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Curtis Brown Photography.
Terrence Riggins stands in a solitary cell, mouth agape as photos of his family bloom across the walls. Over a small sink, his brother and sister stand beside him, children all over again. Across the cell his mother smiles, radiant in bright, crisp color and batik prints. There are family members with their big, gorgeous Afros and actors from the time. They begin to fade, and it’s all too much.
“You trying to break me, brick face!” he cries, and his voice cracks at the edges. “But you can’t! Because I’m already broken.”
So unfolds Unbecoming Tragedy: A Ritual Journey Towards Destiny, the world premiere of which is running at the Yale Off Broadway Theater through June 1. A collaboration between Long Wharf Theatre and Collective Consciousness Theatre, the work is both a play and a ritual, as elegiac as it is layered and imaginative. It is directed by dynamo Cheyenne Barboza, with a powerhouse creative team.
In its telling of Riggins’ life, this dramatic Matryoshka doll defies genre, inviting a kind of witness and wonder that feels profound. Performances run at 41 Broadway through June 1. Tickets and more information are available here.
“I have a responsibility as an artist, in my creative imagination and in the theater, to tell this story in the way that I'm telling it,” Riggins said in an interview last year, when he was still workshopping the play. “I had to really ask myself: Do I want to be this vulnerable? And then when I thought about it … my journey is like, I don't shy away from emotion. And despair and tragedy. I don't run from that kind of stuff.”
In fact, he runs towards it. When the audience first sees (and also hears) Riggins, he is walking into solitary confinement, the eerie buzz and hum of a correctional facility around him. On one side of the room, there's a toilet-sink and clouded-over mirror, on the other, a cot that seems too small for any human body, much less one pushing six feet. A flat, impassive voice announces that the door is closing, and something seems to push him in.
Curtis Brown Photography.
We don’t know it yet, but somewhere in Riggins’ clothes is a photograph of his late mother, who becomes a central character in the show. It is she to whom Riggins’ soul must answer, she who this play is arguably for. When he unfolds it and begins to speak, there’s a momentum and nostalgia there, and a listener may find themselves holding on to every word.
Here is Terrence, thrown to the wolves. Here is Terrence, at last alone with his thoughts. Here is Terrence, marking time with toothpaste. Here is Terrence, the actor, the son, the substance user, the playwright, the prisoner, standing with all the fragmented parts of himself.
This container, deftly handled by scenic designer Omid Akbari, is meant to be both physical and psychological, and it works. While Riggins seems at first unphased by solitary—he shouts to a guard, presumably on the other side of the door—the mask begins to fall quickly. A Bible flies into his cell, and he pushes it back, some deeper story there. Then a pen and paper come rushing in, and he doesn’t quite know what to do with them.
He sends them out, only to understand the power they wield minutes later, and ask for them back. He moves around his cell, restless, an actor in the planning stages of his greatest work. When he announces to the audiences that “you must be my fourth fucking wall,” imagining a cinderblock wall between them, something falls right into place. The proscenium is open.
Riggins jumps forward and back through space and time, bringing the audience along with him. In one moment, we are in 1970s Los Angeles, as he attends a “new age African school” where he is known as “Nkosi” (“King” in Swahili) to his classmates and teachers. In another, he is clasping an opal around his mother’s neck, her smile as pearlescent as the stone. In another, he is reading August Wilson in an L.A. jail, his mind wrapped around the sentences of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.
That play is a turning point in both his real and dramatized lives: Wilson’s 1984 work, set at the beginning of the 20th century, became Riggins’ gateway to acting, and later his reason for moving to New Haven. In the last several decades, he has landed and played roles in multiple Pittsburgh Cycle plays, including Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, King Hedley II, RadioGolf, and Gem of the Ocean. They are part of him, as familiar as family members, and the audience can feel it.
Curtis Brown Photography.
And yet, Unbecoming Tragedy is not a quotation of Wilson (or anyone, for that matter) — it is very much Riggins’ own, with a flair for the surreal that he leans into. During one sequence, for instance, he pictures himself on a beach out in California, the sand cool beneath his feet. He is listening to a circle of African drums, their sound familiar and propulsive.
Behind and all around him, projections appear: bodies wildly dancing, their organs pulsing with red and yellow until they resemble heat maps. The percussion is bone-deep; it makes Riggins move between past and present, what happened and what could have been.
