Screenshot via Long Wharf Theatre.
Sali (Ianne Fields Stewart) is zesting citrus, the microplane damp and sweet-smelling in her hands. Considerations! she announces to no one, and therefore everyone. Ask yourself if the work is a star vehicle or an ensemble production. Her nails, long and immaculate, sparkle with gold glitter at the tips. The words are savory and round in her mouth. Ask yourself if the plate must always come second to the dish.
She is a sorceress; this is her kingdom. Ask yourself if the ingredients are more important than the techniques. The zesting never ceases. Even through the screen, it smells like sunshine.
So unfolds the fifth annual Black Trans Women at the Center, a virtual new play festival from Long Wharf Theatre, project manager Joey Reyes and playwright and performer Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi. Filmed between Zoom rooms, apartments and community theater spaces across the country, the festival centers and celebrates Black Trans women, lifting up their stories at a time when they may be needed most.
It is both meditation and medicine, a reminder to stay in the fight for human rights, and that the fight takes many forms. The performances fall at the tail end of Transgender Awareness Week, which runs Nov. 13 through 19 and culminates with the Trans Day of Remembrance on Nov. 20.
From Nov. 18 through 20, seven short plays and two virtual discussions are available for viewing on YouTube. From Nov. 20 through the 22, audiences can experience the premiere of Edidi's Shape Shifter, filmed earlier this year at Bregamos Community Theater in Fair Haven.
Producing partners include The Theater Offensive, Breaking The Binary Theatre, Portland Center Stage, the National Queer Theater, and About Face Theater. Programs, viewing links and performances with ASL interpretation are all available here.
Ianne Fields Stewart in Marcela Michelle's Sali at Work.
"This space can be one of reflection, one of revelation, one of discovery and one of affirmation," said Edidi in a pre-recorded welcome and invitation to engage that went live Monday night. "You're invited into this space, to be in this space, to help cultivate and create this space. This is a communal space, one where the invitation of cultivating community is extended to all of you."
It could not come at a more urgent time to stage the work. In this country and worldwide, Black trans women and non-Black trans women of color experience violence at a rate far higher than their white peers. This year alone, the American Civil Liberties Union has tracked over 550 pieces of legislation aimed at people who identify as LGBTQ, particularly young people and those seeking access to gender-affirming care. Meanwhile, millions of Americans just elected a documented abuser who spent over $30 million on campaign ads attacking trans people.
Enter these strong, necessary and manifold voices, from Venus Kii Thomas' Enemy In The Water to Javon Q. Minter's Crowned Jewelz nearly two hours later. Over these seven short works—presented one after the other, in a sort of thrilling whirlwind—characters show the full breadth of their humanity, with themes that range from budding romance and self-love to religion, safety, and the fight for visibility past and present.
What stands out—as it has for the festival's growth over the past five years—is the expansiveness of experience, and in it the total rejection of a dominant (i.e. cis, straight, white, male) narrative for something exquisite, vast and needed.
Or as Minter said in a talkback, "The job is imagining. And any way you lack that imagination, you lack people that genuinely exist, we're doing the American theater a disservice."
Garnet Williams in Venus Kii Thomas' Enemy In The Water.
That sentiment is embedded in the festival's seven plays, weaving itself in and out of characters' lives as the audience opens their computers and phones and jumps in. Take, for instance, Thomas' work, a sharp, focused interrogation of belief set in the year 2122 at a Baptist church and small community farm somewhere in the American South. As Thomas world builds (credit to Edidi, who lends the show a velvet-voiced narrator with a smart sense of pacing), xe introduces Auntie (Garnet Williams), around whom the story blooms.
Before Auntie, a child is about to be baptized; the preacher and clergy are ready, the font filled. Gospel music builds and swells sweetly through the building. It's easy enough to close one's eyes and see sheaves of light pouring through the window, to feel the sticky heat of summer, somewhere that is not too far away. For a minute, there is peace in the pause, and it seems like all is right with the world.
Or is it? "Ain't no happy day for that baby," Auntie says straight into the camera, her head tipped just so to one side, like a physical tsk tsk. "I know exactly what they feeling."
The feeling shifts: a viewer can imagine a bright spot over Auntie, like everything else in the room is standing still as she speaks. Bridging the digital distance, she barrels forward, remembering her visits with God during a Fourth of July years ago, during her childhood. Back then, nature was her church: she was able to question the moon and stars and hilltops more than the clergy members who populated the physical church she attended.
