Tag Archives: Stori Ayers

HOME

Tory Kittles is flanked by Brittany Inge and Stori Ayers, who play forty characters in Samm-Art Williams’s Home (photo by Joan Marcus)

HOME
Todd Haimes Theatre
227 West Forty-Second St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 21, $49-$149
212-539-8500
www.roundabouttheatre.org

Tony-winning director Kenny Leon describes his Broadway revival of Samm-Art Williams’s rhythmic, poetic Home as a two-hundred-yard dash. It’s more like an Olympic relay, and his team wins the gold.

In December 1979, the Negro Ensemble Company debuted Home at St. Marks Playhouse, with Charlie Brown, Michele Shay, and L. Scott Caldwell, directed by Douglas Turner Ward; the show transferred to the Cort Theatre on Broadway in May, earning Tony nominations for Best Actor and Best Play. A 1982 DC version featured Samuel L. Jackson, S. Epatha Merkerson, and Elain Graham. Sadly, Williams, who was also an actor and television writer and producer, working on such series as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Martin, and Frank’s Place, passed away in his hometown of Burgaw, North Carolina, on May 13 at the age of seventy-eight, just a few days before the first preview of Leon’s throughly engaging Roundabout production at the Todd Haimes Theatre.

Home takes place on Arnulfo Maldonado’s low-tech, cozy set, centered by a rocking chair on a wooden platform in front of a tall row of vegetables and a backdrop of vast green fields under a cloudy sky in the town of Cross Roads, North Carolina, a storm sometimes visible in the distance. Occasionally, a black cutout of a silhouetted house narrows the stage. The show begins with Cephus Miles (Tory Kittles) taking a deep breath — as if getting ready for the race — and two unnamed women who serve as a Greek chorus (Brittany Inge and Stori Ayers) singing, “In the great gitt’n up morning fare you well. Fare you well.” The second woman adds, “If there was ever a woman or man, who has everlasting grace in the eyes of God. It’s the farmer woman . . . and man.”

Cephus Miles (Tory Kittles) searches for home in fast-paced Roundabout revival (photo by Joan Marcus)

However, everlasting grace does not necessarily mean success and happiness. A moment later, after the first woman agrees that Cephus is blessed, the second woman says, “Shit. Big deal. He can think about grace while he’s chopping wood this winter to go in that ‘pop belly’ stove that he cooks on. Or when he has to pack mud in the cracks of his house to keep the wind out, or when he has to use newspaper to wipe his ‘behind’ because toilet paper is just not in his budget.”

Cephus is a simple man with simple desires. He cultivates the fields with his uncle Lewis and granddaddy and appears destined to marry the young and innocent Pattie Mae Wells (Inge). Though not a religious man, he agrees to be baptized by Rev. Doris (Ayers), who warns Pattie Mae, “Keep your eyes on this one, honey. He ain’t a whole Christian yet.”

The chorus lets us know early on that Cephus, like many local men before him, headed off to the big city but didn’t find what he was looking for. “Maybe they’ll all leave,” the first woman says. The second woman responds, “Most of them have. He left. But he came back. Fool.” Cephus also runs afoul of the draft board when his number comes up to go to Vietnam, as he was taught to love thy neighbor and thou shalt not kill. And to make matters more complicated, Pattie Mae decides to go to college, promising to write him every day.

Cephus undertakes a personal Great Migration in an attempt to find a new home, but amid all that befalls him, he sticks to his roots, explaining, “I have no regrets. No bitterness. I’m thankful. And I pray from time to time.”

Stori Ayers, Tory Kittles, and Brittany Inge make the Todd Haimes Theatre feel like home (photo by Joan Marcus)

Serving as the offstage anchor for this wise and very funny and intimate play that never stops once Cephus draws that first deep breath, Leon further establishes himself as contemporary theater’s most consistently successful Broadway revivalist; in the last ten years, he has directed memorable productions of A Raisin in the Sun, A Soldier’s Play, Topdog/Underdog, Ohio State Murders, and Purlie Victorious (among several off-Broadway shows and Shakespeare in the Park). Next up for Leon is Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the fall, with Jim Parsons, Zoey Deutch, Katie Holmes, Billy Eugene Jones, Ephraim Sykes, Richard Thomas, Michelle Wilson, and Julie Halston.

