Universal feelings through a black lens
At Oakland theater company, art and life have a way of intersecting
Ayodele Nzinga is the kind of person who, if you send her a lengthy text saying you’re running a couple of minutes late to an interview, might reply with just one word. “Relax.” For the 65-year-old founder and executive producing director of Oakland’s Lower Bottom Playaz, the imperative to “relax” turns out to be emblematic of a far-reaching philosophy.
“Mama at Twilight: Death by Love,” which she wrote and directs, and which begins performances this week at the Flight Deck in Oakland, is on the surface about huge systemic issues: HIV/AIDS, disparities in health care access, homophobia, gender norms, mass incarceration and its effects on families and communities as well as prisoners — all as they relate to blackness.
Yet “Mama at Twilight” is also human in scale. It chronicles Mama (Cat Brooks), her mysterious illness and the way it affects her complicated, artistic family members: Kristopher ( Julian Green), Pappi (Pierre Scott), Sun (Stanley Hunt) and Tonya (Venus Morris). The play emphasizes the way, in the face
of insidious forces that grant and take life as a matter of caprice, “people should live out loud, be more forgiving and not sweat little s— so much,” as Nzinga says before a recent rehearsal.
She should know. In mid-December, Nzinga’s 24-year-old niece, Shaffiyah Roberts, who lived in Sacramento, was killed; as of this writing, no arrest has been made.
“I’ve got a whole houseful of people that are upset right now because the last time they talked to my niece — she’s got a cousin, and the last thing that transpired between them was an argument.”
“The kids in this play remind me of my kids when they were young,” says Nzinga, the mother of seven. “There’s this constant sniping battlefield — ‘Shut up! No, you shut up!’ — and that’s love talk. The thought that you could be involved in this loving sniping at one another, and then someone could walk out the door and never come back, is hard for us to wrap our heads around.”
Nzinga remarks wryly that art and life have a way of intersecting when it comes to Lower Bottom Playaz shows, which focus on urban black life. She founded the company in 1999 “because I was an actress and there weren’t enough parts,” she says. “There wasn’t enough black work being done.”
After running a “gypsy troupe,” Nzinga “struck a deal” with the PrescottJoseph Center, a community organization in Oakland’s Lower Bottoms neighborhood. In exchange for teaching Shakespeare to the youth in that black neighborhood, the organization would fund one production per year of a classic black play. Both were performed in the Sister Thea Bowman Memorial Theater, in the center’s huge backyard. Nzinga initially wasn’t ecstatic about the Shakespeare part of the deal, but over time, the Bard “bit me in the butt and I fell in love,” she says.
Nzinga adapted Shakespeare’s text to speak more directly to the concerns of her neighborhood, producing a gentrification-themed “Romeo and Juliet” as well as a version of “Macbeth” called “Mac (A Gangster’s Tale).”
She even adapted her productions of black classics. “‘A Raisin in the Sun’ is a good story,” she says, “but it’s hard for people perhaps to see the relevance of it to today’s moment if you don’t bring it on their street or next door to them.” (Her version, “Rasin’,” brought gentrification into the story.)
Then, she and her company discovered August Wilson. “The language was there for us before we discovered Wilson; Wilson gave us shape and form in a lot of ways.”
The Lower Bottom Playaz is the only theater company to have fully staged all 10 plays of Wilson’s century cycle in the order in which they’re set; he wrote one play for each decade from the 1900s through the 1990s, most of them set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. (Christopher Rawson, a board member at the August Wilson House in Pittsburgh, says he knows of 11 other companies that have done all 10 plays, but no others that have done them in decade order.)
Embarking on that mammoth project, from 2010 to 2016, “sort of put us on a path,” Nzinga says. “The places where it was very difficult to stay together as a troupe, all that was held together by Wilson.”
One of those difficult places was when the company lost the use of the Prescott-Joseph Center’s backyard, after its advocate left the center’s board. It eventually found a home at the Flight Deck, the downtown Oakland venue that opened in 2014. “I love a theater with a roof,” Nzinga says, “but it’s expensive.”
Even if her troupe doesn’t perform anymore in the Lower Bottoms neighborhood, Nzinga says her focus is the same, just matured as a result of the immersion in Wilson. “I have a really black lens, but I tell people that’s OK, because I’m actually doing everyone a service, because black people are the canary in the coal mine. If it can happen here, if it does happen here, then chances are that it can happen to you as well.”
If that sounds like a lot of verbal gymnastics to have to go through to make black theater appeal to a broader audience, Nzinga acknowledges that “it does require modulation. When you tell people you have a very black lens, some would think that would limit you then, because then maybe you’re interested in a very narrow sphere of things that aren’t interesting to the greater public.”
But “what you can’t modulate is, we’re all human. We all love people. We’re all concerned about honor, with being seen and feeling worth in the world. There’s something in everybody that wants to go forward, that wants more than what it has, that wants to see its children have more than what it has.”
And at the same time: “Nobody can see how precious” is “what they have right in front of them.”