in gratitude

I just returned from a very successful production of Tarell Alvin McCraney's play, CHOIR BOY, at Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, CT. I blogged earlier about the ritualized start to all their rehearsal and tech processes with their Statements of Acknowledgement. Now, I'll talk about myself and my experience working on this fascinating piece of art.

I had no idea that the play would impact me as it did. Or that it would shed such a healing light on decades old wounds that I have carried with me, as subtly as the lining of a pocket, since childhood. These wounds had (have) become such a part of me, that they had (have) informed who I am, how I see the world, how I function in it, how I respond to it, and many of the choices I've made throughout my life -- for better or worse.

Let me do something now, because of these wounds and the resulting lifelong choices I've made, that I've never done before. And that is to say for the first time on social media that I am a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community. I grew up in a very openly, solidly homophobic world in the Black community of my childhood in Texas in the 1960s. Of course, this isn't unusual. The default setting for all the country and the world at that time was revulsion at the idea of homosexuality. I myself certainly thought it was wrong, and I paid a heavy price of self-fear and self-loathing throughout practically all of my youth and into my middle-age. There were many instances in which I might have stood up for a friend, for an idea, or for myself, but I remained silent for fear of seeming sympathetic, understanding, or oddly too knowledgeable. In solitude, I would curse myself.

CHOIR BOY deals with the character, Pharus Jonathan Young, a gifted singer/musician at a Black all-boys boarding school in the present day. He is that young man that my community (in my youth) would have targeted. Openly queer and prone to flamboyance, he is not hiding and he is not apologizing. He gets lots of push back from most of the students and one particularly. But he's also got one friend, confidant, and ally who is a confidently heterosexual baseball jock. I regard this character as the play's secret hero.

But Pharus is its champion.

My role was that of the school's Headmaster. Somewhat a bystander as Pharus moves through his senior year, but with all the support he can give to Pharus, it was a perfect vantage point for the character and for me, the actor and fellow queer person, to watch this young man's story unfold -- and to think about my own life and the youth that shaped me. While Headmaster had not definitely been written as a gay character, I decided to make him subtly (closeted) so. I felt it gave both the character and myself a secret route into a closer, more invested interest and experience of Pharus's journey. And this eventually lead me back to an examination of my own childhood. It lead to the healing I had long needed though never realized that I did -- that working on CHOIR BOY ultimately provided.

Watching Pharus negotiate his treacherous path through his circumstances at the boarding school with unshakable will and determination, good humor, patience, cleverness and kindness, and nevertheless, finding the result of his labors turn to tragedy is the ultimate call to all of us to know each other and to try to love one another AS WE ARE.

I feel I must thank these great artists by name that shared this epic journey on the stage. They are (in no particular order, save one): Walton Wilson, Denzel Fields, Darian Peer, Jarrett Anthony Bennett, Wildlin Pierrevil, Gilbert Domally, Anthony Holiday, Malik James, Aaron James McKenzie, and Israel Erron Ford who played Pharus. Likewise, I am enormously grateful to our director, Christopher Betts for shepherding this story, and the brilliant writer, Tarell Alvin McCraney for this magnificent and incredibly necessary lesson by, about, and for the Black LGBTQ+ community and the world.

There is so much more I could say regarding my life and decisions as shaped by my upbringing, and perhaps in a future blog, I will. But for now I will say simply that my journey of healing has begun. And it continues . . .