In a rehearsal room deep inside the Mead Center, Arena Stage’s home in Southwest D.C., the cast and company of We Are Gathered are running through the new play by Tarell Alvin McCraney. Tape on the floor marks the dimensions of Arena’s in-the-round Fichandler Stage, reimagined for the moment as a late-night gay cruising area in a park, where the play’s two lovers, W. Tre and Free, first meet.

Watching intently from one side of the room, McCraney, the Academy Award-winning writer of Moonlight betrays little nerves or discomfort sharing the play-in-process with the small audience that’s been invited to absorb and discuss.

Seated a few feet away, in sneakers, joggers, and a Pride-striped button-up shirt, Kent Gash, who’s directing the world-premiere production, radiates calm encouragement to his cast. He and McCraney previously collaborated on the plays Choir Boy and the ballroom-set romantic drama Wig Out!, and, as I’ll mention to the writer later over a Zoom call, both men make sharing a work-in-progress with a crowd of mostly strangers look easy.

Opening up that sacred space is simple, but not easy, McCraney asserts. Was he nervous? “Yeah, I’m always nervous,” he admits. “What I do is important to me and it’s important to connect. Sure, some of it is about perfectionism and doing it right, but at 45, I know that there is no perfect, so I sort of disabuse myself of that.”

Beyond just getting things right, McCraney — who also chairs the playwriting department at Yale’s School of Drama, and has, since 2023, served as artistic director of L.A.’s Geffen Playhouse — is driven to create lasting work that reflects the Black gay experience. “It is essential to make sure that my community knows that it exists,” he says.

“It is essential to have places for it to breathe together and think through and dream together. We won’t survive without this thing, and so, yeah, I get nervous. I get nervous about it because it’s important.”

On the rehearsal stage, actors Kyle Beltran, as protagonist W. Tre, and Nic Ashe as Free, flow beautifully together. Their couple flirts and banters, and argues over the exact details of how they met in that park, and where exactly their present relationship should be headed.

Tre isn’t sure where his heart resides in his internal tug-of-war between the poles of blissful monogamy, and cruising for anonymous sex. He loves Free, but does he need to be married to him? That’s the underlying question of We Are Gathered. The play approaches his dilemma from several angles while respecting the long history of gay men gathering in these secret spaces, even now in an age of instant hookup apps.

“It was important to me to talk about that generational divide,” McCraney says. “It was important to look at the ways in which a Gen Z person dating a millennial, a geriatric millennial, might be like, ‘Wait, what? What is this world you were talking about and how does it exist?’ And really pointing out, ‘You don’t even know you inherited these things. You don’t even know that there were people in this park before you who needed to do these things and set it up so you could do it.'”

Past generations of queer people cleared the way for not just today’s respectable freedoms, like marriage equality, but also for gay men to cruise, hook up, and generally express their sexuality in ways that do not always appear respectable.

“Not that I think cruising is this sort of great legacy handed down over time,” clarifies McCraney. “But I think the ways in which we talk about our intimacy and sexuality — and the ways in which we cultivate that, underground or not — are important.”

METRO WEEKLY: I can see you are at Arena. Do you feel like you’re living there at the moment?

TARELL ALVIN McCRANEY: No. Actually, like all projects, I wish I had more time here. It’s been a great experience, but no, I’m not. I’ve been in the building with this process, and, y’know, sometimes you feel like, “Oh God, I sleep here,” but I don’t, I come here, I dream for a little bit and we’ve been in and out. So it feels like it’s happening so fast.

MW: I was there a week before last to watch your rehearsal. It felt like a genuine communion in the room between the company and the audience that was gathered. How did it feel for you?

McCRANEY: It felt very welcoming. It felt wonderful to be back in the DMV, I’ll say that. It felt amazing to get a sense of what it is to call in community for this event, and then try and maintain that as we open up for audiences who may not feel like they are in community, and in a space that’s larger.

