Lydia R. Diamond on race, class and Broadway’s ‘Stick Fly’

Reporting from New York —  Lydia R. Diamond, whose plays often work the intersection of race and class, remembers once posing a hypothetical scenario she knew would prompt heated debate.

The 42-year-old African American playwright and teacher contended that if the Obamas had a son and that son became the fiancé of somebody’s white daughter, the young woman’s family would not be happy, despite the breeding and connections.

“My white friends would say, ‘No, no, no, you’re wrong! Class would trump race,’” she recalls. “I wasn’t convinced — and still am not — that Grandma would be all that thrilled. No way would anybody want to see a black guy show up.”

But, she says, “as I’ve gotten older, I’ve so much less conviction about being right. There are so many gray areas. And this is where I write from.”

In “Stick Fly,” a comedy that opens Thursday on Broadway directed by Kenny Leon and produced by Alicia Keys, Diamond moves full steam into this tricky terrain. In the play, which had a well-received production at the Matrix Theatre in Los Angeles in 2009, sparks fly when two young African American men bring their respective girlfriends to meet the parents at their lavish summer getaway on Martha’s Vineyard.

The crusty patriarch Joseph LeVay, a neurosurgeon, has married into one of the Vineyard’s first families, though he often reminds his sons, Flip, a plastic surgeon, and Kent, an aspiring novelist, of his working-class roots. The LeVay family history impresses Taylor, Kent’s girlfriend and an entomologist whose lab work lends the play its title. Among the human specimens in the house who come under her scrutiny are Kimberly, Flip’s affluent and pretty white lover who works with underprivileged inner-city children; and 18-year-old Cheryl, a bright soon-to-be Ivy League college student who has taken over the household chores from her ailing mother, the LeVay’s longtime maid. Tony winner Ruben Santiago-Hudson portrays Dr. LeVay, with Dule Hill and Mekhi Phifer as his sons.

“Lydia is courageous to write about class and race in such a broad and complicated way,” says director Kenny Leon, who also directed “The Mountaintop” on Broadway this fall and was at the helm of the 2010 revival of August Wilson’s “Fences” with Denzel Washington and Viola Davis. “It’s not about assigning blame. It’s about the universality of family and identity.”

Indeed, wealth, prestige and education are no cushion against the clashes that erupt in the course of the weekend visit. This occurs most memorably when a game of Scrabble deteriorates into a squabble between Taylor and Kimberly. When Taylor complains bitterly that the white students and teacher of her feminist seminar refused to acknowledge an inherent racism in their approach to a certain topic, Kimberly calls her on her hyper-sensitivity.

“Kimberly, because she has worked with kids on such a low economic standard, finds it difficult to understand why this woman with such beauty, tenacity and intelligence would cast herself as a victim,” says Diamond. “And Taylor simply feels that such overt displays of racism warrant questioning.” She adds that the pressure mounts because of submerged romantic and sexual connections among the four people. “As Kimberly later tells Flip, ‘That was about boys as much as it was about anything.’”

Alicia Keys says that it was just these “funny and smart” confrontations that led her to put her name above the title as producer and to compose incidental music for the show. “I just loved the way the characters purposefully challenged each other, even if they might argue the opposite of what they believed,” she says. “I do it myself sometimes to see who it drives mad and who can handle it. I think all families do that at these sorts of emotional gatherings.”

Although Diamond says that her play is not autobiographical, elements of the character of Taylor emerge as the playwright sits, dressed all in black, in a Midtown office. She is soft-spoken and thoughtful, a Boston-based mother, teacher and wife who finds the media spotlight somewhat intimidating in dealing with such prickly issues.

“I feel so vulnerable to being misunderstood that I pray that the black literati don’t come after me,” she says. “These conversations can be so charged and dangerous.”

While she teaches playwriting at Boston University, her husband John, a sociologist, lectures on achievement gap issues at Harvard. Asked where she herself might fit in at the LeVay home on Martha’s Vineyard, Diamond toys with a metal fly on a chain around her neck, a gift from an actress who was in a previous production of “Stick Fly,” which had a long gestation period in regional theater.

“I think I’m better behaved than Taylor in that moment,” she says with a laugh. “I certainly identify with the roiling frustration. ‘Why do I always have to be the irritant saying that?’ My opinions have softened, but there is racial economic inequality. While the arguments may be more nuanced now, all you can do is point it out. When you’ve been doing that for so long, you can see people roll their eyes. ‘Oh, there she goes again.’ But maybe it’s not my turn anymore to scream about it into the wind. It’s now for somebody younger to do that.”

Born in Detroit, where her father was a high school principal, Diamond had a fairly peripatetic youth. Her parents divorced when she was 2, and she followed her mother, an academic and musician, around the country.

“I’m old enough to have experienced people getting out of the pool when I got in, pools where my mother would not have been allowed,” she says. “So I grew up with fierce loyalties around our heritage of African Americans and the need to address the issues of black disenfranchisement.

Her previous work has often dealt with those themes — such as her adaptation of Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and “Voyeurs De Venus,” her most recent play about the freak exploitation of the historical figure known as the “Hottentot Venus.” Diamond finds it amusing that she may be the one to introduce white audiences to what in the black vernacular is referred to as “bougie”: the socio-economic subset of wealthy, well-educated and patrician black families like the LeVays. While Americans were introduced to middle-class black families through the Huxtables in “The Cosby Show,” Diamond says that she finds it “startling” that many Americans are not aware of a class of privileged blacks in this country with their own codes and rituals.

Their comparative privilege has not inured them from being treated, as Flip says in the play, like just another black person. He complains to the others about having been followed around recently in a Pottery Barn by a suspicious salesperson, whom he finally confronts with the fact that he is a doctor, well-dressed, well educated and well-traveled. To which Cheryl, the substitute maid, says sarcastically, “So they should follow around a guy who works for, say, the phone company, just not you?”

“Each character has to confront their own racial, economic contradictions,” says Diamond. “But it is not appropriate to say, ‘I’m better, and so you shouldn’t treat me like a black person. You should treat me like a person.’ I find those sorts of dissonances great fodder for the theater and issues we should continue to examine … even if, at times, you feel that the shifting perspectives can open up the ground beneath you.”

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