Between 2010 and 2020, Utah’s population grew at a faster rate than in any other state and more than 52% of that growth occurred in minority populations. Today, more than 1 in 4 Utahns identify as Black, Indigenous or People of Color (BIPOC), compared to 1 in 5 in the 2010 U.S. Census.
As the upward trend continues in the current decade at nearly the same pace, how that expanding diversity in Utah’s demographics is represented in jobs, community life and arts and culture takes on progressively greater attention.
At the start of its 34th season, Plan-B Theatre once again stands as a prominent leader of making good on the objective of representation matters in the performing arts, especially in showcasing original plays that mirror precisely how the state’s profile has diversified. Its ongoing Theatre Artists of Color Writing Workshop has become a natural and essential element in its creative mission, as The Utah Review previously described as a “a socially conscious theater in full bloom.”
This week, Plan-B’s world premiere Full Color reflects the core of these efforts, as it presents short first-person monologues by eight BIPOC playwrights who reflect on their experiences in Utah. However, instead of the playwrights performing the monologues they have written, the premiere performances will be entrusted to their own doppelgänger — actors who relate, identify and can sincerely testify to the gist of the experiences and the stories the playwrights have put into their script. Directed by Jerry Rapier, the production will run Oct. 24 to Nov. 10 in the Studio Theatre at the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts.
Entirely written in the first person, Full Color, the third installment in Plan-B’s Color Series, stands out from its previous installments where the playwrights crafted fictional stories based on their personal experiences. In 2019, … Of Color comprised a quartet of short plays by four playwrights of color making their debuts. Ripping away the premium on civility, politeness and gentility that tacitly signals restraint which exists so extensively in the Utah social landscapes, the short plays demolished those restraints in a production that rightly shocked the senses, rattled and invigorated the mind and resonated in complex commemorations, crises and celebrations of culture, spiritualism and racially authentic language. Two years later, an audio production of Local Color featured four stories that The Utah Review at the time described as crisp, formidable and precise for how each writer unflinchingly commands us listeners to rethink the diction and syntax of our human connections and consider a dramatically more enlightened language that rejects the unsatisfactory hollowness of the words we frequently have used to characterize one’s identity (and self).
In Full Color, the playwrights put their most incisive writing on display, as each monologue pierces through and tosses aside the stereotypes and conventions, which no longer belong in a Utah demographic landscape that continues to transform at a pace more quickly than in any other state in the country. In the hands of another company, it might have been sensible and logistically ideal for the playwrights to perform the words they etched into their scripts. But, Plan-B’s decision to have actors selected because they precisely fit the objective of a undeniably credible doppelgänger magnifies that these voices are not singular but resonate with greater volume and depth than ever before in Utah. Likewise, the particular sequencing for presenting these eight monologues builds to the epiphany that compels us to acknowledge the enlightenment occurring and responsibility we have in ensuring its sincerity, integrity and dignity, if indeed Utah is to thrive as vibrantly as possible.
In a joint interview with The Utah Review, playwrights Courtney Dilmore (Diné) and Bijan Hosseini (Persian/Okinawan), along with their respective actors Abyanna Wood and Alec Kalled talked about the challenges of finding congruence and resonance in the upcoming performances.
Dilmore’s script includes bits of Navajo language, as she recounts traveling seven hours from a bustling urban life to the reservation where her family resides, a remote and quiet spot. She realizes that her return has become more than an opportunity for decompressing from the stresses of her normal schedule. With her mother who encouraged her to come, as well observing how her grandmother struggles with memory in her old age, Dilmore suddenly realizes how reconnecting to the roots of her identity will give her the strength and confidence to stand in two worlds.
Dilmore, a multidisciplinary performer and artist, said that the writing process came organically and quickly for her. Earlier, she had a social media series Be Native with Courtney and subsequently she said that writing a specific story about her own reconnecting to her roots came with, as she described it, “very little revision.” She added that she did not take into account who eventually would be picked to perform her monologue. However, Dilmore quickly found peace and felt immediately comfortable in entrusting her doppelgänger, Wood, with her words. Wood said that she immediately connected to the stories about Dilmore’s mother and grandmother. For Wood, the biggest challenge was mastering the lines in the Navajo language, which led her to taking lessons and realizing how beautiful it is — reminding her of her own role in being a steward of her own heritage and history.
