Image Courtesy Next Act Theatre
Kill Move Paradise
David Cecsarini chose Kill Move Paradise to open his final season as artistic director of Next Act Theatre, the honored company he co-created in 1990 and has led since 1992. It’s a wild ride of a play by the 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright James Ijames that should thrill fans of theatrical experiments. It was introduced to the world in 2017 by the National Black Theatre and to Cecsarini by director Marti Gobel.
In the play, four young Black men magically arrive one by one in a limbo where they learn that they’re the newest in a very long list of murdered Black Americans. A note arrives by paper airplane explaining that before they can ascend to paradise, they must accomplish four objectives in the presence of an audience. The actual audience is constantly acknowledged. The script makes clear that Ijames knows it’s like to be largely white folk.
One of the characters has been here before. Since the final requirement for entering paradise is to “make a house a home,” perhaps this soul has yet to find a family in the Underworld. He’ll do that.
“This play is not realism and should not be performed as such,” Ijames writes in the script’s opening direction. It’s a window into Black experience in America. “The space,” Ijames writes, “should look pregnant with history and possibility.”
The 2014 shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice by a cop who mistook the child’s toy gun for a real one inspired Ijames to write the play. Young Tiny, toy gun in hand, is the last character to land in limbo. He has no idea he’s been murdered. He provides the group the opportunity to meet the remaining requirements: remember; take care; and boogie oogie oogie.
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Tiny will be played by Joseph Brown Jr., a Marquette University theatre student. He said this about the characters’ involvement with the audience.
“I would say the play is trying to tell the audience that often we have to experience tragedy for non-people of color to understand what it’s like to be a person of color. No formal explanation really suffices to explain what things are like when you’re not a white person in America. It’s usually through some dramatic form of death that people say, hey, this is something we need to rally against. It’s always some big dramatic act of violence that gets people’s attention.”
Black Out
On Oct. 1, Next Act will introduce Milwaukee’s first “Black Out” night. Kill Move Paradise will run Sept. 22-Oct. 16, but at the 8 p.m. show on that Saturday night only Black-identifying people can enter the theatre at 225 N. Water St. A 7 p.m. reception and a post-show talk back are included, all free of the white gaze.
The world’s first Black Out performance was on Broadway in 2019, designed by playwright Jeremy O. Harris for his Slave Play. Chicago had one. San Diego had one for a show that Gobel directed there. It was her idea to inaugurate the practice here.
“So it’s a newly established motif,” Cecsarini says. “I’m fascinated how it’s going to go. I wonder if it’ll become an in-joke for the all-Black audience, knowing they’re supposed to be the white audience. I think it might make for an enjoyment cycle between the actors and the audience. I’m excited just to let the work we put onstage speak in terms of where we sit with the Black experience, and to get information about that experience out to our people.”
Let People Talk, You Listen
How can we non-Blacks learn about Black experience? “Just let people talk and you listen,” Brown suggests.
Gobel’s life in art has been devoted to sharing Black experience onstage and helping theatre companies of every size and sort diversify. In actors Marcus Causey, Dimonte Henning, Ibraheem Farmer, and Brown, she and Cecsarini have the perfect cast for this example.
Cecsarini is the set designer. His plan is to continue to direct, act, and design for the company. “It’s the administrative merry-go-round I’m leaving,” he explains. “I want to make way for somebody with a lot more of that sort of energy. A lot of cultural change has happened the last few years, and I think change at this level is a good idea to move our company forward.”
The company plans to hire a new artistic director by the end of September. That person will work with Cecsarini until January, and then have “half a season to get their own rhythm going,” Cecsarini says.
“For now,” he adds in artistic director mode, “we’re asking our audience to follow mask protocol whenever we’re at community red or yellow levels. I’m pretty sure most audience members will be thankful for that. And what I would also say is, please come back to the theatre. We need you and we hope you need us.”
For information, show times and tickets, call 414-278-0765 or visit nextact.org.
