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Mark Clayton Southers is an award-winning Dramatists Guild member, writer, director, photographer, Artistic Director for theater initiatives at the August Wilson Center for African American Culture (2010-2013) and founder and Producing Artistic Director of Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company (2003-present). A scroll through Mr. Southers’ Facebook page over the years show him arm-in-arm with a who’s-who of Pittsburgh’s glitterati including, among others, August Wilson, George Benson and Jerome Bettis.

But for those who know him well he has another very special talent: Mr. Southers builds bridges in the City of Bridges.

He is much beloved in Pittsburgh as a literary lion and theater impresario who works daily to ameliorate racial injustice through his own work as a playwright and his approach to producing. He’s an heir to his friend August Wilson’s legacy, and has produced all ten plays of Wilson’s American Century Cycle here, ensuring that the great African-American playwright’s work enriches the lives of all Pittsburghers. And Pittsburgh Playwrights’ Theatre Festival in Black and White is a one-of-its-kind annual workshop presentation of new plays pairing black writers with white directors and white writers with black directors.

Next week, Mr. Southers’ newest play, a modern take on Strindberg’s Miss Julie, premieres at Pittsburgh Playwrights. Miss Julie, Clarissa and John re-imagines the action playing out at a Reconstruction Era Virginia plantation. “Seven years ago I saw Miss Julie—and figured this was a play that black folks could relate to about class and sexual politics.”

Though it’s been a typically busy few months for Mr. Southers—along with writing this new adaptation, he recently directed The Piano Lesson at the August Wilson Center—his most impassioned creative endeavor over the last year was born out of a near-death tragedy that left him with limited mobility, narcotic-induced visions and a compulsion to communicate his hard-earned experience through a series of highly personal journal entries entitled 99 Chronicles.

After the car he was driving collided with a city bus on May 11, 2015, he was left in the hospital, literally shattered. He was in a coma for weeks, and spent three months bedridden, slipping in and out of consciousness.

When I interviewed Mr. Southers and his steadfast wife, Neicy Southers, about those months in Intensive Care, she said that just before the first surgery—to rebuild his leg and stop internal bleeding—he enjoyed a rare moment of consciousness, and, “He was cracking jokes.”

“I was cracking jokes?!” Mark interjects, “Do you remember them?”

Neicy laughs, “No!”

“Too bad. There might have been some good material.”

It’s in part Mr. Southers’ indefatigably inspiring outlook that makes him a beacon for all theater people in the ‘burgh. Once he began accepting visitors at the hospital his room turned into a theater, sometimes with as many as a dozen visits in a day. There was so much singing and sharing and poetic praying that a nurse even joined in, performing a song (and nearly getting in trouble for doing so).

“The theater community assisted my wife,” Mark remembers, “It was the community of friends that assisted in my recovery. We had prayer warriors and the arts community came out every day and sang and told jokes and poems and held my hands. Every day, I had people.”

Hospitalization and lack of mobility took their toll on his spirit. “If not for writing I wouldn’t have made it,” he admits. Mr. Southers’ chronicles are heartfelt, touching, funny, terrifying and revelatory. In his sixth chronicle he addresses his feeling of paralysis:

“I’m laying here unable to move below my neck. I’m told I’m not paralyzed, but yet I cannot move much. I can move my right arm fully and my left partially. Neither of my legs will move. Everything is in a fog. I have a breathing tube in my mouth and a feeding tube inserted into my left nostril.

My beautiful wife comes close to my face and speaks to me in slow structured sentences much like a kindergarten teacher talking to a five year old on his first day of school. She shines and is full of heavenly praise for the Lord.

Strangely it feels like I’m in a space station. I don’t feel at all like I’m laying in a hospital bed but more like I’m strapped standing up to a wall. Nurses occasionally come in and remove bags of fluid from below me. I have no idea that it’s my fluid and that I have multiple tubes connected to my lower orifices. Yes, my body is in cruise control thanks to modern science.”

To read 99 Chronicles is to glimpse the most raw and personal moments of a journey back from the brink of death. They portray an astounding passage through heartbreak and self-scrutiny. The narcotic painkillers administered during his recovery evoked terrifying dreams. He remembers them vividly, and has recorded them in the most harrowing of his Chronicles.

They’d make for compelling theater, but for the moment Mr. Southers plans to turn 99 Chronicles into a book and to leave the dramatization to someone else. “Now that I have another chance at life I want to put more energy into my family,” he says. “I don’t want to revisit these things. I’ve written what I want to write to get them out of my system. I’m fine with another dramatist writing them [as a play].”

Even so, it seems impossible Mr. Southers will ever leave the theater. His wife Neicy sums it up with a knowing smile, “The first phone call he made from the hospital was to settle a problem with his production of Fences.”

You can read Mr. Southers’ chronicles here, but be forewarned they are not for the faint of heart: http://www.markclaytonsouthers.com/chronicles.html.

Mark Clayton Southers at the fundraising event the theater community held for him.

gcody@dramatistsguild.com �