Hosseini, who admits that he is so obsessed with his perfectionistic expectations, had initially written an entirely different piece that was suited more for two actors performing dialogue than as a pure monologue. “With very little time left, I opted to go for low-hanging fruit,” he explained. The second attempt came together very quickly. He wrote about not only being profiled and being pulled by police but also being subjected to the humiliating profiling experience by TSA officials at the airport.
Hosseini’s monologue is the closer in the production, its tone much different from the opening monologue about stigmas and personal dignity by Dee-Dee Darby Duffin, which pops with humor matching with the incisive recounting of an experience with a deli department cashier at a local grocery store in one of Salt Lake City’s most progressive neighborhoods
What surprises in Hosseini’s monologue is that it still could function as a two-hander. It became a fine opportunity for Kalled, his doppelgänger, to nail the manner in how Hosseini might have related his experiences to a friend or acquaintance. While Hosseini admits that he is a control freak about his work, Kalled, during the interview, explained that he could relate exactly to the experiences Hosseini scripted in his monologue. The experiences Hosseini chronicles are not singular, despite the claim by some who will contend they have never experienced anything similar. This underscores the wisdom of having actors who understand (and likely have had) such experiences performing these monologues, which organically deepens their instructive significance and thematic value. Reading Hosseini’s monologue, Kalled said, “there were ‘oh my God’ moments because I also have felt them throughout most of my life.”
In reading sessions and now rehearsals for the production, the eight playwrights and eight actors have become more attuned to the order in which the monologues will be performed. Fried Chicken by Dee-Dee Darby-Duffin is a contemplation of the stigma associated with government benefits, with a lesson about dignity and respect for those who earnestly make it work on a fixed income. Dilmore’s Here follows in a gentle, spiritual and meditative tone on the sense of pride and identity when a young person reconnects to their Native American roots, which rejuvenates them with fresh confidence to “walk in tow worlds again.”
Another shift in tone occurs in Let’s Not by Tito Livas. His monologue makes an impassioned case that being called “too good-looking” is anything but a flattering comment, as it is really code, and not even in an innocuous context, for “your skin has too much melanin.” I Still Have To Live Here by Tatiana Christian is about the playwright’s intellectual journey outside of the echo chambers in political discourse. Christian’s monologue quickly zeroes in on the layers and complexities of identity politics and the less-than-effective impact of performative politics, where microaggressions and subtle and not-so-accidental encounters with racism occur much too often.
Building on the two immediately preceding contributions, Darryl Stamp, in American Survival Story, recounts personal examples, accompanied by a lesson about the fully justified concerns of forgetting a past juxtaposed with the present, knowing that historical erasure continues now but also in a kinder and gentle manner that actually is deceptive at times.
In Life is Color, Iris Salazar relates her personal experiences and explains why colors are not just descriptive labels for literary and creative purposes but they also can be double-edged in purpose. Positively embraced, they are labels of empowerment when individuals proudly own them as a sign of their heritage and identity but there also are many who use them as rhetorical weapons against individuals because of their color. Salazar’s monologue neatly sets the stage for Fox and the Mormons by Chris Curlett. He geniously sets up the parallel between his own story and the classic Aesop story of The Fox and the Grapes, as a young Los Angeles man transported to a world of theater shadowed by the ubiquitous LDS presence, where stereotypes and typecasting for the wrong reasons persist. In At Least, Bijan Hosseini reiterates and reinforces the experiences articulated in Stamp’s monologue. Hosseini puts the context on the final thematic line in his monologue that also serves as the finishing line about all eight playwrights. Building toward the conclusion, he relates not only a stop by police but also being subjected to the humiliating profiling experience by TSA officials at the airport.
In addition to Kalled and Wood, the other actors will be Estephani Cerros, Pedro Flores, Talia Heiss, Terence Johnson, Alex Smith and Yolanda Stange.
Performances will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Thursdays (Oct. 24 and Nov. 7) as well as on Wednesday, Oct. 30 and Fridays during the run. Additional performances will take place on Saturdays at. 4 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. For tickets and more information, see the Plan-B Theatre website.