Week 1 / Spring 2024: Hero, a play by Shariffa Ali and company

In the time that I have spent at Brown, there has been little clarity about the work that I want to, the things I want to study, the scholar I want to be. I have mostly been okay with this. Employing something like self-deprecation in response to the inevitable and daily question in graduate school: What is your work about? Ah, I don’t know, I’ll say. Today, I suppose I am interested in… I’ll say. Yeah, I’m the least decisive person in my cohort, I’ll say. This has become my way of moving through graduate school. With indecision. Commitment issues. But also with fluidity and openness and a deep willingness to be captivated by whatever is in front of me at that moment. It is imaginative and capacious. And I suppose I can’t really imagine going through this process differently.

One thing I do know now, though, is that I want to, have to, must be around theater. That whatever I study or write about or go on to do, theater must be an integral part of my life. I grew up as a kid who loved musicals, thanks to my mom. My family would go to the Pantages, or somewhere on the Vegas strip during a summer vacation, and catch productions of Wicked and Phantom of the Opera, seemingly on multiple occasions each. In fact, I am sure that there are other shows that I saw as a child, but those are the ones that I remember most. My fervor for the musical as an artform only grew as an adult. With a mid-2010s obession with The Color Purple Revival: seeing the musical on Broadway twice, and then St. Louis’s Fox Theater something like half a dozen times in a two-week span. As a kid who was raised on karaoke at my family parties, maybe there is nothing that captivates me quite like singing. And when I try to reflect on what else—what else is it that keeps me coming back—I think about the stakes. About the skill it takes to make something manifest—to create—in a way that is live. And in front of an audience. It’s not a type of creative form that I’ve ever engaged in. I prefer the back room, the private retreat, the lonely desk—where I can write and then erase and then pare down and then maybe one day I’ll share it with other people. But, on stage, you don’t get that. And I found myself enraptured by the courage of it all.

Which is all to say, since I have been at Brown, I have taken every opportunity to see people perform on stage. Last year, it was the Writing is Live Festival, which is an opportunity for the MFA Playwrights (including a new-er and dear friend of mine) to workshop the plays that they have spent the school-year writing. I went to every production, inspired by the aliveness of this artform. And my love for creativity that is enacted on stage, my love for witnessing people grapple and play and encounter those stakes, was reignited.

Which brings me to this week: Open Rehearsals, for a production/play called Hero, by New York-based theatermaker, Shariffa Ali. Very summarily (and not to do it justice, by any means) Hero is a play about a South African middle school student named Vuyo, who was an extraordinarily talented vocalist. Relating the events surrounding a national choir competition—in which Vuyo was conspiratorally dressed as a girl to perform the soprano solo (because of the pressure to adhere to the community’s expectations around gender)—the play explores life just after apartheid in a small township called Butterworth, and the complex interpersonal and social negotiations therein.

There is so much to say about it. And so many reflections to be had, still. But I think what I feel most compelled to relate is the radical hospitality (to quote Shariffa earlier this week) of the creative team. In a somewhat unexpected turn, during the first Open Rehearsal on Friday, the team decided to include a significant amount of audience participation, largely to account for the absence (that evening) of two of the five cast members. In practice, this looked like inviting/imploring/insisting on the participation of the audience members as soon as we walked into the room. We were immediately asked to participate in the story. And I, frankly, panicked. Because on this night, the attendees were two graduate students in my department (including myself), and students from Brown’s MFA program—which is to say that literally every student in the room was either actively pursing a career in acting, or has otherwise been deeply connected to the world of theater (playwrights, directors, former actors). So I walked into the room, head down, eyes averted, deeply aware of the fact that all of these performers were basically skipping to the stage to join the company. This might have been my worst nightmare. Because in an attempt to avoid being perceived, what actually happened is that I was (maybe) the only student in the room who was not on stage, instead sitting as a lone audience member. (I say “maybe” because, having been embarrassed by my unwillingness to participate, I did not have it in me to glance around to see if anyone else was seated.) My palms were sweaty, knees weak (you know the rest). I was in a tizzy, and not the most embodied. But then the play began. And, somehow, I found a sense of presence. Because the things that were happening on that stage—the storytelling, the fluidity of language, the physical comedy—were too captivating to worry about myself any longer.

On the second night (Saturday), which was open to a greater public (faculty members, other theatermakers, family), I watched as the creative team seamlessly incorporated feedback from Friday evening’s talkback—things like contextualizing the particular historical moment in South Africa with more clarity and (to my delight) inviting even the seated audience members to participate more fully. Namely, we became part of the middle school choir—with invitations to go to choir practice, and to sing with the sopranos, altos, tenors, and bassists. We, too, felt implored to show respect to Mrs. Mthwesi and to Coach, when they called for silence or for chanting or for singing. The physical comedy remained. As did the storytelling. And the fludity of language. But, on this night, I was even more taken by the deep commitment to hospitality that the creative team enacted. By the ways that the space felt fluid and open and like all of us were part of the story. And by the things that are made possible—for me, and in the room more broadly—by offering the story in a way that invited each of us toward an embodied investment in its telling. I suppose there is something here about belonging—and how it can be enacted in different ways, across a single space. What a joy. To be in that room. And to be part of that choir.