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Collaborators: Caroline Jackson Smith and Margaret Lynch
DECEMBER 20, 1999--Caroline Jackson Smith, associate professor of African-American studies and theater says that she and Cleveland playwright Margaret Lynch "have worked together for years, always on interesting projects dealing with what it means to be an American at this place and in this time."
Lynch is dramaturg for Cleveland's Great Lakes Theater Festival. In that role, she has worked with Jackson Smith on productions by noted playwrights Adrienne Kennedy, Horton Foote, and Lorraine Hansbury, among others. Crossroads Dancing is Lynch's first play. "The kinds of African-American plays I've directed, with their complexities of people speaking from different planes of reality, makes this play very familiar to me," says Jackson Smith, who has worked on many African-American plays. She believes there are considerable parallels between the role of ancestors and the extended family in both African- and Irish-American experiences. Besides the long-standing professional friendship the two share, sensitivity to the parallels is, she says, a major reason she was Lynch's director of choice for Crossroads Dancing. Jackson Smith says she and Lynch see "a lot of similarities" in their respective backgrounds--Jackson Smith is African-American, Lynch is Irish-American. When asked to explain, Jackson Smith says, "We've spent a lot of time together. We're the same age with similar educational backgrounds. We share a lot of issues--growing up as women in mid-century with mixed messages: being pushed ahead in new opportunities but still wrestling with marriage and family issues that don't go away."
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