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Ale Cruz and Jaylah Jones in the world premiere of Heart. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Willie is doubled over her computer, her voice weaving in and out of the clicking keys, the hum of traffic somewhere in the distance. She's nearly spitting into the receiver. "Hello? Do you know who I am?" Her voice is sharp and cold. It's only when her secretary enters with a gentle reminder of the date—Christmas Eve—that she stops what she's doing for a moment, and starts to take stock of where the year has gone.
Somewhere above, the angels are waiting, listening, for the prayer that will inevitably come. Is it enough to salvage Christmas and help her start to heal? Will it ever be?
That question sits at the tinsel-tinged and wildly beating heart of Heart: The Holiday Play, a new play from drama instructor Ty Scurry and New Haven Academy's Legacy Studios drama club. Written, directed, and produced by Scurry and assistant directed by Yale senior Josie Ingall, the play brings together narrative storytelling, hard-fought forgiveness, family ties and some time-hopping holiday magic to balance the bitter and the sweet.
While it is inspired by two of Scurry's all-time favorites, A Christmas Carol and It's A Wonderful Life, the show belongs entirely to New Haven, and particularly to the resilient, funny, and empathic young people at its core. Its world premiere is set to open this Thursday, Dec. 14 in New Haven Academy's gym-turned-auditorium. Performances run Thursday through Saturday; tickets and more information are available here.
Ty Scurry: "It's like clay, where it's constantly being molded."
"This show has been through so many changes, and I don't think it'll be the same next year," said Scurry at a recent tech rehearsal, checking his watch to clock the 15 minutes before run time. "It's constantly evolving. The kids are making it their own. This is really becoming their show, where they're embracing these characters and putting their own spin on things that I didn't even see. It's like clay, where it's constantly being molded."
In part, that’s because so much of Heart is his own story. When Scurry was just 15—he's now 23, and directs the drama programs at both New Haven Academy and James Hillhouse High School—he started writing the show as a freshman at Wilbur Cross High School, as a way to tackle mental health in his own life. At the time, he said, he was depressed but didn't recognize it as depression, and thought he was just in a rut he couldn’t get out of.
English teacher Salvatore DeLucia, who now helms the Lights Up Drama Club, saw that Scurry was struggling and encouraged him to get it out on paper. It was a first push in what would become eight years of editing the same show.
In its first drafts, Heart was a musical about trauma and redemption, depression and recovery. After graduating from high school, Scurry put it aside and poured himself into other work, ultimately directing the fledgling drama club at Hillhouse and later trying to save a family music store in Hamden. At some point in late 2019, shortly before Covid-19 hit New Haven, he picked it back up after struggling to get into the holiday spirit. This time, it came out as a mashup of his two favorite holiday texts—and it stuck.
Warren Leftridge and Mikaila "Sora" Mae Matta in Heart. Both are students at James Hillhouse High School who joined the cast.
“When you’re doing an original work, there’s no rulebook or no inspiration to really go off of,” he said. “So it’s just interesting to be in this space, where it’s kind of like, we’re just creating.”
As it opens this week at New Haven Academy, Heart tells the story of Willie Mae Superior (Ale Cruz), the owner of a cell phone company who cannot escape the grief of losing her mother (Mikaila "Sora" Mae Matta as Seraphim) to gun violence during the holiday season. Now an adult, Superior is estranged from her father (Azaad Mamoon) and struggles with depression, close with only her secretary Alisha (Solimar Quintanilla) and left largely to brave Christmas alone.
When she contemplates taking her own life on Christmas Eve, it's an intervention from the angel-ghost of her grandmother (Jaylah Jones) that saves her—and puts family and forgiveness back in perspective.
In the background, subplots multiply over time (it would not be a play by Scurry if they didn't): Alisha is caring for a child with leukemia (Lauren Sellers as Eric), Willie's father is dying of heart failure and desperate to rekindle his relationship with his daughter, Willie struggles with decades of mental illness and suicidality, and a New Haven pastor (Jeremiah McCullough) pleads for support during the holiday season, amplifying the city's real-life homelessness crisis. Beyond the veil in heaven, Seraphim and Mama Mabel struggle to reconcile as mother and daughter.
Michelle Cochran as Young Willie and Azaad Mamoon as Willie's dad (Mr. Superior).
"Directing it and allowing it to grow into what it's becoming is something new that I haven't done before," Scurry said, adding that many of the characters are inspired by people in his own life. "It's been a pretty interesting journey to not build a piece of work that's already been built."
On stage, that story has come to life in vibrant color. As lights come up on Willie, hunched over her laptop in true Grinch-like fashion, the audience can feel a heavy, sharp grief radiating from the stage, and it's enough to pull them in and keep them there for the next 90 minutes. Around her, Heart's cosmology of characters springs to life, first with Alisha and Pastor Branford, and then with an entire cast that pops out of the dramatic woodwork.