“The drums are beating but I am being played,” he says in a sort of fugue state, and it’s a reminder of the sharp, complete lyricism with which he speaks and writes.
In another, he begins to sing Paul Robeson’s “Ol’ Man River” while at one of his lowest emotional points, and it reminds a viewer that this play belongs to both Riggins and to the long arc of theater history. In one world, Robeson is playing Show Boat’s Joe, just trying to survive as a Black laborer on the Mississippi. In another, Riggins looks out across the East River, and wonders where his life went so upside down. When they collide, it creates a kind of liminal space on stage, so much bigger than the cell itself.
That time bends and stretches in this way works for the performance. Over and over again, Riggins’ life is disrupted by anti-Black violence, from the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. to the alleged “war on drugs” to the carceral state itself. In choosing to name it, to relive it, to explore the contours of its history, Riggins reclaims some of his own power, showing the audience just how active the work of overcoming grief may be.
Curtis Brown Photography.
Meanwhile, the swift, sometimes economical use of blackout, projection, monologue and music move the play solidly into theatrical territory (a nod to Hannah Tran and Finn Wiggins-Henry, whose projection and sound design respectively makes the show sing).
In an early sequence, for instance, several blackouts become transition points, in which Riggins strikes a different pose every few seconds. He’s on the ground, then in the middle of a jumping jack. He’s on the bed, then working out on the floor. He’s sitting still in thought, then he’s walked halfway across the cell. Each vignette is only a few seconds, and yet the effect—the sense of Riggins’ trapped-ness—remains even after the lights have come back up.
These devices blur the line between past and present, real and not, finite and unfixed. Placed in the most claustrophobic of settings, they speed up the seeming porousness of time itself, a very real and documented phenomenon that solitary confinement has on the human mind. And then, they snap back to reality: to Riggins’ recollections of his father, to his struggles in parochial school, to a theft from his family that became his heaviest source of guilt.
Nowhere, maybe, is that clearer than in the last 15 minutes of the show, as Riggins enters his last fitful dream state, and is soon cowering beneath a voiceover that bellows through the house (the voice is his, a testament to his ability to shape-shift over and over again). Around him, water fills the cell; waves undulate and stretch from the walls until Riggins is wading into them.
It is, perhaps, the water from which he came, the water of the East River, the water of the Pacific Ocean, the water that can drown a person if they let it, but also make them clean again. Riggins is not religious, but to call this both hellish, wretched and baptismal does not feel like a stretch: he must feel all of those at once. Only then, as he calls out to the voice, can he begin to heal.
Curtis Brown Photography.
When he stands afterwards to eulogize his mother—who he calls our mother, as though she is now our responsibility to carry too—there’s something so much bigger there than this show. It’s in the attention to pedestrian detail that becomes holy (when he tells you that she liked butter, there's something so universally maternal there that the line is devastating and extraordinary), the tenderness in his voice, the way it centers her humanity and his, too.
It’s a powerful reminder that we belong to ourselves, to our mamas, to the world, and to each other. While Riggins invokes plenty of literary references throughout the show, it is one that he does not, by the late poet Gwendolyn Brooks, that most readily comes to mind. It is she, writing on Robeson, that reminds readers “we are each other’s/harvest:/we are each other’s/business:/we are each other’s/magnitude and bond.”
Those words ring true long after Riggins has left the cell, run back out for a bow (last week, he received an ear-splitting standing ovation), and left the stage again. This is the kind of work that stays with you, worth a second or third viewing because it is so full and so lyrically rich you cannot possibly absorb all of it in a single viewing. For Riggins, long a Collective Consciousness mainstay, it is also a triumph, a testament to the talent that we in New Haven have in our own backyard.
“This is just not a theater piece,” Riggins said in an interview before the play opened. “It's not just for folks to just escape their daily lives and come to see some piece of theater or some story that they can just compartmentalize and keep at the theater. I realized that this is a ritual. This is actually my rite of passage for the rest of my life.”
Unbecoming Tragedy: A Ritual Journey Towards Destiny runs through Long Wharf Theatre and Collective Consciousness Theatre at the Yale Off Broadway Theater through June 1. A number of talkbacks and events are planned around the show; for more information, visit Long Wharf’s website.