“My daddy called me to him. Said he had been thinking about me and it grieved him to see me in the world carrying other people’s songs and not having one of my own. Told me he was going to show me how to find my song.”

- August Wilson from Joe Turner’s Come and Gone

Personal tension-filled experiences infuse my work, informing the characters and the conflict in my stories. I was born literally at the dawn of Mississippi’s post-Jim Crow experiment and into a setting that was beset with unspoken but aggressively enforced boundaries and conventions. Whether because my father was Catholic and my mother was Baptist, or because I lived neither in a white nor a black community, or because of countless other experiences, I grew especially attentive to those boundaries and conventions and often felt minimized and marginalized by them. The tensions continued into my adulthood as one of few Black officers on an aircraft carrier with hundreds of Black enlisted men, or as a member of the U.S. military in the international expat community that embraced me, or as a Black man from a rural background living in an urban setting. Being on the margins, constantly required to codeswitch, never quite able to be myself, I took to writing as a way of making a space for myself and the others I knew had to be out there with experiences similar to mine.

You-Eat-What-You-Kill-scaled-1.jpg

Cathleen Riddley, Michael Asberry, and Anthony Williams in “You Eat What You Kill” from the Best of PlayGround. Photo by mellophoto.com

As a playwright I center the question and honor the questioner; I give attention to language, cadence, and the occasion for song; I aspire to unthread conventions of community in order to reveal the authentic individual making and finding a space in which they belong in that community; I work to model the brave conversations necessary for true connection; I laugh a lot; I recognize affinity and solidarity are not the same and that the difference between the two is the source of both conflict and a path to liberation; I know that however small we are in the cosmos, we are not insignificant.

 
DS5_0283.JPG

I believe in theatre as a space of dynamic, interactive inquiry, engagement, and meaning making. I believe in Black Lives Matter. And I believe the time is now.

Jasmine Williams and Dezi Solèy in The Last Sermon of Sister Imani. (Photo by Jay Yamada)