I’ve been investigating what this thing is, this calling is — I’m trying not to get emotional about it — in what I do. And I’ve always known that my job is to call, to gather folks to a story or to something so we can engage it. That’s my calling in life. And as we discover or explore what community means to us, how it operates, it can be very tricky. Because we start going, well, “community,” and then you look at the world and how fast the internet is, and the introduction of broadband around the world, and into the ways in which satellite, Starlink, things like that are making it easier for us to access each other, there are so many people who may find community together. And the task is so important. It’s for us to look right in front of us and see who is in front of us and know that that is the world, that this present moment is the world.

So, when we invite that world to grow, how do we do that and still keep that connected feeling that we had when it was just us in a room welcoming each other? That’s the job. That’s the task. And it’s not easy. It is simple, quite simple, but it is not easy.

So, that’s how I feel. I felt very much like, wow, this is what it means, call people in a room, begin to tell stories, begin to hear stories from them, call-and-response. Find a way towards what we’re here to do, and then go out into the world and continue thinking about that until the next time we can gather again together.

And how do you grow that same feeling? How does it gain elasticity in a room full of 500 people from various places who just had to drive through a rainstorm to get to you, or who did their taxes yesterday, or whose mother is ill, or all of the things? How do you gather them and still sort of gain that intimacy of presence in the moment? So yeah, it was great to feel it. It helped sort of set the bar for what we’re trying to do.

MW: Now, for me, going into this play and immediately seeing that we’re going to be in a story about a Black gay couple who met cruising and are discussing marriage, I right away could see myself in the story. It doesn’t have to be that way, but it’s definitely a rare joy to experience it. And you consistently put Black gayness, or gay Blackness, in your work, so I just want to hear from you about your commitment to, as you’ve said, letting that community know they exist, and showing everybody.

McCRANEY: Yeah, I’m committed to it. I could try to be more eloquent than you were about it, but again, you learn that when someone says something and it’s right, you go, “Yeah, that’s it.” I will just say, I lost a lot of people very early in life. I’ve had a lot of loss in life. And dealing with grief, being in grief about those people, with those people, made me realize that my survival was predicated on the memory of them, the things they taught me, reimagining those things, and also — and this is going to sound way more cryptic than I mean it to be — but the ways in which I bring them with me.

Because I know, physically they’re not with me at this moment doing this thing, but I tell stories so that I can look to that corner and go, “That’s that time that I brought in that thing that my mother did, and it happened here.” My mother loved to dance, group dance, dance was so important to her, so it’s in the play. The fact that it’s here feels like she’s here.

I imagine I inherited that from a lot of folks who lost a lot, particularly enslaved folks who were trying to hold onto things that they had shards and pieces and memories about. I imagine I inherited this commitment to always bringing and filling rooms and spaces with remembrances and with the ability to bring presence of people who are no longer physically with us here. So yeah, it is how I survived, I think.

MW: Talking about the ancestors, I have to bring up the Nottoway Plantation, the largest surviving antebellum mansion, burning down yesterday. On the internet, a lot of people have reacted to it with absolute joy, and were then criticized for that. I can’t help but look at it joyfully. What do you think about it?

McCRANEY: I think the world reminds us quite often, especially as we build things, we try to make institutions that then lead to ways in which we write ourselves into jurisdiction and laws, that we are infinite. And I think this world, its power, as Octavia Butler tells us often, reminds us that change is actually God, and that things do change, they must change.

We can fight all we want against that change, but it will remind us that there are things outside of our control. Call them chaos, but there are things beyond our control, we try, we really do, we must, right? Like we’re sitting here right now being like, “We can’t be in-person, so we’re going to make this device that we can be together in.” And then, after how many years of doing this, every time I meet with somebody in person, we still go, “Oh God, yeah. Why don’t we do this more often?” Right? Because we need that, right? So yes, the world will remind us that there are things that will interrupt the things we need and things we think we need, and the ways in which life works. And then, there is God.

MW: That was a very spiritual reaction. I wonder if you have a visceral response to seeing that place go down in flames.

McCRANEY: Anything on fire after the fires that we had in L.A., I’m just very like, “Whoa.”

MW: I understand that.

