Lucy Alibar Biography

Lucy Alibar was ready to board the train three years ago to attend a reading of a friend's play; Alibar was to play the role of Ducky, a secretary who is slain. She was preoccupied with the character and the play, unaware that the script she co-wrote had been selected for development by the Sundance Institute's Screenwriting Lab. Because her phone service had been turned off two weeks prior because she had fallen behind on payments, no one could call her with the happy news. Alibar had been leaving her Lower East Side apartment at 5 a.m. for a job preparing sandwiches and salads (I can't remember how many, but it was a lot), then returning to her apartment to write, then bartending, then home again to write, then waitressing to fund her writing. But, just as she was about to board the train, she received the wonderful news from her friend and cowriter, Benh Zeitlin, the film's potential director, through e-mail. As the film was being shot in Louisiana, she scraped together enough money to get her phone service restored, rewrote (and rewrote and rewrote) the script, assisted in casting, and worked on additional rewrites. Alibar's film, Beasts of the Southern Wild, earned the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah in January, and the Camra dOr prize for outstanding debut feature at Cannes in May when it received a 15-minute standing ovation. Following its June premiere, Beasts received rapturous critical acclaim and became a surprise indie summer visitor at multiplexes throughout Americathe little art-house movie that might. On her Super Soul Sunday television program in August, Oprah Winfrey gushed over the film, which President Obama had suggested to her. Dolly Parton, Tony Kushner, Flannery OConnor, and horror films are among her favorites. She's a good baker and a mediocre cook. Her dishes have a strong garlic flavor and are often served uncooked. (She thinks it has something to do with her inability to grasp the notion of constraint.) She claims that directors are terrific cooks and writers are good bakers.) She's now working on an autobiographical play about growing up in a Pentecostal Southern Baptist family with an atheist father, as well as a Southern comedic action-adventure film about a troop of Georgia Brownies. South Africa, France, and the United Kingdom have all staged her plays. She resides with her Brazilian film-editor boyfriend, whom she met on the set of Beasts of the Southern Wild and who is also a skilled chef and was the captain of his country's national rugby team. Alibar grew up near the Georgia border on the Florida panhandle. Baya M. Harrison III, her father, works as a criminal defense attorney, similar to Atticus Finch, but with a lot more ax killers, she claims. Her mother, Barbara, is an artist, and her maternal grandmother, Alice, was a newspaper writer. She made up her last name by merging theirs and formally adopted it on her 18th birthday, shortly after she finished her shift as a server at the Village Inn on the Apalachee Parkway. She told a reporter from the Tallahassee Democrat, "I wasn't the finest waitress in the world, but I was pleasant and worked hard." The majority of the clients were stoned, to begin with and were simply there for the unlimited pancakes. However, I like listening to them converse. It was wonderful for me to be among so many people because I grew up in the country and was rather alone.) Alibar claims her grandma and mother taught her how to be an artist and a woman. They both had families and had very happy lives, and they were both dedicated to their work, and it never seemed to me that how they did it was a mystery to me. My grandmother had six children, one of them died as an infant, and despite the fact that she was impoverished, all of her children received an education. My mother, on the other hand, grew up in poverty. And they both worked so hard and put so much effort into cultivating their own pleasure. That was something I wanted to keep as an amulet. It's not armor, but rather a magical feather. As if it were Dumbo's magical feather. She progressed to more realistic characters and situations, winning a playwriting competition at the age of 14 and receiving a scholarship to Young Playwrights Inc. in Manhattan. There, she met Benh Zeitlin, the son of folklorists, a Jewish youngster from Queens. I recall him writing about a lot of drunks being existential, and I wrote about a lot of Southern kids, and we became fast friends and formed this beautiful creative connection. In 2001, she returned to New York City to pursue playwriting at New York University. She'd never had Chinese food before. She didn't have much money, but she had her writing, her parents, and a close circle of theatrical pals to fall back on. Her father then underwent quadruple-bypass heart surgery and a stroke while she was in her early twenties, and she feared he was going to die. Despite all the questions about what to do if a man with a gun stopped you and ordered you to get into his car in the forest, she realized she had never spoken to or received from her father about love. As a result, she composed Juicy and Delicious, just one play that served as the inspiration for Beasts. It was about a little kid named Hushpuppy dealing with his father's illness and death, a guy capable of great love but unable to express it verbally. Beasts have been seen as a story about environmental deterioration, racism, and political instability. All of this is great with Alibar, even if none of it is what she had in mind when she created Juicy and Delicious. She explains, "I'm just telling a tale." It revolves around a little girl and her father. I simply want everyone to participate. Because, on some level, everyone has a father and loses that father. Alibar claims that creating the play aided her in better understanding her father and her love for him. She claims that watching the film she helped make helped her understand him even better. When I watched Dwight Henry's portrayal [as Hushpuppy's father] on television, I felt his dread for the first time, even when he was at his worst, when he was enraged. I'm guessing it's because he's terrified of leaving his child alone in the world. I wrote this because I adore my father, and I truly wanted it to come through. I truly needed all of his humanity to shine through. Her father enjoyed the film, much to Alibar's pleasure and happiness. This was the finest day of my life, he remarked when he phoned me. You used a lot of my lines, but that's okay. Boss, that Benh Zeitlin is a genius! He's an absolute genius! Alibar left her day job in January of this year. She is currently a full-time writer. She goes for a run when she is preoccupied or suffering. Alternatively, you might go to yoga. She can also bake. She then goes back to work.

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