Williams (The Montford Point Marine, The Dance on Widows’ Row) wrote Home while taking a bus back to where he was born and raised, Burgaw, North Carolina, influenced by the many characters he met on his journey. The play introduces us to such fanciful figures as Joe-Boy Smith, One Arm Ike, Old Chief, Hard Headed Herbert, Lottie Bell McKoy, Aunt Hannah, Pearlene Costin, Sydney Joe Murphy, Mr. Hezekiah Simmons, Miss Lizzie, and Dingles the invisible dog, each worthy of their own individual story as they tend to the fields, go to church, throw craps in the graveyard, or enjoy the fish fry.

Inge (Father Comes Home from the Wars, The Ballad of Klook and Vinette), and Ayers (Blood at the Root, Travisville) are phenomenal, taking on some forty roles between them, metaphorically passing the baton as they swiftly move from one part to the next with only small changes to their voice and demeanor and to Dede Ayite’s naturalistic southern costumes. Allen Lee Hughes’s tender lighting sharpens the focus on the character-driven narrative, while Justin Ellington’s sound maintains the sense of place even as the basic set stays the same as Cephus experiences life outside of Cross Roads, traveling miles away from his family farm (hence his last name).

Kittles (8 Hotels, Richard II) gives a career-defining performance as Cephus, a kind of southern Odysseus wondering what awaits him when he returns to a land he left years before. Kittles fully embodies the unpredictable Cephus, whether sitting in a rocking chair contemplating his fate, relaxing on the wooden platform sharing sweet memories, standing firm for his principles, or, perhaps, becoming a ghost, his right hand shaking.

The ninety-minute play concludes with a glorious finale that crosses the finish line with pure genius, reminding us all that there’s no place like home.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

CONFEDERATES

Siblings Sara (Kristolyn Lloyd) and Abner (Elijah Jones) fight for freedom in Confederates (photo by Monique Carboni)

CONFEDERATES
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 24, $35-$80
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Playwright Dominique Morisseau and director Stori Ayers magnificently interweave two parallel threads, one that takes place on a plantation during the Civil War, the other at a modern-day university, in the world premiere of Confederates, which opened tonight at the Signature’s Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre for an extended run through April 24.

The play begins with tenured Black poly sci professor Sandra (Michelle Wilson) speaking to school leaders — and the audience — projecting a picture of the real-life postcard Type de Negresse d’ADANA, which famously depicts a Black woman breastfeeding a white baby, from more than a hundred years ago. “Before this becomes a complete misinterpretation of intent, I’d like to say that I am not averse to images of slavery,” she announces. “There is nothing slavery that is off limits for me. No shame in my own enslaved heritage. No shame. And yet. . . .” She then switches to a doctored version of the photo, with her head photoshopped onto the Black body, a printout of which had been taped to her office door, and asks for an immediate investigation.

As she departs, the action switches to a slave cabin in the 1860s, where Sara (Kristolynn Lloyd) is stitching a wound suffered by her brother, Abner (Elijah Jones), a runaway slave who is fighting for the Union army. On a raised platform sits a bench chest on one side and a writing desk on the other, surrounded by columns evoking the front of a southern estate. (Rachel Hauck’s set remains the same throughout the play, equating the two time periods.)

Sara wants to join the army too and be useful to the cause, but Abner is having none of it. He tells her, “You good n’ safe with what you do right now. Fast picker. Keep out of the eye of the storm. You like the nighttime nobody seem to notice. That’s good n’ safe. I ain’t got to worry as much.”