McCRANEY: You know what I mean? I hear about the fires in Minnesota, I hear about the fires in New Jersey, and I’m just like, “Whoa.” I’m not even trying to be funny, but just after that….

I remember I flew from here, from D.C., January, I think it was eighth, back to L.A. I get off the plane, I go to my apartment and I go upstairs and I look out the window, and I can see the Palisades on fire. I don’t live in the Palisades, I don’t have those assets. And I’m looking across and I can see this entire city on fire. To see it, just see it, was wild. And seeing the flames shooting up in the air that far away — I’m at least 10 miles away.

So yeah, again, that’s why I’m saying, it may sound like I’m trying to be spiritual, but it’s, again, a constant reminder that sometimes the world has a chaos that will tell you that you don’t have control. And when you don’t have control, what do you do? That is how you know who you are as a person. Yeah, I don’t know. What do you do? What happens in that moment? What do you cling to? What thoughts do you have? So yeah, that, I don’t know. It didn’t scar me, but it reminded the shit out of me.

MW: That is not a perspective I brought to that piece of news. Taking it back to We Are Gathered. On the subject of cruising, the play goes into detail through W. Tre, your protagonist, telling us about the etiquette, the customs of outdoor cruising in that spot where he meets his fiancé Free. As somebody who has been out for many years, I know those customs and etiquette, I think, more or less stay the same even though the world has changed greatly. Why did you want to write about cruising, and specifically the gay culture of outdoor cruising?

McCRANEY: I wanted to write a play about the things that might get in the way of a modern couple, a modern queer or gay or same-sex loving couple. And I think, what are the questions that we ask ourselves when we are about to get married? What are the questions we sort of think about? “Oh, I’m married now, so I’m going to bring my full self in a way that I couldn’t before.”

People sort of go, “Well, when we get married, it’ll be different.” And it’s like, “Well, what will be different? You’ll still be the same you. You will be you.” And so, you start thinking — at least I started thinking to myself, well, who am I? How did I get here? And is there a way to enter into this union sort of pure? For lack of a better term. And I think people who are often told that they are deviant, or at least socially cued that, might have some questions around that. I think, I really wanted to allow audiences, and us, to figure out if marriage is right for us, what does marriage mean to us, and what about the world that we come from either helps that or hinders that. Right?

So yeah, cruising at any level. I think most people don’t think of themselves as cruising, but I’m like, you go to the club to do what? You go to the bar to do what? You go on the app to do what? You flirt on Snapchat and do what? We all have a way of trying to do that thing that is essential, which is meet people, for sex, but most of all, intimacy. And the ways in which we’ve demonized other people’s habits and ways of doing it, and the ways in which people have sort of gone, “Okay, well, you can demonize that, but I’m going to do it this way.” So I love the uniqueness of that. And I love the question of it.

The other portion of that is that I feel — as a person who is in their forties — a sort of generational gap between myself and an older generation of same-sex loving Black cis males, particularly. Or even queer people of that age, there’s just a sort of gap because of the AIDS epidemic. There aren’t a lot of survivors, especially in the arts. So it’s interesting to me, the things that I inherited from them that I talk about to people who are in their thirties. And people who I date, I’m sort of going, “But you don’t know about that? Yeah, there used to be bath houses all up and down this street in Chicago,” or, “The Lower West Side was populated with this. And this is how that happened.”

Now, I wasn’t there, but of course, reading the stories, hearing the stories, hearing from folks, it’s like, oh, this is kind of important. And the ways in which, as you said, those customs and mores have actually just morphed a little bit. They haven’t gone anywhere — now there’s just apps that help us do it more. There’s still those same things. There is something essential in seeking intimacy, and people will figure out a way to do it regardless of what parameters you put around them.

MW: You’re also talking in the play about marriage. Through W. Tre, you make the distinction between being somebody who supports marriage equality and being somebody who doesn’t necessarily see the value in being married for himself. Is that a stance that you invoke for the sake of argument? Is that a personal stance?

