A young Black boy wakes up in the afterlife and calls out to God.
No answer.
That is the premise of Makambe K. Simamba’s Dora-award-winning Our Fathers, Sons, Lovers and Little Brothers, which is set to have its final performances in Calgary this September as part of Handsome Alice’s 2024 season.
The play is centred around questions of what it means to be young and Black in Canada, and what an afterlife looks like for someone discovering the truth of the life they lived.
“What follows is this young person processing how he got here… and the death that he didn’t choose. So, the piece asks questions about, or plays with the potential of what an afterlife might look like, what that might entail, and what it might mean for a soul to get ready to transition to fully leave a body and go on to whatever happens to be next,” said Simamba.
“There’s a sometimes comedic exploration of what that might be like, that sort of exists within the undercurrent of the real resonance of pressing issues.”
Among those issues were the continued deaths of individuals like George Floyd in the United States, and even Latjor Tuel in Calgary, she said.
“I think about Trayvon Martin. I think about how a lot of media outlets came out trying to demean his character. I remember the word thug was used. I remember they really just tried to paint him as a bad kid, and the quick defence for that is often like, no, he was a good kid. And maybe he was,” Simamba said.
“I’m less interested in, ‘oh, did this person do things that we feel like made them deserve to be treated this way?’ I’m more curious about what’s the bigger picture? I want us to think about why is it that people who tend to look a certain way tend to be more likely to have this outcome, and so how do we as the community, Black folks, and just a human global community come together and also honour the spirits of the folks we have lost.”
Simamba said that curiosity comes from wanting to see people and their lives reflected on stage, and for Our Fathers, Sons, Lovers and Little Brothers, that does mean piercing the bubble that underestimates the racism that manifests around Black Canadians, and the number of Black people who are killed.
“What happens is we have this list of infamous names of Black folks who are killed by the police, and we only know them for the worst day of their life. We really know them for their death. We don’t know them for their lives,” she said.
“What I hope that people take away is that like any person who died under such a circumstance, they had a life, and I think that that person, that soul, would want to also be remembered for the life they lived, not just the death that they didn’t choose.”
Intensity and inspiration came from her own life experience
The choice to place the story in an imagined afterlife instead of the perhaps more obvious choice of the living present, came about as a result of a death in her own family, she said.
In 2016, Simaba was a part of One Yellow Rabbit’s Summer Lab Intensive program, when her cousin passed away. At the time, she felt like she wanted to quit OYR’s program out of grief, but said that she was urged to complete program and the story.
“I had this little bit of a nudge from somebody from the spirit world, and that gave me a permission to just write the thing the way it made sense for me to write it. So, if there’s something about that space that I was in, I didn’t really have an inner critic, I didn’t feel any sort of blockages in terms like, is this going to make sense and are people going to get it,” she said.
“I really just wrote the concept away in the rawest way that it made sense to me, and the intention of here’s a young person who was taken from his family, his community, his society, way before his time, so I would like for everybody to spend a few minutes with him, just to remember that he was a person.”
That rawness and intensity earned Simamba a pair of Dora awards in 2019 for Outstanding New Play and Outstanding Performance by an Individual.
That the original workshopping of the play happened in the Big Secret Theatre in Arts Commons and is now returning to that same theatre for its final performances, felt like a bit of a homecoming, she said.
“Handsome Alice produced my very first professional show as a playwright, which was also a solo show called A Chitenge Story, and it was directed by Kathryn Smith, who runs Verb [Theatre] and who was co-producing, and so there’s just and like Meg [Farhall], who now runs Handsome Alice was the producer on A Chitenge Story,” Simamba said.
For her part, Smith said that Our Fathers, Sons, Lovers and Little Brothers was the kind of show that was both breathtaking and deeply important and that it was exciting for Verb and Taragon Theatre to be partnering on bringing it to Calgary for a final time around.
“It’s been a dream of mine to see this show presented in Calgary, since it had its world premiere back in 2019. Makambe is a fierce and present performer who offers nuance to the audience while also wearing her heart on her sleeve,” she said.
Our Fathers, Sons, Lovers and Little Brothers has been directed by Donna-Michelle St. Bernard, with set and video design by Trevor Schwellnus, lighting design by Andrea Lundy, sound design by Diana Reyes, and original music composed by Maddie Bautista.
The show runs from Sept. 13 through 28 at Arts Commons.
Tickets are available at handsomealice.com.