Sara insists that Abner train her on how to hold a musket. “So I know what it feels like to have the power of freedom in my hands. ’Case I never see you again,” she says. He shows her and replies, “Now you’re a real man.”

Candice (Kenzie Ross) and Sandra (Michelle Wilson) discuss bias in Dominique Morisseau world premiere (photo by Monique Carboni)

Jones does a quick change and becomes Malik, a Black student arguing a grade with Sandra, his teacher. He is defending his paper, which got a B-, claiming that his unconventional interpretation of Lincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation, and affirmative action is valid. Sandra responds, “I’m saying there are loopholes in your overall analysis of the so-called modern-day plantation in the workforce and its parallel to slavery during the time of the Civil War,” a capsule summary of what the play is about.

“Neither of these policies originally targeted the people it was designed to protect,” he declares. “They both came with multiple side clauses and loopholes. The result, slaves still weren’t freed even after the proclamation, and so-called minorities weren’t employed equally after affirmative action. Paperwork and lies and bullshit and plantation by another name.” She ultimately gives him a chance to rewrite the paper and hand it in the next morning.

Back at the plantation, the master’s daughter, Missy Sue (Kenzie Ross), has returned from her brief, failed marriage with new insight into the condition of slavery; having grown up with Sara, she considers them close friends — Sara most certainly does not feel the same way — and now she wants to work with Sara to spy on her father, the master, and ultimately live together safely in the North. Abner is not happy about this prospect, and Luann (Andrea Patterson), a slave who is sleeping in the master’s bed, starts getting suspicious that something is going on under her nose.

Meanwhile, at the university, Sandra is being accused by numerous people of having bias — Malik thinks she is biased against him; her ditzy, talkative white assistant, Candice (Ross), believes she favors Malik; and her fellow Black professor, Jade (Patterson), has heard that Sandra will not support her tenure vote and feels she treats her more like a threat than a colleague. In addition, everyone has a different opinion, not all of them good, about Sandra having worn a Black Lives Matter T-shirt the other day. Issues of gender, class, and race explode in shocking ways as the poignantly beautiful finale approaches.

Sara (Kristolyn Lloyd) and Missy Ann (Kenzie Ross) confront each other in play that bounces between past and present (photo by Monique Carboni)

Morisseau is one of the most successful and busiest writers of the last decade. In the last ten years, she has given us the Detroit Projects trilogy (Detroit ’67, Paradise Blue, Skeleton Crew), Pipeline, and Ain’t Too Proud — The Life and Times of the Temptations, addressing inequities in housing, business, employment, education, and entertainment.

Inspired by Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2011 Atlantic article “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War,?” Confederates is another sparkling triumph from Morisseau, ninety minutes that will dig into your soul while also making you laugh. In a program note, the playwright offers, “Just like in the present, the enslaved are multifaceted. We all carry snark and sarcasm. We are all expert navigators of the systemic fuckeries. And sometimes, navigating that shit is painful. And sometimes, navigating that shit is funny.” Amid all of the controversy over critical race theory and the 1619 Project, Morisseau sharply portrays how America’s racial history has brought us directly to this moment in time, where we must learn from our past and face hard truths.

To further the comparison of then and now, Patterson, Jones, and Ross play characters existing in each era, with direct similarities, while Lloyd’s and Wilson’s characters are mirrors of each other. For example, Candice is aware of her white privilege just as Missy Sue wants to do something to help Sara after all the awful things her family has done to her, even though they each still don’t quite get it; both women are played with humor by Ross. The connections between the dual roles are further established in the costume changes, in which the actors tear off their clothes to reveal their other character as light and sound bombard us; the costumes are by Ari Fulton, with lighting by Amith Chandrashaker and Emma Deane, sound by Curtis Craig and Jimmy Keys, and projections by Katherine Freer.