McCRANEY: So every argument in the play is mine. You know what I mean? We can pretend. Toni Morrison said this thing about having a muse and how she thought it was silly until her father died, and she wrote Song of Solomon. It’s like, yeah, I can pretend I didn’t need a space for me to sort of enter into the play, but most of the thoughts, even the contrarian ones, even the ones that are picking at the other ones, are me trying to figure this thing out. So they come from me. They’re in my head.

How important they are, how I use them to lead my life is completely different. I think there is something that did happen to me when our communities decided to fight really adamantly for gay marriage. And that was even how it was branded. And it felt as if in order to get it passed, it really needed to look a certain way. And that concerned me because, one, sure, I might fit into that category depending on who my partner is or was at the time, but it just felt like it was leaving so many people out of it. And I just thought, “Does this stop trans youth from being thrown out of their houses and having to live on the street?” You know what I mean?

But at some point, I calmed my little loud self down and realized that there is no panacea. If we found a way to house all the trans children in the world, we would still have other things we would need to do. So it’s not like we can’t engage in one portion of the struggle without knowing and understanding the other.

To deny those things is silly and sort of youthful myopic-ness. And to really lean into the fact that it’s not one or the other, it’s and, and how the plurality of that is actually exhausting. It’s fucking exhausting, but necessary. It is the world that we live in. So I don’t know that I hold the stance that I don’t think it’s necessary. I do think that there is something about building community together in order to cultivate or practice or witness love and a covenant. There’s something about that that’s necessary. To what degree is up to the people.

MW: Actually, you said something about it during the Q&A after the rehearsal. You said, “To be in service to a relationship for the rest of your is a calling,” which it is. I shared that with my husband, he was like, “Mm-hmm.” So you have respect, obviously, for the institution. You’re not married, I take it.

McCRANEY: No, not currently.

MW: Do you want to be, or do you never want to be?

McCRANEY: As Free says in the play, I would like to be asked to be married.

MW: That’s a good answer.

McCRANEY: Because it’s all fun and games when you’re like, “Yeah, maybe.” Hey, look, if I’m asked, I’m going to answer the question. I will have an answer ready, for sure. But yeah, I don’t presuppose and sort of ideate too long on it, mostly because I think there are — especially for younger folks — so many cueings of what marriage should be, and as all callings are, you know it when you feel it. If it’s a true calling, then you know that this is a calling, you know the answer to that. It’s as if I said, “Hey, you want to be a priest? Sure, okay. What do you dream about your priest ordaining looking like?” And it’s like, “I don’t know… except that I know that I got to do this.” There are steps to it, but there’s not like a, “Yeah, it’ll look like this and it’ll feel like this.” There’s a way that we get trapped in the event of the thing, and that can stop us from really remembering and honoring the call of it. The sort of, “No, I have to be ready.” And that doesn’t mean wearing white, that means whatever I’ve got to do, some other movement in order to get there. Does that make sense?

MW: It all goes back to whatever it means to you.

McCRANEY: Yeah.

MW: On the subject, of being proposed to or people proposing, one special feature of this production is that at most of the performances, couples who have volunteered will be wed onstage after the show in front of the audience by one of the actors who’s been ordained just for this. This is what, in ballroom or in theater, would be called a stunt. How did this stunt come about?

McCRANEY: To keep it 100, I remember seeing my friends getting married and I couldn’t be there at the wedding. And then, they had a renewal of their marriage vows. Their names are Kirven Douthit-Boyd and Antonio Douthit-Boyd. They’re former dancers at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. So, their marriage is pretty public. The other side of that was that they had been married 10 years and wanted to renew their vows, so then, they invited everybody to the vows and had just this openness to it, very much letting people know that they could be involved in the renewal in any way, shape that they wanted to.

I just remember that was sort of the first ceremony that I ever cried in. I really just broke down because it was so loving the way in which the community was just adding bricks or mortar to their foundation. They were like, look, it’s been a tough, wonderful 10 years, and we wouldn’t change anything — with the pandemic and all kinds of wild things happening in the middle of it — and they want to recommit to do it. And then, how we showed up, their community, showed up to continue. You know what I mean? So anyway, it is at that point that I was like, you know what? This show has to have community bricks in it. If we are building something, whether Free and Tre get married or not, what we’re doing in this building is coming together to help them fortify what they have. And that is active. And that is exciting to do night after night, and anew every day, every performance.

