By SHARON EBERSON
Tami Dixon has a case of “brain spaghetti,” as she calls it. It’s a condition she experienced 10 years ago, when she researched, wrote and performed the solo tour de force South Side Stories, and now she is at it again.
The result, starting Friday at City Theatre, is South Side Stories Revisited.
“Including myself, I have 30 distinct voices, some that may pop up with one line,” she said. “So that’s brain spaghetti.”
Dixon is back at City Theatre, having interviewed dozens of South Siders to try to get the pulse of what’s happening from the Flats to the Slopes, and not just weekend scenes on Carson Street.
In 2012 and during an extended run into 2013, Dixon performed South Side Stories, which came out of a two-year fellowship of embedding in the neighborhood. The stories she heard and related were mostly filled with nostalgia.
City Theatre came back to her with a different idea: To focus on the here and now.
“I got to really listen to people in all of the shades and experiences that they’re having now,” said Dixon, who conducted most of her interviews in the summer of 2023. “It’s just humanity playing out.”
The trick was finding a tie that binds.
“Last time, the narrative that tied it all together was me coming to the South Side, living in the Slopes for the first time and trying to find home.”
Helping her revisit and refocus is longtime friend and West Coast-based Matt M. Morrow, who returns as her director, along with co-artistic director and dramaturg Clare Drobot. Also back on the creative team are scenic designer Tony Ferrieri and projection designer David Pohl.
Writing and performing a solo show, Dixon points out, you don’t have the big-picture luxury that playwrights can get from listening to others say their words.
“So I need people on the outside that I trust and just will say, “OK, if that’s how you feel, I believe that. And so Matt is just that person. He had to be there.”
In the 2024 version of the show, Dixon said she will engage with the audience, a continuation of South Side Stories Revisited as a communal project.
“I don’t know what the hell’s going on. Even after all this exploration, I’m still struggling myself. Even 10 years ago, I feel like, I felt sure about things, and now I feel lost about the world in a lot of ways,” Dixon said. “And I felt a little bit of pressure about me having to figure that out before I do this show. And finally, Matt and I were like, why do I have to figure that out when this is the thing everyone is struggling with? So why don’t we, together, go on this journey and explore all of these stories and talk about what they’re bringing up for us.
One person this revisit brought up for Dixon was her neighbor, Eleanor, who was a character in the show’s previous incarnation.
“She’s since passed, but I talk about her because … she embodied the spirit of the South Side. She was tough, a bit mean, and freaking hilarious,” Dixon said. “And she would say to me things like, ‘I don’t know why people are putting all these decks on their houses. What the hell’s the point?’ And I realized that she had grown up here, spent her life here. Her childhood was in the backdrop of the mill, which dominated their lives. And so her resistance and revulsion at new people coming in and putting decks on made me realize she couldn’t even see the view, because her frame of reference only included the mill. And I started thinking, well, maybe I’m having trouble understanding what’s going on right now because I’m looking at the world through the lens of how the world used to be, before COVID changed everything. So that’s kind of my entry point.”
Dixon had no agenda, and any conclusions drawn from her South Side slices of life will be personal.
Here’s more of what she had to say about South Side Stories Revisited.
Q: Did you approach things differently this time around?
A: The approach changed because when I first did the show, I was pretty new to town and I didn’t have a lot of resources to connect with people. That’s where the idea for just dragging around a cart and two chairs and a sign came from. … So now I’ve got another 13 years under my belt in Pittsburgh, and knew more people, and more people knew me. So I did a lot of appointment interviews, people that City Theatre suggested. I wanted to talk to people that were doing things in the community: business owners, politicians, people that had lived in the community for a long time. I went back to a couple resources from the first show, neighbors from the Slopes, and then I thought, well, the first time worked so well, why just throw the baby out with a bath water? I decided just to take the cart and do that again. … With the random person on the street, there’s always going to be some beautiful gems in there. And then I also went to as many South Side events as I could: the home tour, the garden tour, block parties, council meetings … anything I could to introduce myself [and] the project to people. So a lot of different avenues this time, but still in the same kind of grassroots pattern.
Q: Was there a noticeable change in mood or the tenor of stories from the first time around?
A: Oh, yeah. The first Stories had a lot to do with nostalgia. It was all about the South Side of the past, and City Theatre wanted me to explore the now. And I think we are all having a challenging time articulating what the heck is going on right now. And if you just read the news, you’d get one version of the story. But if you live here, I heard a lot of people talking about how they’re upset that the news is only really talking about one part of what’s going on. [News about crime, for instance] is happening in communities all over the country, and we’re just a reflection of the world right now. We’re not separate from it. And so there was a sense of trying to change that narrative, because they didn’t think it was a correct narrative, a fair narrative or a full narrative.
Q: Did wanting to talk about the “here and now” inspire people to be more or less eager to tell their stories?
A: It was hard for some people to talk about the right now, because we have no distance from it. It’s not that we shook hands with this part of time and we understand it. We don’t really understand it. And so that was challenging at first, to have people have a deep sense of connection to the right now. And time is so strange right now. When I think about the last 10 years, I really think people can only wrap their heads around the last four years because the six years before that feel like another era, before COVID, and wherever we are now.
