
Culture & Community | Faith & Spirituality | Music | Arts & Culture | Theater | Public Health | Shubert Theatre
Lucy Gellman Photos.
Beatrice Somerville was taking it to church, her voice fierce and honeyed all at once. In the center of the stage, she gripped the mic with one hand, the other stretched out toward the audience. A curtain of yellow-white light fell over her face. Behind her, a choir swayed to the words, carried on a carpet of percussion and keys. In the third row, Jerel Cloud stood, eyes closed, and raised her arms toward the ceiling.
"All right now!" shouted emcee Sean Hardy from the front of the room. It would not be long until the whole room was on its feet.
That sound enveloped the Shubert Theatre last Saturday, as A2A Productions launched the ninth chapter of "The Cry Within" from the building's new second-floor cabaret space. Part monologue series, part concert, and all testimony, the show doubled as a powerful public health PSA, urging its attendees to seek out help when they may need it most.
The work comes from playwright Andrea Daniels-Singleton, a daughter of New Haven who has used the arts to shatter stigma around mental health, substance use disorder, racism, domestic abuse, and crises of faith within and beyond the Christian church.
Top: Daniels-Singleton expresses gratitude after the performance.
"My hopes and beliefs for The Cry Within production is that we will sell out theaters all around the world while creating change, and crushing the many stigmas in life that are attached to shame," Daniels-Singleton said in an interview after the performance. "As an audience member, my goal is that people leave the production with educational tools and resources, feeling empowered, encouraged, and courageous, ready to conquer life's giants."
For Daniels-Singleton, who grew up in West Hills, that mission has been years in the making. In 2016, she birthed the first "Cry Within" as a small collection of monologues, enlisting friends and family to perform them at her family's longtime church, St. Mary's Union Free Will Baptist, on Shelton Avenue. At the time, she didn't know whether or for how long the project might continue, just that she wanted to break through a layered culture of silence that she knew could be deadly.
In that first year, she wrote and edited and then wrote some more, covering topics that included everything from intimate partner violence to social isolation. In part, it was inspired by her own work as a care provider to community members, and belief that the arts can open a door to conversation that may otherwise remain closed, an approach she has also brought to programs like an annual World AIDS Day observation and her short film Pastors Cry In The Dark.
"There are many different cries within that people have buried, and I want to bring it to the light," she said before an early performance six years ago in an interview with the late Tom Ficklin on WNHH Community Radio. "And I want to bring it to the light, because if I can awaken it, we can heal it."
From that first year, Daniels-Singleton kept building out the collection, adding to a portfolio of characters that did not seem so far away from New Haven at all (while her monologues are fictionalized, the characters are based on afflictions that are very much real and present). In three or four-minute performances, she took on everything from sexism to schizophrenia, leaving no stone unturned. Her goal was and is always the same: to let her listeners know that they are not alone, and to encourage them to seek out professional and medical help if they need it.
"It's been amazing to see this evolve," said Daniels-Singleton, who has been with the performance since its inception at St. Mary's, and helped his wife arrange original music for this year's show at the Shubert. "These touch people's lives and bring about awareness. People don’t always realize that there is help."
Saturday's performance was no exception, packing an emotional tour de force into a surprisingly tight 90 minutes. As actors waited along both sides of the room, attendees took their seats, taking in the cabaret's modern chandeliers and deep, dramatic purple lighting. Along both walls, actors steadied their nerves, running over their lines one final time. Between them hung dozens of stories, just waiting to be told.
Then, as if Daniels-Singleton had flipped a switch, the performance announced itself with a flurry of keys and quick, soft footfalls on the stage. At the front of the room, emcee Sean Hardy cleared his throat, looking out over a crowded, half-lit house. As one of the show's original and longtime members—not even brain surgery has kept him from performing—he later called "The Cry Within" divine, so emotionally and spiritually fulfilling that it feels heaven-sent.
"Please take courage" in the music and monologues that were about to unfold, he told the audience. "Healing lies ahead as we travel through the ninth chapter."
And indeed, it did. From musical interludes that had the house on its feet, monologists brought it, each putting their own on Daniels-Singleton's carefully crafted words. Taking the stage with a quiet, understated sort of presence, reader Jonathan Quinn Berryman brought it right to the current political and existential moment, reading "The Skin I'm In" with a steady, precise delivery that made each word feel deliberate. As he read from memory, extended his arms and hands, letting even his fingertips become part of the performance.
"Brown," he said, his voice full and round. "Not good enough.” A beat. “Educated. Still not good enough." Beneath each word simmered 400 years of American history, and the stain of slavery and racism on a country that never moved past its original sin. He pushed forward, recounting a world that repeatedly told him he was less than. At one point, he looked up, and paused for just a moment. He looked pained.
"Did we forget who we are?"