So, how do we do that? How do we keep that engaged? And also, how do we make an altar call for folks who also need re-foundationing, to reify and to fortify their foundations? How do we invite that? Because then, again, in that night, in that promise, in that covenant, that couple will forever be in the minds and hearts of all the 400-some-odd people in the building. And they can think back over their lives and their moments and go, “You know what? There was a moment we stood with 400 people to claim love, to remind ourselves that love is a calling and that we are called to it.”

Again, that’s supposedly my job as an artist. So I’m trying to take it to [those] levels. And again, theater is born out of those events, right? Theater and dance are all born out of those rituals. There’s a marriage dance in almost every culture. There’s a need to witness and be witnessed and to celebrate together in a kind of circle. So how do we just keep that alive in our ever-globalizing modernity in late-stage capitalism? And that was one of the ways, it was one of the ways of like, yo, if we’re going to do it, let’s do it every night. So, just so your readers know, it’s possible every show, depending on as many people that sign up, every show someone can renew or be married. And yeah, we’ve got a good turnout. We’d love more.

MW: You talk about the witnessing, I’ve had the experience, and it only happened deep into my adulthood, of being at a wedding ceremony and, as a witness, experiencing real meaning in everybody being there to be part of giving our, not our blessing or approval, but just our hope to them. And giving that love and strength to them.

McCRANEY: That’s good. Some ceremonies you have to give your blessing. Some ceremonies, they ask you… No, seriously, they ask people to stand up. And it’s usually dramatized in films as, “Does anybody object to this marriage happening?” But there are plenty of other scripture-based, and other religious ceremonies where the community has to say, “Do you all consent to being watchers and helpers and witnesses and community to this marriage, to this binding of two into one?” And people have to say yes in order for the thing to proceed. So, that consent, that buy-in is ever important.

MW: I wanted to ask you about music because at least in the rehearsal, we saw that you use music in entertaining and engaging ways. As somebody who writes to music — today, I listened to a lot of Nicholas Britell, his Moonlight soundtrack, If Beale Street Could Talk. Love his music.

McCRANEY: Yeah, we’re born on the same day. The exact same day.

MW: Oh, well, there you go. You strike me as somebody who probably has writing playlists. Was there any music that you associated with writing We are Gathered?

McCRANEY: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There was a playlist I called “You Bettah Right.” It was mostly just like ’90s R&B, hip-hop, and soul. And I thought it was more hip-hop than it was, there’s certainly a lot of hip-hop in it, but the amount of girl groups, the amount of Xscape songs, SWV songs, I just was in it. And none of those songs made it into the show, but it was so important for me because those were love songs for me. I don’t know why, they just were, they are love songs to me, a lot of them.

This is late ’80s, early ’90s, but there was a group called Troop. They had this song called “Spread My Wings,” and I was listening to it, and I was just like, if this ain’t a marriage song, somebody better sing this at my wedding because these fellas is going in. And we ask the audience to think of love songs as you’re watching. What is your favorite love song? Bring that to the space to be thinking about it, because if you bring it in the space, it will show up for us in a way. So it just primes us to be in that space of thinking about it. Because you can’t quite quantify it. I mean, how is that a love song? But it is, though. How is it a marriage song? But it is. It’s such a marriage song to me and… I don’t know. You sometimes can’t say why a song is, you just know it is, you feel it is. I mean, sometimes it’s in the lyric. But I don’t think [Jagged Edge’s] “Let’s Get Married” is a marriage song. I know people do, but I’m just like–

MW: Yeah, no, I don’t either.

McCRANEY: Yeah, they’re like, “We ain’t getting no younger, we might as well do it.” I was like, “Yeah, you play that at your wedding, don’t play that at mine.” But these songs that are just like, I don’t know about that thing, again, it’s about what it is to you. Everybody will be different, but everybody will have one, right? Everybody’s different, but if you asked everybody, what’s a song that makes you think of marriage or long relationships or just commitment to relationships in a passionate way or in a loving way or in a positive way, I think everybody has one.

