Photography by Whitney Curtis
Nearly five years ago, when playwrights Kristen Adele and Michael Thomas Walker saw that Michael Brown had been shot and killed in Ferguson, they felt compelled to do something. Both were living in New York City, and they noticed a disconnect between the stories they were seeing on social media and what was presented on the news.
“I just remember feeling so helpless, thinking, ‘What can I do? What can I offer as an artist? How can our work create change?’” says Adele.
“We felt like we needed to go and investigate,” says Walker.
The resulting play, Canfield Drive, premieres January 9 at the Black Rep, thanks to a grant from the National Performance Network, the Rep, and 651 Arts. The pair feel that they were entrusted with the story. “These stories are complicated—they’re messy. There’s no happy ending because it hasn’t ended—it continues,” says Walker.
Named after the street where Brown died, the play portrays two high-powered journalists with differing political ideologies thrown together following the death of the unarmed teenager. As the reporters work to figure out what happened to Brown, they’re forced to deal with their own biases. The play is based on interviews that Adele and Walker conducted throughout St. Louis. In collecting stories, they spoke with all types of communities, including a group of indigenous Native American women near Cahokia Mounds.
“It was important to us that this story not just be black and white,” says Adele. “We felt like this story often gets framed as a black-and-white issue, not an American issue, but it impacts everyone.”
In addition to interviewing St. Louisans, Adele and Walker kept two other important sources in mind: their mothers. “We wanted a play that would reach both of them,” says Adele. It was important that it not just be a play for white people or black people but for people who wanted to participate in a larger conversation.
“If you want to come to the theater and be changed,” says Adele, “then this is the play for you.”
And The Black Rep will finish the season with these other works:
- Milk Like Sugar: Obie winner Kirsten Greenidge’s play follows Annie Desmond, whose friends are trying to convince her to enter into a life-changing pact on her 16th birthday—to become a teenage mom. (Sounds unbelievable, but such a “pregnancy pact” was reported in Massachusetts in 2008.) It’s only after Annie agrees and befriends Malik, the fellow student she’s chosen to be her baby’s father, that she starts to wonder what the consequences ofher choice might be.February 13–March 3at the A.E. HotchnerStudio Theatre.
- Nina Simone: Four Women: “To be young, gifted, and black / Oh, what a lovely, precious dream,” Nina Simone once sang. Nina Simone: Four Women, by Christina Ham, takes its title from another of the civil rights activist’s protest songs, which features four black women with varying skin tones—Sarah, Sephronia, Sweet Thing, and Peaches—who have suffered from self-hatred. In the play, Peaches is Simone, and the four meet on the day of the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. May 15–June 6 at the Edison Theatre.