There's plenty to see here, thanks to a kind of world-building at which Scurry is particularly talented. When Willie steps back in time, reliving her mother's death and father's departure, she's horrified to find that there was a whole backstory she never learned, because she was too young to understand it (a nod to freshman Michelle Cochran as young Willie). When Alisha lets herself be vulnerable, it gives her a softness and warmth that the audience didn't know the character had. When Seraphim and Mama Mabel reconnect in heaven, it feels genuinely divine, a reminder of the kindness and grace of which humans are capable.
Solimar Quintanilla as Alisha.
And in this dark season, so often heralded as a time of miracles, the show's message—that goodness can prevail, if it works hand-in-hand with abundance and compassion—feels right on time. Scurry may bend time and space, but he never loses track of the story, weaving into it all the complexity and heart of which a person is capable of in this complex drama called life.
Meanwhile, the show is also a joy to watch; no actor comes up short. As Willie, Cruz is in their element, with a range of emotion that is palpable even in the audience. Alongside and sometimes opposite them, Quintanilla brings a sweetness and strength to the stage, and nails the role of big-hearted caretaker with a wisdom (and energy reserve) far beyond her high school years.
As Willie's father, Mamoon balances a kind of trauma and warmth, ending every voicemail to his daughter with an off-key, very dad-like cover of Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called to Say I Love You" that is inspired by Scurry's late grandfather.
McCullough, who has grown tremendously since his debut in Songs for a New World earlier this year, finds the fire and also the depth to play a pastor, then delights at the end of the show in a cameo from Santa Claus (just go with it). As they play off of each other, Matta, Leftridge and Jones are especially dynamic, like a beatific Charlie's Angels that the audience didn't even know it needed. Even Elliott Peaper, in his debut role as Alisha's son Maximus, gets a chance to shine as he drifts in and out of scenes as a backup dancer, ensemble member, and supportive older brother.
Cast members perform "The Human Heart" at the end of the show.
For a play that takes on mental illness, generational trauma, gun violence, poverty, and the medical industrial complex with both swiftness and clarity, Heart also manages to channel the sweetness of the season, which this year has sometimes felt hard to find and hold onto.
To his original script, Scurry has folded in popular music, including a performance of Mariah Carey’s earwormy "All I Want For Christmas Is You" from Quintanilla that is hard not to dance along to from one's seat. When Cruz sings "I Am Changing," popularized in the musical movie Dreamgirls, they put their whole heart into it. By the time the cast sings Once On This Island's "The Human Heart," Scurry's own love letter to musical theater, it’s hard not to feel a little verklempt.
In the quiet before a recent rehearsal, several cast members said they are grateful to be part of Heart's first-ever cast and crew, and excited to bring a beloved teacher's words and vision to life. Leftridge, a senior at Hillhouse who came onboard for the show, said he’s learned so much through theater, and is happy to give back through performance.
Cruz.
"Portraying these characters, bringing them to life and doing them justice is no easy task at all," he said. "Which I give Ty credit for, cause he puts us to the challenge." Before the show, he added, he didn't always think about the mental headspace his peers might be in.
Now, "I feel like I understand where that person is coming from—what they went through to shape them that way," he said. "I think it's so much better to understand people when they're going through stuff like that, as opposed to judging them, or calling them a grinch, or dissing them and pushing them to the side because they don't want to be bothered."
Several of the actors added that they are grateful for a space to speak honestly about depression, anxiety, family conflict, and suicidality. Cruz, who is a senior this year, noted that mental health is often stigmatized or dismissed, particularly in families of color—which makes the chance to discuss it feel all the more sacred.
"There are some people who are supportive and will hear you out, and there are some people who, you know, they just believe in that myth that mental health issues just don't really exist," they said. "They're kind of like, 'You're fine! Suck it up.'"
Jeremiah McCullough: "Being able to become someone else for a brief moment, to step away from all your problems and focus on what you really enjoy doing, it's an amazing feeling."
McCullough added that stepping on stage brings him—and many of his peers—a kind of calm, particularly at this time of year. Often, he has trouble getting into the holiday spirit. When he read Heart, he realized how not alone he was in that sentiment.
"It's relieving," he said. "Being able to become someone else for a brief moment, to step away from all your problems and focus on what you really enjoy doing, it's an amazing feeling."
That feeling, it seems, is also paying off. At the end of a tech rehearsal last Wednesday, Scurry approached the stage beaming. For the previous 90 minutes, actors had shape-shifted into entirely other people, probing that thin and porous barrier between light and dark, past and future.
Now, they sat on the lip of the stage, transformed suddenly back into high school students. Scurry, arms lifted from conducting the finale, took a deep breath.
“Guys? We have a show!” he began, and actors whooped and applauded as they burst into smiles. “I don’t know what y’all did yesterday. I don’t know what y’all ate today. But we have a show.”