Berkshire’s English Department recently hosted playwright Emily DeVoti ’89.

DeVoti, a Great Barrington native whose works have been performed from New York City to London, shared her inspiration for writing with students in several English classes on April 12. Invited to speak to students in Lissa McGovern’s Built in the Berkshire’s class, DeVoti recalled first learning of W. E. B. Du Bois, the early civil rights pioneer born and raised in DeVoti’s hometown.

“I grew up here, but I never studied him before college,” DeVoti shared. “During my first year at Princeton I read [DuBois’] The Souls of Black Folk and I was amazed. He is, I think, Great Barrington’s most famous resident but he was not celebrated locally, and that made me ask a lot of questions.”

Fascinated by both Du Bois’ exclusion from her early schooling and his legacy in the area, DeVoti began to research his life, eventually developing and writing the play Beyond The Veil, a fictitious account of a meeting between Du Bois and Edith Wharton, an author whose work and legacy has long been appreciated and taught in schools locally, including at Berkshire. The screenplay focuses on the lingering question: What would have happened had Du Bois and Wharton met?

“I feel like they would have totally gotten along, I really do,” DeVoti said.

A staged reading of Beyond The Veil was performed by Shakespeare & Company at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in January to help launch the 2019 W. E. B. Du Bois Legacy Festival.

A deeper discussion about race, class and Du Bois’ legacy followed, as students asked questions on everything from his impact on the civil rights movement to his later years as a self-professed communist living in Ghana. 

At the end of her day, DeVoti visited Mari LoNano’s Contemporary Drama class who is charged with writing its own play as a group project. Students were eager to collect writing tips from DeVoti who’s written over ten of her own plays. She encouraged students to, “open up the flow a little, because you’ll feel that as a reader.”

When asked for suggestions on how to get started, DeVoti said some of her plays have begun as simply a piece of dialogue that she’s overheard, “because it’s real, and you can then imagine what goes around it.” She then shared ideas for how to structure a group writing project, like using the exquisite corpse model where different writing teams take on a beginning, middle, and an end, or using a monologue-based approach where every writer creates a monologue and the group strings them together to make a story.

The class concluded with a writing exercise developed by Cuban-American playwright and director María Irene Fornés, designed to help writers open up, create a simple scene, and hear voices for dialogue.

“The big thing is just getting characters talking,” explained DeVoti. “Through the talking, you find a character that’s interesting to you, and then you let them talk more. Then you throw in an obstacle and see what they do. Writing characters can often be delving into our memory to find someone that we haven’t been able to forget or someone that we would like to talk to but never had the chance.”

The trick to playwriting? According to DeVoti: “You really just have to do it. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad. Eventually something’s going to be good, and then you discover it.”