The audience was listening closely now. Berryman, a longtime educator who is the assistant principal at James Hillhouse High School, pushed away the fear and ignorance that inform stereotypes, his hands floating through the space as if they could physically will away the harm. He found his footing, his voice cresting as it grew more confident. Among the rows, a few murmurs of "yes!" and "mmhmm" bubbled up from the seats.
"You can't destroy us," he said to applause. "Greatness resides inside."
As a Black administrator in a district dominated by white faculty—despite teaching a student body that is as diverse and polyphonic as the city itself—Berryman later said the monologue resonated deeply with him.
"As someone who is 52 years old, I understand what it is to struggle as a Black person in America," he said. "You can have all the qualifications and all the credentials and still not be good enough. I'm at the intersection of Black and male, which in this country is criminalized. In this area, being a highly educated, certified Black male ... I'm still an anomaly."
It set the tone for an evening that balanced its bitter with its sweet, jumping from toxic masculinity and internalized misogynoir ("I nicknamed myself not enough," said Jerel Cloud at one point, and the pain was palpable) to spiritual burnout to effusive, jubilant praise that spilled out into the audience. Performing Daniels-Singleton's powerful "What If I Told You," actor Walter Cloud turned the clock back to childhood, addressing his father as he remembered a handful of Tonka Trucks and a paternal warning that men didn't show physical affection.
"I needed more. I needed you," he said into the microphone, and something caught in his throat for a moment. His eyes scrunched and crinkled at the edges. He was learning to chart a new path forward. "Not only you, but the soul of you."
"Dad, what if I told you that real men do cry?" he asked later in the monologue, to instant applause and responses from the audience.
Others pushed themselves as they took the spotlight, letting their stories anchor them in time and space. In her second "Cry Within" performance ever, Daniels-Singleton's daughter, Zshonna Singleton, waded bravely into intimate partner violence with "Beautiful Flower," the story of an abusive relationship that felt throbbingly real.
Steadying her nerves beneath the spotlight, Singleton spun her mother's words into a vivid narrative, telling the story of a night out on the town that turned deadly for a friend caught in her partner's cycle of emotional and physical abuse. To push through her nerves, she focused on her mother the whole time, "like I was just speaking to her."
"My hope is that people my age see how severe my [character's] situation was, because it is real," she said in an interview after the performance. "I’m 19, and we need to be aware of this because anything could happen. We saw what happened to her."
It opened a kind of urgent, sharp vibrancy that flowed through the rest of the night. As musicians returned for a medley, five short original songs became their own kind of act, with a performance from Somerville that had attendees openly weeping as they let the words flow through the space.
Taking the mic afterwards, longtime "Cry Within" participant Steffon Jenkins kept it going with "When The Music Stops," a portrait of a woman whose faith is tested by her struggles with mental illness. As she cradled her head in her hands, despairing at voices in her head, some members of the audience leaned in, as though the words were hitting home. They stayed there as Erica Wilkins barreled toward the end of the night with "No More Sheets," about a character who stops sleeping around as she discovers that she is all she needs.
"Come out beautiful!" she declared, and the audience applauded as she burst into a smile. "Come out royalty! Come out boss lady! The world is waiting for us!"
Speaking To People
In a series of interviews after the performance, both cast members and attendees stressed the importance of "The Cry Within" as a way to spread a vital public health message, particularly to those who may feel shame or stigma around seeking help. Jenkins, a survivor of domestic violence who runs the support group Women Winning Over Fear, remembered the first time she performed with the cast.
For years, she recited the same monologue, telling a story about domestic violence that she could relate to. Then she took on "When The Music Stops," which ends with a congregant calling her pastor in the midst of a mental health crisis. As a devout Christian herself, Jenkins can feel the character's story arc deep within her every time she performs. She is especially attuned to the threat of social isolation and despair after the Covid-19 pandemic.
"You're locked in and away from the world and you have to deal with these inner demons and this darkness all alone," she said. "I am definitely an evangelist—I’m very bold about the topics that we consider taboo and I don’t mind sounding the alarm. I believe in church and therapy. And medication if you need it."
Faith, she added, is very much part of that equation for her—as it is for Daniels-Singleton. "You gotta have faith in a chair before you sit in it. You have faith in revolving doors that these things are going to open. I would love to see this have a domino effect to where more pastors and more churches can be able to really see these and look at their ministry from a different lens. God gives us wisdom, and we have to be wise."
Attendee and singer Jackie Brunson, who flew in from Florida for the performance, echoed that hope. As Daniels-Singleton's godmother, she's attended four performances of "The Cry Within"—but known the playwright and lyricist for her whole life. She said she was thrilled to see it move into the Shubert—a formal and prestigious theater space—and is doubly excited to see what her goddaughter does next.
"What she’s done really has been an inspiration for everybody," she said in a phone call last week. "I’ve seen her take subjects that are really relevant right now and develop them into monologues that really speak to people."
An encore performance of “The Cry Within: Chapter Nine: Restoration” is planned for February 22, 2025 at 6 p.m. at St. Mary’s UFWB Church, 266 Shelton Ave. in New Haven.