Haddad and Marla Mindelle. Being Black in an all-white workplace can make you feel invisible. Being a Black woman in an all-white workplace that hires a Black man with the same name can start an identity war. Dizzying and razor-sharp, this play slices to the core of how the weight of assimilation leads to rageful, bloody consequences and burns the whole damn system down.
But as we follow these threads, what unravels is the deep and delicate connections between them: they all share in painfully oblivious men taking up space in their lives.
Everyone thought they knew Cats. No longer were they felines looking for a new life, they were now marginalized queer individuals finally able to showcase who they truly were. Sitting in a theater fashioned to be a church whose religion was yet unclear, we are immediately introduced to the charming, fierce congregation of Black womxn who bring this church to life and then take us on an embodied journey.
The church quickly becomes a cosmic, otherworldly architectureโan ode to the church of divine Black femininity, of contemporary rapture, and of an intergenerational coming together. In intimate rooms for audiences of a few dozen, this director has redefined and reinvigorated the idea of micro theatre, creating immersive spaces that allow for quietly raw performances enveloped in evocatively rigorous designs.
In addition to directing, he self-produces his work and has been a guiding force in helping others create their own productions. A ghost story in the Jim Crow South. Good versus evil. To have sat in the audience was to have witnessed what many of us have felt on screen, but few of us have experienced in a theater. A chill of terror ran down our spines, almost as if we were trapped in this horror house. A merging of light, sound, environment, costume, and performance, so seamless, that it could only have been orchestrated by a knowing directorial hand.