The cast is superb, led by Wilson (The House That Will Not Stand, Sweat), who mixes vulnerability with determination as Sandra, and Lloyd (Dear Evan Hansen, Paradise Blue), who unearths a dark fierceness as Sara. The line conjoining them is evident from the start and passionately fuses them together by the end, making a grand statement of how much America has to learn about race.

Morisseau wrote Confederates after being challenged by Penumbra Theatre founder Lou Bellamy to craft a theatrical response to one of the main points Coates made in that 2011 Atlantic piece: “For my community, the message has long been clear: The Civil War is a story for white people — acted out by white people, on white people’s terms — in which blacks feature strictly as stock characters and props.” She was also inspired by Toni Morrison’s discussion of the white gaze; she once told Charlie Rose, “I have spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.”

In another program note, Morisseau explains, “I, too, have felt the lash of writing in a continuum that honors this gaze, even when I personally do not hold space for it in my own aesthetic. But there are other gazes as well. As a woman writer, I have also felt the male gaze. As a radical writer, I have felt the gaze of respectability politics. And as a Black writer, I have felt the gaze of Blackness that sometimes is only qualified as one myopic thing, rather than expansive and global as Blacknesss truly is. No matter the gaze, they all feel like one collective thing to me as an artist: oppression.” Confederates takes on all of those gazes in elegant and intensely clever ways. Morisseau’s Signature Residency 5 began with Paradise Blue and continues with Confederates; but no matter how much you enjoy it, don’t wait for the curtain call, because the play is about a whole lot more than just applauding a job well done.

THE GLORIOUS WORLD OF CROWNS, KINKS AND CURLS

The Glorious World of Crowns, Kinks and Curls takes on sociopolitical and -cultural issues by exploring reactions to Black women’s hair (photo by Diggle)

Baltimore Center Stage
Through April 18, $15-$40
www.centerstage.org

There are two critical takeaways from Baltimore Center Stage’s world premiere of Kelli Goff’s extraordinary virtual play, The Glorious World of Crowns, Kinks and Curls. The first, as declared in unison by the trio of performers: “Don’t ever touch a Black woman’s hair without her permission!” The second: There is great theater happening all over the country, not just in New York City, as the pandemic has introduced me to wonderful companies in California, DC, Ithaca, Texas, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, and other locations, where I have never had the privilege of seeing them in person.

In the ninety-minute play, filmed onstage in Baltimore without an audience, Emmy nominee, journalist, and NAACP Image Award winner Goff tackles the issue of how Black women are treated because of their hair. In a series of monologues and scenes with two or all three of the actresses, Stori Ayers, Awa Sal Secka, and Shayna Small, each portraying multiple characters, share more than a dozen stories about how their hairstyle has impacted their lives, and usually not for the better, as they are either judged negatively by others or seen as some kind of doll that can be touched, ogled, and thrown away.

The work opens with a woman auditioning for a play based on a book called Scars. “Even if you don’t have physical scars, all of us have scars that we carry with us, and within us,” she says, explaining how much she identifies with the script, implying not only the fictional one but Goff’s. “I mean, for me, I’ve mostly dealt with weight and body image stuff for years, and, well, I just know what it’s like to walk through the world and have people not see you but look right through you. And the stories in this play are fundamentally about women who want to be seen for who they are. Not dehumanized for who they are or judged for who we are or how we look. I mean they, how they look.”

After the actress explains that she would do anything, within reason, to get the part, the casting director asks, “Would it be possible for you to change your hair?” The producers want the actresses to look “as natural as possible,” but even when the woman auditioning explains that her curls are natural, the casting director adds, “You’re just so talented. I’d hate for something as silly as how you choose to wear your hair to hurt your chances. I mean, this show could change your whole life. And after all, it’s just hair.”

