The Not A Moment, But A Movement playwrights reflect on their readings two years in the making.
By Jessica Doherty
Nearly two years ago, six Black woman-identifying or nonbinary writers were commissioned by Center Theatre Group to write brand-new, full-length plays. The Not A Moment, But A Movement (NAMBAM) cohort began in 2021 as a collaboration with The Fire This Time Festival and the Watts Village Theater Company to create work for the Digital Stage. As the second part of this program, five of these writers presented their final works for a staged reading at the Kirk Douglas Theatre this past June. We spoke with the writers about how they have grown since joining the cohort and working on their plays.
Z & Co” f/aka AzizA Barnes realized during the writers’ strike that much of Z’s life had been about survival. “I need to live by my values or I’ll crumble,” Z said. “Going into this [process], it was like, what are my standards for everything? And what would happen if I decided to really give a f***?”
Z is a character in surrounded by an eclectic crew of characters—a teddy bear that comes to life, a clout-chasing influencer, a friend who is roped into a cult through her “spiritual advisor,” and even the Tiger King documentary itself. “There is something about [this play] that is a kind of existential loop hole that continues until you can get off the ride.” This loop mirrors the devolving insanity of the ‘cultish’ world around us as people search for connection. “When the world is in incredible recession, global war, excess, the end of environmental stability as we know it, the art of conversation has become like a Tower of Babel, it’s crumbling down..so I need ‘my people’ now more than ever.” The play is a sequel to Z’s BLKS, which Z wrote at 21. Now at 31, Z is less concerned with the audience. “It’s restored me,” Z said. “I used to be very preoccupied with the welfare of an audience...they’re grown, if they hate it, they can leave.”
Roger Q. Mason’s Night Cities is a ritual of intimacy, exploring the sexual and social life of Bayard Rustin as he navigated his youth into the early years of his activism in the 1940s and 1950s,” they said of the play. The play was inspired by Rustin’s brazen commitment to his identity and beliefs, even in the face of society’s obsession with censorship. Mason’s understanding of why this story needs to be told now has grown since the start of the commission process—particularly as the desire to judge, out, and surveil others has only grown with the rise of social media. Rustin navigated the balance between public and private life in a way that Mason feels could inform others as they do the same. “We’re living in a state of great pride and openness around queerness, and with that comes scrutiny and naysaying and censorship from those who oppose that freedom,” they said. “We need now, more than ever before, unapologetic possibility models from the past, who paved a way for us to be free.” And for the naysayers and the critics from before this commission, Mason asserts that they were “merely fortification systems which invited me to more boldly inhabit my current and future self.”
Tahirih Moeller was taught by a professor that “a play tells you what it is.” And Kia Was Here does not shy away from grief. It is loud and large about it, the way the titular character Kia is with her niece, Kamille, who is now learning how to live a quieter life without her. “Grief is so inescapable, it’s hard for me not to write about it when I’m sitting down and trying to tackle a play,” she said. “I’m just really curious about how I handle grief and how the Black community approaches grief and why it feels so taboo to talk about death...It’s sad to say when people die every day we have to figure out our relationship with grief in a way where we can find the love in the community within it.” Both Kia and Kamille do this with food—which, sometimes, comes to life with googly eyes and quippy remarks. It may sound jarring to jump from serious conversations of grief to comical fantasy—but Moeller has made it work. “I would tell myself [to stop] worrying so much about the structure,” she said. “I wasn’t really allowing myself to just figure out who each character was...it’s okay to just write and piece things together and focus on the craft part of it.”
Cynthia Grace Robinson knew when she became a caretaker for her mother with Alzheimer's that, “I was going to someday write about all of this when I can.” Letters From Loretta is an “intergenerational love story” capturing “all the things that could happen in a life.” What began as a mother-and-daughter story grew into something more, capturing Loretta’s love story, friendships, and changes in her physical and cognitive abilities. In between writing, Robinson had to process the emotions and logistics of her mother’s passing, finding strength and inspiration in her mother’s journals while revisiting her own. “I don’t think there was ever going to be a time that I was going to be ‘ready’ to write the piece,” she said. Now that it has been written, she hopes it will be of service to audiences in similar shoes. Robinson feels each of her plays is a journey, and this was no exception—it is her first play to be presented in Los Angeles, which is her soon-to-be new home. “It just feels energetically right for me that it would be something that was such a big transition in my own life, and this play is making the transition with me,” she said, “I always had everything I needed to write it.”
“There’s no time that’s appropriate for you to grow and learn and be prepared for some level of artistic impact,” t. tara turk-haynes said. With Blue Paris Blues, the passage of time has helped her contextualize the ages of her very famous characters—Duke Ellington, Sidney Poitier, Diahann Carroll, Paul Newman, and more—as they joined forces to make a movie about jazz expats in Paris in 1961. turk-haynes just turned 50 this year, making her closer “in theory” to Duke Ellington as a character in his 60s compared to the other characters in their 30s. “It helps to understand that this is a moment in their journeys of evolution, where I’m not necessarily sure at, 30-something, I would have really understood what that meant,” she said. “Now I can be a little bit more reflective and contextualize some of the emotions and the feelings someone in their 30s would feel.” Most of the characters aren’t just 30-year-olds—they're movie stars. But she hasn’t let that get in the way of creating truthful characters. “I would try to not be intimidated by the characters because of their fame,” turk-haynes said. “If you stay strong in your desire to lay tribute to them and tell a really good story in their voices and what they experienced—you should go for it.”