MW: Are you writing anything else right now?

McCRANEY: Yes. I’m writing multiple things at the same time. There’s a play called Windfall that I have to write for Steppenwolf that will go up next year. I’m writing a television series or two. I’m writing multiple film scripts.

MW: Obviously, you enjoyed tremendous success with Moonlight, and since then, you wrote a movie [High-Flying Bird] for Steven Soderbergh, you had a show [David Makes Man] at OWN. What have your experiences with Hollywood been like as compared to your experiences in theater?

McCRANEY: My experiences in the TV and film industry made me run wonderfully back into the arms of theater, so much so that I’m writing way more plays than I’ve ever probably written at the same time. I couldn’t wait to get back, so much so I became the artistic director of a theater, which I never thought I would do. But the need to be back doing theater — need, not just like. I said to my producing partner and best friend, Glenn Davis, who just got nominated for a Tony for Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Purpose, I was like, “G, I know we got a lot of projects going on, but if I don’t get into the theater, I’m not going to make it, I’m not going to make it, and I need it, I need it bad.” So, this has been wonderfully nourishing.

MW: How do you account for that? What is your rationale for what that is, for that “If I don’t get in there”?

McCRANEY: Again, you would think, I’m a writer, I would know how to talk about these things, but I really don’t. I don’t. Except that I know I’m doing something essential. Not that I don’t think television and film are essential — I do think they are, I think there’s just a lot of things that also come with that and complicate that that I don’t necessarily understand, and maybe don’t need to. It is an industry. It is a business.

But I know if I can get some people to stand out on the courtyard and engage people walking by, as a mentor of mine, Peter Brook, used to say, if a person crosses an empty space and someone’s there to watch them, then we have theater, in that very essence and moment. That’s essential to me and it’s essential to the lives of so many people. Because that is essential, because it’s so important to me, if I can’t do that and do it with this kind of generosity, I feel like I can’t get better. I want to get better at it. Like we started the conversation, my job is to lean into and get better at doing what I’m called to do. And if I can’t do that, then I sort of lose my way a little bit.

MW: Which brings me to my last question, because something else you said after that rehearsal is that you have started thinking about legacy, and leaving a body of work that will provide for future generations of actors, creators, and audiences. It struck me as like Timothée Chalamet accepting his SAG Award and saying, “I want to be one of the greats.” And I love that ambition. Is that you? Do you want to be one of the greats? Is that what you’re talking about?

McCRANEY: The greats? Love Timothée Chalamet. I got to teach him once, that was a good time. I wouldn’t characterize it in the same way. Somebody came to me the other day, a student at an HBC here in D.C. and said, “Oh, I have work to do because of you. I can go and find monologues and scenes because of what you do.” That’s important to me because when I was young, there were like two places we could go to find a scene and they didn’t reflect the modernity that I lived in. And sometimes, I didn’t need the modernity, but they didn’t even say that I existed. I wasn’t alive in those worlds, and that is terrifying. It’s sort of terrifying to go and be like, oh, there is no other me. And then, you sort of have to scour and turn over and look.

And the immediacy with which we were being decimated, our stories being decimated, the books being banned, and the ability to get to them being restricted so much that, again, to imagine, in a world with this much information flowing all the time, in every way, in our hands, every 30 seconds, pulsating, thrashing into our palms, and you’re telling me that there are going to be students who go, “Oh, I didn’t know Essex Hemphill existed. I didn’t know…”? That is wild to me. That I can’t abide. I won’t lie down and let that happen. That can’t happen. Sure, you can have thoughts, good or bad, about my work, about the work of others, but you will have it. It will be here as much as I can do it, and that, I am committed to do. So it’s less about the greatness and more about being here.

We Are Gathered runs through June 15 at Arena Stage, 1101 6th St. SW. Tickets are $59 to $110. Call 202-488-3300, or visit www.arenastage.org.