Seamlessly directed by Bianca LaVerne Jones and filmed and edited by Dean Radcliffe-Lynes and David Lee Roberts Jr., the vignettes that follow detail how Black women’s hair affected their job, dates, friendships, and family relationships. A mother is appalled when her daughter chops off her hair on her wedding day. A Black man running for president of the Black Graduate Student Association is furious when his Black girlfriend straightens her hair, making her seem less Black. An up-and-coming lawyer gives up a Caribbean vacation with her partner in order to be at an important meeting, but her Black woman boss is appalled that she has shown up in cornrows. A young biracial girl and her Black mother are taunted because they don’t look like parent and child. A politician refuses to make her hair an issue but acknowledges that a woman has to prepare for public appearances differently from how men do; she’s not going to worry about how she’s perceived by others just to get more votes because of her hair, although she understands that “representation does matter.”

And girls named Amaya and Claire, only their hands visible, clasped over a drawing of African symbols (which can also be seen on several props used in other scenes), speak to G-d. As they mention various objects, the items magically pop up in their hands as they talk about their hair, with a striking final twist that speaks of legacy and the future.

Stori Ayers is one of three actresses portraying multiple characters in Baltimore Center Stage world premiere (photo by Diggle)

Ayers, Secka, and Small — who never touch one another and are always at least six feet apart — are terrific switching from role to role, each requiring significantly different clothing, makeup, accents, and hair. Jones (Armed, Feast: A Yoruba Tale) and Goff (The Birds & the Bees, Reversing Roe, Being Mary Jane) have assembled an outstanding crew of Black women, including two-time Tony-nominated set and costume designer Dede Ayite (A Soldier’s Play, Slave Play) and hair and wig designer Nikiya Mathis, whose creations run the gamut, giving each character an individuality that speaks volumes. (The sound is by Twi McCallum and lighting by Nikiya Mathis.) The set is anchored by a large, glittering, abstract hair sculpture reminiscent of the work of artist Mickalene Thomas.

The Glorious World of Crowns, Kinks and Curls is a superb example of what theater can accomplish even during a pandemic lockdown, using technology to make the most of the online nature of presentation, telling a story that is fresh and of-the-moment, particularly now that America has a Black and brown vice president, while also taking on racial, gender, and wealth inequality. It’s about personal and cultural identity, about imagery and messaging, about bigotry and racism, about love and respect, about who we are as a nation and what we can be. It’s about all of us, in 2021 and beyond. And, because of the Covid-19 health crisis, it is available to everyone to experience for ourselves, no matter where, or who, we are.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: BLOOD AT THE ROOT

(photo courtesy Penn State Centre Stage)

Inspired by the story of the Jena Six, BLOOD AT THE ROOT examines racial injustice in twenty-first-century America (photo courtesy Penn State Centre Stage)

BLOOD AT THE ROOT
National Black Theatre
2031 Fifth Ave. between 125th & 126th Sts.
Previews April 20-22, $15; April 23 – May 8, $25; May 9-15, $35
212-722-3800
www.nationalblacktheatre.org

In 2006, six black students at Jena High School in Central Louisiana were arrested after a fight with a white student, shortly after nooses were hung from a tree in the school courtyard, leading to a nationwide discussion of racial injustice in America. Inspired by the events surrounding the Jena Six, playwright Dominique Morisseau wrote Blood at the Root, which will make its New York City premiere at the National Black Theatre in Harlem from April 20 to May 15. The play, which incorporates music, dance, and poetry, is directed by Steve Broadnax and features Stori Ayers, Brandon Carter, Allison Jaye, Tyler Reilly, Kenzie Ross, and Christian Thompson. Morisseau, who is also an actress, has previously written Sunset Baby, Follow Me to Nellie’s, and the “Detroit Projects” trilogy, which consists of Detroit ’67, Paradise Blue, and Skeleton Crew, which returns to the Atlantic next month.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: Blood at the Root begins previews April 20 and opens April 23 at the National Black Theatre, and twi-ny has three pairs of tickets to give away for free. Just send your name, daytime phone number, and favorite play that addresses racism to contest@twi-ny.com by Thursday, April 20, at 3:00 to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; three winners will be selected at random.