NHFD Playwright: We Can Talk

Liberal elite New Haven theater-goers beware: If you attend the new play inspired by the landmark Ricci v. DeStefano case, you won’t get to feel superior to the working-class white people who convinced the U.S. Supreme Court to change the rules for affirmative action.

That play, four years in the works, begins previews this Thursday night at the Yale Repertory Theatre. It officially opens next Thursday night and runs through Feb. 23.

Karen Hartman wrote the play, which is called Good Faith: Four Chats about Race and the New Haven Fire Department. She bases much of the dialogue on conversations she had with four key characters on different sides of the 2009 ruling: black firefighters Michael Briscoe and Tyrone Ewing; named plaintiff Frank Ricci, a white firefighter who argued that he and his 19 colleagues deserved to be promoted based on the results of a test that the city had thrown out because no African-Americans scored highly; and his team’s firebrand attorney, Karen Torre, who became a voice of working-class outrage over elite white liberalism.

The Ricci v. DeStefano case sparked a fascinating legal debate about how to offer opportunities to historically discriminated-against racial minorities without limiting the opportunities of white working-class firefighters (as well as one Latino firefighter who joined the 20 plaintiffs) who work hard and play by the rules, as a certain presidential candidate once put it.

A decade later, the case presented Hartman, a graduate of both Yale College and the Yale School of Drama, with a chance to explore how the human side of the case’s aftermath, and the underlying discussion, fare in the age of Trump.

She could have caricatured a side with which she disagreed. Instead, she chose to dig deep across boundaries.

Hartman learned a lot from those conversations, about nuances of race and class that have gotten lost in the hot-button public debates that have divided the country. She concluded that the country at large can indeed have those conversations despite the pessimism of our day.

She also learned a lot about firefighting: ​“This was something that should have been really obvious to me from the beginning. But I didn’t get it until I started actually talking to firefighters…. You don’t meet many people who are doing what they wanted to do since they were six years old. These guys are living the dream. They love their jobs. There’s so much excitement. There’s so much giddiness almost and enthusiasm and a real camaraderie. They make each other lunch and dinner.”

Hartman said she hopes her audience will leave learning a lot about both subjects as well.

“I want every audience member — whether you’re an East Coast liberal typical theater-goer; or hopefully a theater-goer who is connected to New Haven and not necessarily connected to Yale who has come to the Yale Rep to see this play because you want to see yourself and your city — I want everyone to feel respected,” Hartman said during an interview Wednesday on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program. ​“But I want everyone to feel challenged. I want everyone to have to hear every point of view and to take that in.”

In the course of her four years of research and writing, Hartman recorded Studs Terkel-type oral histories with her characters. She watched them at work. She followed up with extensive questions and conversation.

Like all good stories, this one was filled with shades of gray. Especially about race and class. In ways that made her examine broader questions.

Hartman heard Karen Torre point out that liberal U.S. Supreme Court Justice ​“Ruth Bader Ginsburg never had an African-American law clerk.” And she saw Torre’s point. ​“You look around any room where everyone looks like you,” Hartman reflected, and ​“you have to question how everybody got into that room.” Not just in an all-white firehouse. But in an all-white law office or theater.

“Despite having had these conversations in New Haven, I was one of those liberal bubble people who did not see the Trump win coming at all,” Hartman recalled.

“But when it happened, I did think immediately about this case and the conversations that I had …

“The Yale Law School faculty and the liberal African-American firefighters, like Mike Briscoe, like Gary Tinney, the president of the Firebirds, were on one side of the political divide. Whereas the primarily white firefighters were on the other side. And that kind of weird alliance of what people we call the elites and actual ​‘urban African-American people’ versus the white working class had played out right in this case, which I found interesting.

“I had had this inside understanding of the moral compass of fairness of a person like Frank [Ricci] or like the other members of the New Haven 20 or like Ben Vargas, who’s Latino but who had sued as part of the New Haven 20 … this sense of, ​‘These are the rules. This is what I did. This is how I studied. This is what I expected.’”

At one point, Hartman spent hours watching Frank Ricci teach a class at the fire training academy.

Frank Ricci, in a separate recent interview on WNHH’s ​“Dateline” program, said he was impressed by how much time Hartman spent researching her subject and how open she was. He said he had fears of walking into the Yale Rep and ​“viewing the play kind of the way Brett Kavanaugh would view ​‘Saturday Night Live.’”

“She was very pleasant, very nice,” recalled Ricci, who plans to attend Friday night’s performance of the play. ​“I think we’re of different political spectrums…. Her politics are more to the left than mine.

“We had a conversation. In America, we spend too much time talking, not enough time listening, when people disagree with us …

“She sat there for, I want to say, four hours without moving. I think she got a little bit of an education that firefighting is dangerous work.”

In the end, Karen Hartman emerged with a play — and a cautious optimism about the possibility of people finding understanding across racial and class divides.

“If,” she added, ​“we are willing to show up and listen.”

Click on the video for the full interview with playwright Karen Hartman on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program, including a discussion about how she went about Studs Terkel-izing the script.

Click here for more information about Good Faith: Four Chats about Race and the New Haven Fire Department.

Click on the video for the full recent interview with firefighter Frank Ricci on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program, including an discussion about the legacy of the Supreme Court case.