To the untrained eye, my hometown of Clermont, Florida is hot, sleepy, and unassuming. Its population wasn’t much, and we didn’t even get a movie theatre until I was sixteen. While some may call my town boring, its quaintness gave me the opportunity to create my own magic. Orange blossoms perfumed the air all year round. Grasshoppers talked and dead lizards came back to life. Without a radio on, music suddenly filled my home when I began to feel lonely. Snow fell in November, and on a clear night, if I found the right hill to sit on, fireworks began to burst from a not-so-far off magic kingdom.

In reality, the music came from the high school marching band, and the fireworks came from Disney World. Despite its development, there are still a few orange groves on the outskirts of town. But other things like talking grasshoppers and resurrected lizards came solely from my imagination as a child. Tired of staying inside and reading other people’s stories, I went outside and wrote my own with the flora and fauna as an attempt to mythologize the natural beauty my small town had to offer. After a long day of exploring and “writing” outside, I would recount my adventures to a sibling or cousin, putting on a show despite being shy and sensitive. Without knowing it at the time, my backyard was my first stage.

Years later as a playwright, my stories have found a home in more traditional spaces where I can magnify or distort the magic I once experienced in order to better understand the world around me. I do this by theatricalizing not only the landscape but my experiences as a Black woman growing up in a small Southern town. So, in my plays, animals appear larger than life, blooming flowers bring back sweet memories, music and fireworks appear almost at random, and it absolutely snows in hot Central Florida. Those moments, along with a sense of small-town entrapment and nostalgia, are explored by women and teens trying to maintain their own beliefs while navigating expectations put on them by their families or circumstances beyond their control like racism, violence, and untimely death. My characters are working against people and situations seemingly immovable or inescapable but ultimately, they find the strength in themselves to push until something, or someone, breaks. And more often than not, that strength also comes from those family and community members they once felt stifled by. My characters are independent and bold but are a part of a much larger, loving whole.

As a teen, I often felt pressured to be something I wasn’t whether that be fervently religious or an athlete rather than an artist. This struggle for agency led me to my play She Moves in Her Own Way, a coming-of-age story that follows an eighth grader trying to pursue dance while her father pressures her to accept his dream of being a basketball player. As Alex struggles to convey her passion to her overbearing father, we are sent back in time to learn that Anthony’s journey as a young NBA star was partially ignited by an attempt to impress his own father. While the father and daughter fight on and off the court, Alex’s imagination underscores her story with Tchaikovsky and a corps de ballet becomes her teammates, fireworks, and snowflakes twirling from the Florida sky.

My interest in nostalgia brought me to my play, Here Lies Vivienne Greene, which is set in rural Georgia during the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. The title character works as a funeral director at her family’s business and is asked by a desperate Black mother to help save her boy from an angry white mob. As Vivienne contemplates her decision, I use music and whiffs of magnolia blossoms to send her back to the love of her life, Hugo, whom she lost to racist attack. Inspired by her memories and her uncle’s own courageous acts in their community, she overcomes her fear and gets the young boy out of town in a casket¬– alive. This play was also inspired by Trayvon Martin. Then nineteen at the time of his death, I was proud of the extra care fellow young Black people took to check in and make sure we were safe in our own community, but also angered that we had to do so in the first place. In the play, Vivienne, also harboring conflicting emotions, dreams of a world where African Americans don’t have to die to be free.

In my play, Absentia, I return to the hills of Clermont. While Neoma Baines is held captive for eight years, her mother Diana is joined by the community to mourn the loss of a young girl. Soon after, Neo escapes and she struggles to heal from her trauma as she yearns for the life she once knew. Throughout the play, she is haunted by Robyn, a rabbit who she briefly clung to until she realized she couldn’t care for him. Months after her escape, Neo dances around a bonfire and Robyn appears as a large grotesque Disney-like character. And while Robyn doesn’t speak like the grasshoppers from my past stories, his brutalized image represents the hope that she once had and then lost in the wake of her “death.” As someone whose family shifted often growing up, family isn’t easily defined as blood relations for me. In fact, the more I write about family, the more I realize I could never have one definition of it. Absentia is another one of my attempts at coming up with a definition versus the definition. For Neoma, family is someone she can breathe easily and together with, someone who can keep the monsters away. Despite the lack of hope they once had in their situation, by the end, Neoma learns that family is, and always will be, her adoptive mother, Diana.

Similar to my full-length plays, my short plays often bring young characters back from the dead. In Hashtag Jones, a hashtag becomes a trending topic that turns out to be a Black teen who’s been killed by the police. As Twitter users try to speak for him in only 280 characters or less, Hashtag Jamal Jones tries desperately to reclaim his story. In Wax, Brittany, trapped in the woods where they were murdered, claims their mother will recognize them by their moon tattoo and lay them to rest. And in Blue Saturdays, Mike has battled childhood Leukemia twice, and after a third diagnosis, his best friend Jane asks to pray for him so they can continue their weekend tradition of sitting on a hill looking at clouds. Having had friends die young rattled my community and took away some of my childlike wonder, but through theatre, I can give them a chance to talk about what they want and what they miss.

Like Clermont, the theatre can be a magical place. An empty page or space can be unassuming, and we are often met with the ordinary, but we are soon moved when the familiar becomes unrecognizable. As a theatre artist, I can take the moments that once colored or underscored my childhood and theatricalize them with characters who are fighting to find themselves while realizing they don’t have to go too far from home to do so.