‘The Wash’ by Kelundra Smith is inspired by both history and muse

A new production based on the 1881 Washerwomen Strike hits stages this weekend. Here, Kelundra Smith talks about her first playwriting venture.

Kelundra Smith said in a recent interview that the stage plays she’s written still surprise her.

“I was not one of those . . . critics who sat in an audience, thinking I would go be a playwright one day,” said the noted theater journalist, managing editor of American Theatre magazine and editor-at-large for ArtsATL.

“I was content to be an arts journalist, and I considered pivoting to ghostwriting biographies or looking at fiction. That’s where I thought my writing might go. I never considered playwriting.”

Yet her play, The Wash — set during the Atlanta Washerwomen Strike of 1881 — will have its rolling world premiere this summer in a co-production at Synchronicity Theatre and Impact Theatre. It opens on the Synchronicity stage June 7, then moves to Impact on July 10.

“For me, this story is almost a divine assignment,” Smith said. “I was driving home one day and started hearing these voices that I can only describe as what I felt like were the voices of my grandmothers. I didn’t know any of my grandmothers because they were all deceased before I was born. I don’t know how else to describe it, though. But I heard these voices, went home and wrote the first 34 pages of the play.”

Smith learned about the moment from Atlanta history during a visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington in 2017.

“There was a panel in the history gallery about the Washerwomen Strike,” she said. “I was very interested in this event that I knew nothing about, especially because I’m from Georgia. What is this history that I have never learned? I started doing research, as journalists do, and I started reading the newspaper archives, seeing what the Atlanta History Center had and reading books. The story wouldn’t let me go.”

The play dramatizes the events which took place in the summer of 1881, where a group of Black women organized to demand better wages and autonomy weeks before the International Cotton Exposition, a world’s fair set to bring lots of visitors to Atlanta. Eventually, the small group grew to more than 3,000 members.

“The play is about five women working in a laundry co-op together who are fed up with not being paid fairly — sometimes not being paid at all for their work — and they decide to go on strike,” she said. “As this strike balloons into more than they ever thought it would, more women start to join them; one of them is a White woman. And they end up creating one of the largest post-Civil War labor strikes in the South.”

The show, directed by Brenda Porter, is not a rote retelling of history.

“It’s inspired by history, but it’s not a documentary,” Smith said. “It’s my imagination, not a play-by-play of a historical event.”

The characters she created, a diverse group of women, will show audiences the power of what can be accomplished when people come together for a singular purpose.

“It’s an intergenerational story — we’ve got women in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s in the play, and those different perspectives come out,” she said. “Some of them were formerly enslaved. Some were born after the end of the Civil War. They have varying levels of literacy; they represent different parts of Georgia. And the characters are named after ancestors of mine, but they’re not mine.”

Smith said the fiction work sheds light and adds depth to a lesser-told moment in Atlanta history. In fact, she has written a trilogy of plays inspired by African American achievements during the 19th century.

“My biggest dream is that this trilogy becomes a liberation playbook, as we retrace the steps of the ones who came before,” she said.

She hopes this production of The Wash, brought about by two theaters working together, will inspire audiences.

“I feel very grateful, for we have an extremely talented cast and creative team, all local artists, all women, led by Black women,” she said. “I feel very happy about the unity that people will see happening on stage — the ability to come together in sisterhood, band together for a righteous cause, have differences and overcome them.”

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Benjamin Carr is an ArtsATL editor-at-large who has contributed to the publication since 2019 and is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association, the Dramatists Guild, the Atlanta Press Club and the Horror Writers Association. His writing has been featured in podcasts for iHeartMedia, onstage as part of the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival and online in The Guardian. His debut novel, Impacted, was published by The Story Plant.