Q: It does feel like we’re still in it, this not-quite-post COVID time. It’s just a new version of it.
A: We don’t have distance, and there was a lot of fear, there was confusion, but there was still a deep love and a desire to protect this community. And the South Side’s always been resilient. It’s transformed many times as things have changed in the world, as things have changed in Pittsburgh. So that resiliency is definitely still there. But I did sense a little something that I think is not unique to the South Side. … I think this is the first time ever that anybody alive can remember that the entire world stopped. … And if that’s possible, we’re not sure what else is possible. So there was this just kind of confusion and fear that I think permeated a lot of people’s stories as well as this, underneath it all, deep love.
Q: If you live in Squirrel Hill, as I do, it seems like, to a lot of the world, the community has come to be defined by the synagogue shootings. Do people who live on the South Side, when they see reports of crime and nuisance bars on Carson Street on the nightly news, is there a sense of defensiveness, and are they adamant about telling the story of a neighborhood that is so much more than one thing?
A: I think it’s both. And I think there is a defensiveness because when you’re in Squirrel Hill, that’s not the only narrative happening, but it’s dominant and it was so horrific and it was all over the world. Now the issues on the South Side don’t go all over the world, but they certainly go all over the community. And we seem to be the poster child for things. … You know, the South Side has a reputation – it has never been squeaky clean. [Carson Street] has always been known as a party street. And I think if you talk to residents, they’ll say, yeah, on Friday and Saturday nights, it’s always been messy. But just like the rest of the world, there’s a lot more guns, there’s a lot more fear, there’s a lot more anger, and there’s a lot more rampant alcohol and drug abuse. … It’s not just here in the South Side, but because we have Carson Street, this historic street that notoriously has been full of bars forever, it’s going to play out there. The residents aren’t denying it. But if that’s what happens two nights a week between the hours of 1 and 4:00 a.m., most of the residents are like, ‘I’m not afraid,’ but they’re also not going out at those hours, where things are happening.
Q: Do you feel like a therapist as people tell you their stories? Or do you just have to be a good listener, which I guess is a good therapist, too?
A: There’s someone in the show who actually says that her job is helping people, and she just has to listen. And I think that’s the beautiful part of this. I kind of articulate this in the show. City Theatre didn’t send me on a task to go and fix anything. I don’t have an agenda here. I’m not trying to save or defend the South Side. They’ve asked me to explore what has been going on in the neighborhood over the last 10 years, and this is the result. And like I said with the last one, if somebody else was doing this project, they would probably have a whole different set of stories, because the lens through which they look at life is their lens. My lens happens to bend in this direction, of I really like to go deep with people.
Q: How hard is it to pick the stories that would help you form a cohesive theater work?
A: Deadlines are really the only things that keep me from continuing to tinker with it. That’s my favorite part of it. I mean, I love performing for sure, but as the writer, my favorite part of it is interviewing people. I could do that forever. If that was my full-time job, I’d love it.
Q: I feel the same way.
A: I think that’s what people are longing for, connection. And so for me, a deadline helps me. Last time I had a very loose deadline because I was working on a fellowship … and it wasn’t until I got close to the end that City Theatre was like, ‘Hey, why don’t you put whatever you have into the Momentum Festival?’ … I had a couple years to walk around and talk to people. And then [former artistic director Tracy Brigden] finally said, ‘OK, we’ve got to stop this. You’ve got to start writing.’ And I was terrified.
Q: How much did that first experience inform this one?
A: This time, because I’ve already done one of these things, I knew more of the landscape. I knew what it took. I got the call about it in March, right after I finished What the Constitution Means to Me, that they were going to put it in the next season … and they wanted to update it. They wanted a first draft by the end of September, and I said, ‘Well, I only have a little bit of time, so I’m probably going to just have, maybe it’s going to be Frankenstein in this somewhere – 50% of the material will be old material, and 50% will be new material. I had no idea what it would be. … June and July were big interview months for me. August was my transcribing month, and then September was synthesizing, like taking these transcriptions of hourlong interviews and distilling them down to three minutes. And while I’m in the interview, I can tell if this is something that is lighting me up, if there’s something calling out to the universe that this needs to be said. [But] I had to kill a lot of darlings during the process in October, when I did the workshop.
Q: One of the binding parts of the narrative you talked about last time was moving to the Slopes, and finding community that way. What is the binding nature of these stories this time?
A: The task was to explore what the neighborhood has been up to. So, like I say in the show, part of it is, who the hell knows what’s been going on in the last 10 minutes, let alone the last 10 years? Maybe together we can find our way through this. We can do it together.
TICKETS AND DETAILS
South Side Stories Revisited premieres at City Theatre’s Lillie Theatre, 1300 Bingham Street, January 13-February 18, 2024 (opening night is January 19). Tickets: visit CityTheatreCompany.org or call 412-431-2489 (CITY).
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