Queer love fights for its place on an antebellum plantation in 'Sugar in Our Wounds'

Something unusual happened when playwright Donja R. Love sat down to craft "Sugar in Our Wounds." He could not immediately hear the voices of the characters he plotted out in his Black gay love story set in the antebellum South.

Instead, Love said, the first character that spoke to him was a tree. He thought he could humor the muse until the other human voices started to emerge. "I said, OK, this will be gone by the third draft. But instead of the tree leaving, it's gotten stronger and deeper."

Now that tree, stout and talking, is an essential part of "Sugar," a surreal play that makes its regional premiere Friday at Penumbra Theatre. It's sort of a coming-out party for Sarah Bellamy, the company's president, who is directing "Sugar" as her first mainstage solo show.

"I love the magical realism of the piece," said Bellamy. "There are so many different expressions of love in it, and so many subtle ways to create consent in an environment where people don't have control over their bodies — everything from braiding hair to gently touching a face."

The story centers on a relationship between James, who is enslaved on a plantation, and Henry, a newly arrived stranger. Love said the idea for "Sugar" came from reading Tarell Alvin McCraney's "Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet," part of the Brother/Sister trilogy that Pillsbury House Theatre and the Mount Curve Company put on at the Guthrie Theater roughly a decade ago.

"There was this exchange between Marcus and his best friend about queerness during the time of enslavement, and what that meant. I thought, oh my gosh, why didn't I ever think of that," Love said. "Then I read a dissertation on sexuality and queerness during the transatlantic slave trade and I was, again, like, oh my gosh, we existed. We've always existed."

In a neat coincidence, actor Nathan Barlow, who played the title character in "Marcus" at the Guthrie, also is starring as James at Penumbra.

For Bellamy, the play reawakens a lot of the historical research she did in graduate school around the differences between how captives were treated in the Caribbean and South America vs. in the United States.

"The high production economies were just brutal and in Brazil and the sugar colonies, it was more lucrative to purchase a human, work that person to death, and then get a new person than to preserve their lives," said Bellamy. "There was a lot of terroristic violence in the Caribbean, with people's heads on stakes."

She explained that in the United States, slavery was a domestication project that relied on family separation.

"That's not to say that the corporeal violence wasn't there but the project was about sustainability," Bellamy said.

Even today, the effects of that experience can be seen with Black people's relation to the natural world, Love said. Billie Holiday's rendition of "Strange Fruit" is perhaps the most famous artistic example of how trees became locales of terror and dread for African Americans. But there are postcards and other macabre souvenirs of lynchings, as well.

The tree in "Sugar" is a metaphor of not just barbarism but also of recovery. Those who were enslaved were under "total surveillance and people had access to their labor and sexuality — anything that was wanted had to be given on pain of death," Bellamy said. "The tree is the place where all the men in James' family were lynched. But it also wants to be a holy space that is healing."

The tree blesses James' and Henry's love.

"It's in their feelings that they could find freedom," Love said.

"Sugar" is part of a trilogy that centers Black queer history. The other plays in the series are "Fireflies," set during the civil rights era and featuring a Martin Luther King-Coretta Scott King-style relationship where the woman is the power behind her husband, and "In the Middle," which is set during the current Black Lives Matter era.

"There's this rich, beautiful Black queer history that has existed and it has so many intersections, I just want to tell these stories in fresh and exciting ways," Love said. "This is just the tip of the iceberg."

Writing "Sugar" also was salutary for his own physical, mental and psychic health, he said.

"I'd just been diagnosed with HIV when I started writing this play, it helped me navigate my initial diagnosis," Love said. "I could feel myself becoming healed. I thought, 'Oh, if this is what writing is doing for me, I hope that my work will help others navigate through in their own way.'"

'Sugar in Our Wounds'
Who: By Donja R. Love. Directed by Sarah Bellamy.
Where: Penumbra Theatre, 270 N. Kent St., St. Paul.
When: 7:30 p.m. Wed.-Fri., 2 & 7:30 p.m. Sat., 4 p.m. Sun. Ends March 19.
Tickets: $20-$45. 651-224-3180 or penumbratheatre.org.
Protocol: Masks required.