Director Cheryl Lynn Bruce on Next Act’s ‘Splash Hatch’

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“I remember standing on stage looking at the audience—and I wasn’t afraid,” says Cheryl Lynn Bruce. The director of Next Act’s Splash Hatch on the E Going Down was an 8th grader in a Chicago Catholic school in the late ‘50s—and she recalls it as clear as yesterday. “I just knew—that sense of communicating with an audience. I felt like—a special being, elevated into some other kind of world where magic was.” She adds with a big smile, “I didn’t have stage fright!”

Bruce is a remarkable figure to meet, disarmingly formidable, animated in body language and articulate in speech. “I’m an actor,” she declares, “but I’ve had the good fortune of working with incredible directors.” She sees herself as a mentor, recalling that there were only two Black Equity actors in Chicago when she started. “Now it’s commonplace,” she says with satisfaction.

Bruce has been on Broadway in The Grapes of Wrath and Off-Broadway in From the Mississippi Delta, but has also focused much of her energy offstage, directing for Chicago’s Steppenwolf and Goodman Theater, and the Milwaukee Rep, among many others. Bruce is especially drawn to work by Splash Hatch’splaywright, Kia Corthron. 

She recalls discovering Corthron at a Monday night play reading in Hartford. “It was like no play I’d heard before because of the word play, the unspooling of the story in epigrammatic scenes. I love the subjects she tackles.”

Where many playwrights are content to tackle one subject at a time, Corthron assumes responsibility for several in each play. Splash Hatch’s protagonist, Thyme, is a 15-years old, married and pregnant, a Black girl living in Harlem. This would provide enough drama for most playwrights, but Corthron brings multiple scenarios into play. Written in 1996, Splash Hatch is suffused with Thyme’s awareness of environmental degradation. 

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Prophetic Playwright

As Bruce reminds us, in the ‘90s, environmentalism was an undercurrent in mainstream America and a fringe concern among African Americans, who often dismissed it as the preoccupation of “weird white people. There wasn’t a conversation about it in the Black community,” she continues. “Here we are, 27 years later, facing climate upheaval, pollution, unpredictability. Splash Hatchpredicted, suspected, these things. The issues the play raises now seem so apt.”

Thyme is aware of recycling and wasting resources and Splash Hatch addresses high Black infant mortality in the U.S., toxic workplace conditions and the toxic neighborhoods where the poor often live. Job insecurity and inadequate health insurance for the working poor also factor into Splash Hatch. And the play juggles those issues without simply becoming a message dressed up as theater.

Antigone is Bruce’s favorite play, nearly 3,000 years old and still relevant, not because of its reflections on social conditions in ancient Athens but because it tells a strong story. “Everybody likes a story, and Splash Hatch is a story about issues and how the Black people in the story are living through those issues.”

Corthron’s use of language is unique, a dialogue composed on contractions and long winding sentences characterized by “no periods—the velocity of running through a line with only commas hooking ideas together, changing subjects with no pause,” Bruce says.

In other words, the audience must pay attention to the words and their context. “I like plays that ask the audience to do some of the work, as opposed to sitting there, being entertained,” Bruce continues. “There is an unspoken contract between audience and actors: we will go together somewhere within those two hours. The communion of experiencing those two hours together is so precious.” She cites the ancient Greek playwrights, rooted in religious ritual, linked somehow with the magic she first felt on stage in 8thth grade. 

Bruce once directed a student production of Antigone at DePaul University with a budget of $25. The staging of Splash Hatch will be similarly simple. “The actors are doing all the set changes. It’s a minimal set,” she says. “The actors are the jewels. Splash Hatch is not about production design—it’s the bare necessary to tell the story with Kia’s literary pyrotechnics.”

The takeaway from Splash Hatch? Bruce answers without hesitation. “Truth, beauty and hope.”