"Once On This Island" Brings Haiti To New Haven

Lucy Gellman Photos.

The first time Tomitsela Engel-Halfkenny heard “Mama Will Provide,” she was sitting in the front row of the Shubert Theatre, hand in hand with fellow actor Sora Matta. On stage, actor Alex Newell was taking it to church, and the waves of emotion had started rolling in like the tide. Walk with me, little girl/Don’t you be afraid! Newell sang, and Engel-Halfkenny was in another world. Follow me, little girl/Let me be your guide! Matta was in it too. Tears streamed down their faces. 

The two couldn’t have imagined that they would make the character—or the musical—their own less than a year later. Now, they’re ready for opening night.

It’s just one of the ways young people are learning—and teaching each other—through the musical Once On This Island, which opens this week in New Haven Academy’s gym-turned-theater. A production of the school’s Legacy Studios Drama Club, it has once again conjured magic on a shoestring budget, jumping from the Elm City to the Antilles with painted-over used cardboard, dramatic lighting, powerhouse vocals and 1,000 pounds of sand.

It will mark the third and final production of Legacy’s 2024-25 season (read more about that here and here). Performances run Thursday through Saturday afternoon; tickets and more information are available here.

“It feels good,” said director Tyheed “Ty” Scurry, a graduate of Wilbur Cross High School who has gone on to grow theater programs at James Hillhouse High School and New Haven Academy. “I think it’s a show that we need right now. It’s important to see different cultures onstage.”

Written by Lynn Ahrens with music by Stephen Flaherty, Once On This Island tells the story of Ti Moune (Jay’Nitra Pearson and Solimar Quintanilla), a young Black girl in the French Antilles whose parents perish one night in a tropical storm. Ti Moune, for reasons that temporarily remain a mystery, is spared: the God of water, Agwé (Ciaran Borné-Brennan), yanks her from the rising waters and Mother Earth, Asaka (Engel-Halfkenny), spirits her to safety in a tree.

When they spot her the next morning, Mama Euralie (Elliot Baez) and Tonton Julian (Joshua Colon, fresh off a winter of Shakespeare) take her down from the tree and raise her as their own. Around them, the island is sharply segregated: dark-skinned peasants are relegated to a subservient worker class and live in poverty, while lighter-skinned “grands hommes” live in relative seclusion and gated comfort on the other side of the island.

The two populations don’t mix: the grand hommes hate the peasants because their Blackness reminds them of what they have lost (their Frenchness, which here is equated with whiteness). So when Ti Moune crosses paths with Daniel Beauxhomme (Cristian Ortiz), the Gods make a bet to see if Love (Olivia Tapia Ko, as the Goddess Erzulie) or Death (Charles Jeffery as Papa Ge) will win out.

In this sense, colonialism and diaspora are woven deeply into the script: the play cannot move forward without either, and relies on the heavy, historical tug-of-war that both have been fighting for centuries. In the end, these forces are strong and cruel: even the graces of the Gods (and the general schmaltz of musical theater) cannot protect Ti Moune from a bittersweet finale.   

The work (and the libretto) draws heavily on Haitian Vodou tradition and its West African roots, as well as the work of Trinidadian-born author Rosa Guy, who moved to New York City at the end of the 1920s, when she was just seven years old. As a work of art, it also shimmers as a piece of storytelling, celebrating a rich and Calypso-kissed oral tradition.

“I wanted it to be authentic,” Scurry said of building the show at New Haven Academy. In addition to welcoming high school students from across the district (Hillhouse, Common Ground High School, Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School and the Educational Center for the Arts are all represented), he enlisted the help of his younger sisters, Jazmine and Jay’Nitra, and Hill Central Music Academy student Amayah Erskine.

Around him, students stepped up too, excited to play their own part in telling this story. Behind the scenes, junior Austen Fay got moving on the set design. Matta, a senior who has followed Scurry from Hillhouse to New Haven Academy, dreamed up costumes that students could pull from their closets. Students immersed themselves in tech theater, from lighting and sound design to stage management. The result, Scurry said, was a production that is truly student-led. 

Meanwhile—in the way art so often imitates life—the play had started feeling increasingly more relevant the closer cast members got to opening night. Once On This Island takes place in Haiti, which in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was called the “Jewel of the Antilles.” Like other islands in the Antilles, the country has a rich history of Black culture and vibrant resistance, but also imperialism and resource extraction that continues today.   

Never did the cast expect its history to be quite so center stage. In September, as students prepared for auditions amidst rehearsals for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, then-former President Donald Trump attacked Haitian immigrants during a debate, making claims that were rooted in fear-mongering, racism and implicit bias. In January, rehearsals began within weeks of his inauguration, as he issued a flurry of anti-Black, anti-LGBTQ+, and anti-woman executive orders.