When she was baptized, it was more theater than holy rite. "Little do they know, I professed my faith ev-e-ry time I went to the moon and the stars," she says, and a listener can hear it in their ribcage. "It felt more natural that way. No whooping. No hollering. No performance. No condemnation, serpents lurking on my back."
This is where Williams shines: she knows how to make the pivot from narration to sharp critique, from personal memory to heavy, weighted meditation. Without ever having to euphemism her way through—gay or trans or different or special, because that's what families say, right?—she pits an institutional version of God against one that is both personal and deeply sacred, laying bare the feeble balance on which organized religion teeters.
There are layers there, in this short and delicious performance: Williams is also funny, candid, sassy and sharp-tongued, all in the span of about 12 minutes. As she steps onto this digital stage as Auntie, she manages to bend space and time to her will, keeping the audience hooked on each word.
Rocheny Princien as Darla, Elisawon Etidorhpa as Gigi, and Samy Figaredo as Benicio in Morticia Antoinette Godiva's Poly Pockets.
That sense of depth and texture flows through all of the works. In MJ Rawls’ This Whiskey and Me, it takes the form of a night-out-turned-monologue, as Dee Dee (Tony nominee L Morgan Lee, who is fearless in the role) stumbles on an old dive bar that seems to have a trove of secrets of its own. In Elisawon Etidorhpa's Desperately Seeking Faith, it is a brave and uncompromising look at family, estrangement, sisterhood and death. In Morticia Antoinette Godiva's Poly Pockets (a riff on the very gender normy toy of 1990s girlhood fame), it's the ability to imagine that abolition, land repatriation, and new systems of governance and kinship are possible.
Or Dezi Bing's Things Unknown, directed by festival alumna L Morgan Lee and starring a fierce, feisty N'yomi Allure Stewart as Marsha P. Johnson (the work premiered in 2020; it hits differently five years and two presidential elections later). In Bing's world—which is also the audience’s world, because that's how theater works—it is the afternoon of June 28, 1969, just hours before the Stonewall Riots erupt on Christopher Street. It is also Nov. 8, 2016—election day eight years ago—and two not-quite-partners (Bing as Riley and Samy Figaredo as Sammy) are out on a date.
As the stories weave in and out of each other, the audience can feel a chest-tightening kind of parallel between these women, who both want a life beyond their sheer survival. Johnson doesn’t know that she’s about to make history: she just wants to live as she is. Riley isn’t sure what a Trump administration will mean, and hasn’t thought about it until suddenly she has to. Meanwhile, there’s a sense that the timeline is somehow scrambled: One woman stands on the brink of losing change that the other fought so hard to ensure.
In the audience, a viewer has to ask the question: when did we slow down? What and who is keeping change in this holding pattern?
"It's not just 20 or 30 of us out here trying to live lives as we best see fit," Stewart-as-Marsha says, and it's both a reckoning and a requiem for the past two weeks. "But thousands, millions even of people who are gonna love who they want to love, and dress how they want to dress, and fuck who they wanna fuck!"
It feels like a resounding message for the present. When Reyes and Edidi launched the festival in 2020, Long Wharf was still physically closed (but very much innovating online) due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Donald Trump was in what would be the final months of his first (and many Americans thought and hoped, only) presidency. The summer streets were full of protest, artists often at the center of the action as thousands marched for the safety of Black lives.
Five years later, the festival is an antidote to—and straightforward acknowledgement of—the grief and resignation and genuine horror that audiences and theatermakers alike may be feeling in the moment (for the record, it would have been if Vice President Kamala Harris won the election too: it's not like anti-trans violence somehow disappeared during Joe Biden's presidency). To the proposed erasure, the attacks, the sheer cruelty that the GOP has mounted, these seven playwrights—and a host more of directors, actors, collaborators—have said, defiantly, Don't you dare.
"There's a lot of conversations right now about validity—about being valid and what is valid," said Marcela Michelle, playwright and director behind Sali at Work. "Personally, I don't believe in that ... as soon as I give someone the power to validate my words or my work, I give them the power to invalidate me. And I think we spend a lot of time being concerned with who is valid and what's valid. Things just are. The words just are. The writing just is."
"As an artist, as a person, as a woman, as a Black person in America, as a playwright, we just are," Michelle added. "And the words just are. So write it down. Do it. Go. Start now. It begins when you begin."