© E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune/TNS Charlique Rolle and Ericka Ratcliff rehearse the Congo Square Theatre’s latest production, How Blood Go,” at the Steppenwolf Theatre, March 14, 2023.
What would you do if your genealogy revealed a relation to patient 001 of the Syphilis Study at Tuskegee (a study by the U.S. Public Health Service to observe and document the conditions of hundreds of Black men left untreated for the sexually transmitted infection)? And what more would you do, knowing your Southern family tree, full of sharecroppers, preachers and coal miners, also held a physician — and the patient and doctor were siblings?
If you’re Lisa Langford, you write a play about your ancestors, shining a light on the past, present and future inequity of the American health care system in regard to Black bodies. “How Blood Go,” presented by the Congo Square Theatre Company, tells the story of Bean and his brother Ace during the Syphilis study; and features Quinntasia, a wellness entrepreneur who learns her healthy body is the result of a futuristic experimental device that makes her appear white to medical professionals. Both worlds come together as bodies are subjected to medical experiments without their consent.
“The play takes place in both the present and the past,” Langford said. “The past part of it is inspired by my maternal grandfather’s uncle, Green Adair, patient 001 in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. I knew about him because when I was in high school, we received some money from a settlement of a class action suit, which was led by civil rights attorney Fred Gray. I always knew that I wanted to write about him and learn a little more about him.”
A conversation with her aunt revealed Adair’s brother Roman, the doctor. The juxtaposition led Langford to pen the play.
“One would become a doctor. One would become the victim of doctors,” Langford said. “There’s still more that obviously I’d like to explore. But you have this one person who is experimented upon and killed by the medical establishment and then this other person rises in society as a result of it.”
© E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune/TNS Yolonda Ross in Congo Square Theatre’s latest production, How Blood Go”, March 14, 2023.
While the brothers occupy the past, Quinntasia’s story portrays the present and future — one Langford can relate to on a personal level. Langford has Graves’ disease, an immune system disorder of the thyroid. She had to go to multiple doctors to get a proper diagnosis when her hair started falling out in distinct circles.
“This dermatologist barely examined me and declared ‘you Black girls wear your hair too tight.’ Langford said. “This man instead of saying ‘she’s over 50, postmenopausal. Let me test for some autoimmune diseases,’ he looked at me and said you Black girls wear your hair too tight and basically gave me subpar health care.”
Langford found another doctor who listened to her and diagnosed the condition accurately. She looks back and wonders ‘what if I believed the dermatologist and didn’t keep trying to find an answer? The thoughts are very scary.
So, she put that in the play. The audience will hear the phrase ‘you Black girls’ and all the things that people accuse Black people of doing that is detrimental to their health. Langford points out that these biases, judgments and beliefs are evidence of a history of African Americans and their struggles with the medical establishment to see and understand them as human.
“It starts in slavery. And the play reflects this because a lot of the medical advances, particularly for women today, were done on enslaved women,” Langford said. “Every time I go to the gynecologist, I say the names of the women who were experimented upon because I am still benefiting from their pain. We all are and don’t know about it. At present, there is a movement to silence Black history, prevent people from having access to that knowledge and it amazes me because there’s so much we already don’t know. How can you work to keep what little we do know from us?”
© E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune/TNS Ericka Ratcliff, Congo Square artistic director of How Blood Go,” at the Steppenwolf Theatre, March 14, 2023.
It was Langford’s writing that made actress Yolonda Ross want to be a part of the show. “The Chi” actress plays Didi, Quinntasia’s friend.
“It’s not just the story, but the beauty of the writing and how Lisa wove the past and the present together in such a way to show what Black people go through and still go through with the health care system,” Ross said. “The play really does show you that we’ve been through a lot in this country. And a lot of things have not changed. They’ve just morphed into a different way of happening. The mindset in this country is still the same. And that’s where it needs to stop, in the mind.”
Ross, concurrently filming the sixth season of the Showtime series “The Chi,” will also host film screenings, panel discussions and community conversations led by health care professionals during the play’s run. Community engagement is part of Congo Square’s Celebration of Healing programming initiative, wherein annual productions provide audiences with curated spaces geared toward individual and community healing. The free virtual and in-person events are meant to connect to the goals residents shared addressing systemic inequities in public health, and exemplify how artists and cultural organizations bring attention and resources to the issues most important to Chicago communities.
As part of the initiative, audience members attending Sunday matinee performances of “How Blood Go” on March 26, April 2 and April 9 can participate in discussions with artists and community members immediately following the performance. Public Narrative will present a six-part webinar training series dedicated to holistic public health conversations that generate solutions to improve health systems in Chicago. Every Thursday from March 23 to April 27, people can explore the findings of Chicago-based research studies for communities experiencing health disparities and other implications to public health. On March 29, Ross will host a conversation at the Chicago Cultural Center that centers on the television documentary “Power to Heal” and the historic struggle to secure equal and adequate access to health care for all Americans. On April 5, play partner Equal Hope at RUSH Medical Center will host a film screening and conversation wherein health experts will talk about the growing inequities in American health care exposed by COVID-19. Another conversation will take place on April 12, focusing on the maternal health crisis in the U.S.
© E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune/TNS Yolonda Ross, center, with Marcus Moore and Kristin Ellis, in rehearsal of Congo Square Theatre’s latest production, How Blood Go,” at the Steppenwolf Theatre, March 14, 2023.
Langford thinks anyone who comes to “How Blood Go” can learn from it.
“One of the reasons I think there still are disparities in health care between Blacks and whites is because we’ve never stopped to interrogate what we believe,” she said. “At some point in this current century, they did a survey of medical students at some prestigious medical school, and they asked them a series of race-based questions: Do you believe Black people experience the same pain the same way as white people? Do Black people have thicker skin than white people? Ridiculous things that were leftovers from slavery, but that people who are in the medical profession still believe today. There are a lot of beliefs about people that you don’t even know you have — unconscious bias. And until you interrogate those things, you can’t change it.”
Informative, surprising, and entertaining … all words that Langford and Ross use to describe “How Blood Go.” Ross hopes people of all types come to see the production with an open mind. She wants people in the health care system or any system that deals with people not of their race there, so they can examine their understanding of “other.” The act of listening, seeing people of color as human, the lack of trust for the medical establishment, all of it is in “How Blood Go.”
“There are facts in this — a lot of facts,” Ross said. “And there are things that we didn’t know. But we need to know our history to understand what’s happened to us, who’s been doing it, and whose ancestors are those people should understand where we’re coming from and how that time period — way before all of us — has affected us now.”
“How Blood Go” runs through April 23 at Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theater, 1700 N. Halsted Street; tickets are $35 for adults, $20 for seniors and students at steppenwolf.org/howbloodgo. Tickets for Celebration of Healing events can also be found there.
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