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John Berendt’s nonfiction novel, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evilbecame a cultural sensation on its release 30 years ago. (When I hear the phrase “nonfiction novel,” I think of Huckleberry Finn talking about Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer: “He told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.” For his part, Berendt has said, “The only fictional character in the book is the narrator, me, until I catch up with myself midway through the book.”)

Berendt’s story did play loose with the timeline about Jim Williams’s 1981 shooting of his much younger lover and employee, Danny Hansford, and the aftermath. Williams (an antique dealer and society maven) went to trial for the murder four times and finally was acquitted in 1989, then died from a heart attack a few months later. Berendt also changed the names or created composites of other supporting characters. In the process, he turned Savannah, Georgia, (the city he adopted as a second home during the research process) and its gossipy eccentrics into cultural touchstones while giving the city’s tourism industry a huge boost.

And he made a legend out of The Lady Chablis, the Black trans performer whose delicious observations and ability to cut through societal bullshit turned her into one of the first trans icons in America. Lady Chablis, who died in 2016, published her own memoir, Hiding My Candy: The Autobiography of the Grand Empress of Savannahin 1996, and played herself in the (otherwise forgettable) 1997 Clint Eastwood film version of Berendt’s book.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
Through 8/11: Tue-Wed and Fri 7:30 PM, Thu and Sat 2 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM; also Sun 7/14 7:30 PM and Wed 7/31 2 PM; no show Thu 7/4; ASL interpretation Fri 7/19, touch tour and audio description Sat 7/27 2 PM (touch tour 12:30 PM), Spanish subtitles Sat 7/27 7:30 PM, open captions Sun 7/28 2 PM; Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, 312-443-3800, goodmantheatre.org$25-$175

Chablis is also the reason Taylor Mac, book writer for the world-premiere musical version of Berendt’s story, now in previews at the Goodman Theatre, became interested in the project.

Mac is a multivalent force as a writer, performer, singer, and director who received the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grant” in 2017. Mac notes that Berendt’s book came out “the year I moved to New York City, so I was a young’un coming to New York to make musicals. That’s what I was doing. I didn’t know anyone in New York at that moment. And the book was just—I just fell in love with it. I’d never seen America embrace queerness before, really. There’d been little bits—I think RuPaul had a hit single, and before that, there had been other musicians that had little hit singles here and there—but it just felt like a different moment.”

For that reason, Chablis is central to the new musical, which features a score by Jason Robert Brown, recipient of three Tony Awards for The Bridges of Madison County and Parade. (The latter also focuses on a famous Georgia murder trial in telling the story of the eventual lynching in 1915 of Atlanta Jewish factory manager Leo Frank for the death of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old girl who worked at his factory.)

J. Harrison Ghee, who made history last year as one of two nonbinary performers to win a Tony Award (Ghee won for Some Like It Hotwhile Alex Newell won for Shucked) plays Chablis. And they find many similarities between Chablis’s personal history and their own as “a Black queer human being, and knowing how I was received or how any queerness was received growing up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, which is a military town.”

They add, “The south is good for, as we say, ‘a nice nasty.’ A ‘bless your heart’ and ‘oooh, ain’t she sweet’ kind of way. And I picked up on that very early as a child of how people viewed and moved through the world. And it definitely helped me in the character study and in the building of my iteration of Chablis. Because everybody has something to say or a thought towards her. Meanwhile, she’s just walking in her freedom and in her joy and trying to show other people that they have access to that as well.”

Mac says that the show (directed by Rob Ashford) doesn’t turn Chablis into a narrator as she walks in her freedom, though. “I didn’t want her to be the narrator because in my experience that’s what queer people always get cast as. They don’t know what to do with us, so they make us the narrator. Or the best friend, you know? I wanted to make sure she wasn’t put in that position.” Instead, Mac notes, “Everyone’s trying to get into this book that the author is writing. They’re all trying to tell the story of Savannah—the story they want it to be. Hers is just one of the more powerful ones.”

Taylor Mac, wearing a green shirt with black, yellow, and orange flowers on it and a baseball cap, sits at a table in front of a laptop. — Taylor Mac in rehearsal for the Goodman’s *Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil* Credit: Liz Lauren

There was an earlier attempt a dozen years ago to musicalize Midnight. Playwright Alfred Uhry (author of Driving Miss Daisy and the book writer for Parade) was tapped as the adapter, with Brown composing and Ashford also attached as director. Reportedly, that version drew inspiration from Johnny Mercer (whose songs also filled the score for the Eastwood film). Williams owned a Savannah house built by Mercer’s great-grandfather and where Hansford was killed, though the songwriter himself never lived there. (The house passed into the hands of Williams’s sister, Dorothy Williams Kingery, after his death. Kingery, who died last fall, opened the home, now known as the Mercer-Williams House Museumfor tours.)

But Mac, whose own encyclopedic knowledge of music was demonstrated in 2016’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama), says that Brown’s new score draws on many influences, with different styles providing signatures for the range of characters inhabiting the show. “The choice to have a variety of musical styles was something that we talked about the very first day we met to see if we even wanted to do it. But what was chosen for each person was completely his decision,” says Mac.

Ghee found inspiration in archival footage of Chablis in creating the character. “I’m not doing an imitation of her. But I’m pulling from the essence and the spirit of her,” they say, adding, “The amount of times I really do find myself feeling her in scenes and things she would say—I’m like, ‘Ah, oooh, that was NOT ME at all!’” Which seems appropriate for a story that also draws in some measure on the spirit world of Savannah. (Brianna Buckley plays Minerva, the root doctor based on real-life Savannah resident Valerie Boles, in the musical.)

“She’s just walking in her freedom and in her joy and trying to show other people that they have access to that as well.”

J. Harrison Ghee on The Lady Chablis

“I feel like a lot of people operate out of fear and love,” notes Ghee. “And Jim and Chablis are those representations—operating out of fear and love. You make choices accordingly. A lot of people in Savannah are operating in a lot of fear. And they’re operating out of fear of freedom. And it’s wild to me that people are so afraid to be free.”

Mac further notes that the show uses Williams (played by Broadway vet Tom Hewitt) and Chablis as two sides of queerness in America at a moment when queer people (especially trans people) are under renewed attack. Williams, the antiquarian and historic preservationist, wants to fit in and be accepted by Savannah’s blue-blooded upper crust. (The real Williams threw legendary Christmas parties that were a hot ticket for Savannah’s high-society set.) Chablis just wants to live her truth.

“We have a lot of Jims in our culture,” says Mac. “And it’s because of this system that we’ve had to grow up in. And so it’s really about saying, ‘Here are these two options for you. What do you want? You’re at midnight in the garden of good and evil, and which direction are you going to go?’”