As the show inched toward opening, the U.S. government ended Temporary Protected Status for 500,000 Haitians as their country remained in complete and devastating crisis. Meanwhile, officials also began to gut several federal departments, including the education services on which so many young New Haveners rely.

“I think the symbolism stands very strong,” said Matta, who plays Daniel’s well-to-do fiancée Andrea Deveraux. “Especially with, you know, Trump and everything that’s happening in Hispanic countries. Even in the U.S. by itself, just the separation that’s happening.”

Both they and fellow cast members can feel that tension in the play, Matta added. For instance, Ti Moune and Daniel are separated because of social and economic hierarchies that are entirely predicated on race and racism. In the middle of that love is also the light-skinned Andrea, who informs Ti Moune that she will not be getting in their way. This year, that story doesn’t feel so far away from New Haven, where most of the cast members live.

“That’s one of the most powerful parts about this story,” Engel-Halfkenny said as she finished her makeup, a mix of pink and green eyeshadow and lipstick that included tiny fuchsia stickers. She moved on to help Borné-Brennan. “Like, things don’t end up 100 percent good. People don’t get what they want. That’s just realistic. Like, that’s life.”

She added that it feels particularly special to bring Asaka—and traditions that are rarely seen on the North American stage—to life. Growing up in New Haven, Engel-Halfkenny learned about the Yoruba tradition and Orisha practices through her family. Then last year, she and Matta watched Newell transform into Asaka at the Shubert Theatre during its annual gala. It was a revelation. 

For many of the cast members, it also marks a bittersweet and full-circle moment. This month, Scurry will leave New Haven Academy, where he has been teaching drama since 2022, to become a behavioral specialist at High School in the Community. Matta—who has been with him since their freshman year at Hillhouse—will graduate and go on to college.

Cast members, who range from wide-eyed freshman to upperclassmen, also plan to be “bawling our eyes out” by the final performance, Engel-Halfkenny said. Many of them prepared for this show without knowing it, when they folded “The Human Heart” into a winter play that Scurry had written. 

“It feels kind of unreal,” said Matta, who plays Andrea. “I think it’s nice to finally move on, go to college. But this … it’s a nice step out of my comfort zone for my senior year, playing a character that I’m not really used to.”

At a tech rehearsal Monday evening, that full range of emotion was on display from the moment students stepped into the theater. As Scurry headed to the piano for warmups (Kevin James, who is the show’s music director, had not yet arrived), students gathered around him, their voices rising as they belted This is how we wa-a-a-rm up! and later, the words You have got this! in four-part harmony.

Four years ago, maybe the scene would have felt new: Scurry, not far removed from high school himself, still just figuring things out at the keyboard as a few students futzed around backstage. But now, it felt easy, comfortable, as if students had spent years warming to his broad, rigorous orbit. As voices bloomed and baptized the gym, Fay added a few final adjustments to a set he had envisioned and built from scratch. Another student double checked the sand on the stage, raked neatly after each rehearsal.

In a Once On This Island t-shirt and matching pocket square, Scurry seemed completely at home. One of his younger sisters, eighth grader Jazmine Pearson, rocked a shirt that Matta had once worn in BKLYN as a high school freshman. Another, five-year-old Jay’Nitra, ambled around in a pink dress until she had found Jeffrey—dressed in fearsome makeup as Pape Ge—and looked him over skeptically.

Colon, a senior at Common Ground High School, headed toward the curtain, and then poked his head back out almost instinctively. After meeting Scurry through Elm Shakespeare—the organization does work at both Common Ground and New Haven Academy—he found that the musical opened his eyes to new cultural and creative worlds.

"I've unlocked some skills I didn't even know I could achieve," he said. "My acting has helped me ... it just puts me in a different mindset. I just hoping that I'll be able to tell this story well enough." 

He didn't have any reason to worry. When it was time to begin, weeks of rehearsal transformed the stage into something far away, and yet immediately close. Flashes of lightning crashed over the sand, and characters sprang to life with accents that felt kissed by the warm winds of the Caribbean. Students jumped into choreography from teacher Carissa Kee, kicking sand up in a tan cloud that remained at their feet. As they sang, they eased into the vocals, which start haltingly with a prayer and then explode into vivid, polyphonic color. 

“Yessss!” Scurry cried from the back row as Quintanilla entered as Ti Moune, and unleashed a voice big enough to blow right through the roof. The show was ready to roll.