In the mid-1920s, a group of young Black artists came together to create the first all-Black literary magazine. With minds like Wallace Henry Thurman, Langston Hughes, Richard Bruce Nugent, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Aaron Douglas behind it, FIRE!! would go on to influence the Harlem Renaissance for years, despite only publishing one issue, November 1926. Now the lives and experiences of the legends behind the magazine are coming to the stage of Philadelphia’s Quintessence Theatre Group in FIRE!! (Oct. 8-Nov. 2), written and adapted by Marilyn Campbell-Lowe and Paul Oakley Stovall.
“These voices are fading,” Campbell-Lowe said. “FIRE!! is a classic. I would like to reintroduce audiences to these voices, because they’re absolutely brilliant.”
The world premiere production will tell the backstage story of the joy and drama of the magazine’s creation, as Campbell-Lowe described it, and will also deliver enactments of some of the works published in FIRE!! As an example of the former, Campbell-Lowe mentioned the time Thurman was robbed on a Sunday afternoon on his way to give $1,000 to the magazine’s printer.
“It was fascinating to get to know them in a different way,” Stovall said of working on the story crafted around the magazine’s contents. “Anytime you take someone that you have exalted so much and then try to have them speak in a casual, collegial way—what you lean into is that they’re just human beings. As incredible as the work that they’ve done, they were just young people trying to pay their rent, trying to crash over the other person’s house when they needed somewhere to stay. It humanizes them in a way.”
The production, directed by Raelle Myrick-Hodges, will also feature music and dance as these young future legends collaborate and celebrate their art.
“I never perceived them as being in their 20s,” said Myrick-Hodges of exploring these emerging artists’ lives. “To me, the draw of the play is that it’s every single artist that ever started to make art: what those fears look like, what it’s like to feel betrayed by a fellow artist, and what it’s like to have them champion you.”
Jerald Raymond Pierce is the managing editor of American Theatre.
