have Haitians do the labor of qualifying their own humanity.

Alison Stewart: Thank you for answering that. We appreciate that.

Dominique Morisseau: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Bad Kreyòl is running at the Signature Theater through December 1st, Black Theater Night is tonight, and there's a Haitian vendor market this Saturday-

Dominique Morisseau: That's right.

Alison Stewart: -October 26th.

Dominique Morisseau: I would like to say also, if you really want to know what we eat, come to the play, because there's a lot of Haitian food around this story.

Alison Stewart: I'm sold. Dominique, thank you so much for joining us.

Dominique Morisseau: Thank you.