Shelia Payton

Shelia Payton is an author and emerging playwright living in Milwaukee, WI. Her first showcased play is Facing the Shadow, which was staged by The Black Rep in St. Louis as part of the Missouri History Museum’s 150th anniversary commemoration of the Civil War (2012). The play also has had staged readings at the:
• First staged reading: October 3, 2009. Milwaukee, WI. Director: Sheri Williams Pannell.
• Staged reading: May 7, 2012. August Wilson Center, Pittsburgh, PA. Mark Southers, Artistic
Director (Part of the Center’s reading series.) Director: Rita Gregory
• Staged reading: June 4, 2012. Milwaukee Artist Resource Network (MARN), Milwaukee, WI. Director:
Sheri Williams Pannell.
• Full production: November 1-11, 2012. The Black Rep in association with the Missouri...

Shelia Payton is an author and emerging playwright living in Milwaukee, WI. Her first showcased play is Facing the Shadow, which was staged by The Black Rep in St. Louis as part of the Missouri History Museum’s 150th anniversary commemoration of the Civil War (2012). The play also has had staged readings at the:
• First staged reading: October 3, 2009. Milwaukee, WI. Director: Sheri Williams Pannell.
• Staged reading: May 7, 2012. August Wilson Center, Pittsburgh, PA. Mark Southers, Artistic
Director (Part of the Center’s reading series.) Director: Rita Gregory
• Staged reading: June 4, 2012. Milwaukee Artist Resource Network (MARN), Milwaukee, WI. Director:
Sheri Williams Pannell.
• Full production: November 1-11, 2012. The Black Rep in association with the Missouri History
Museum’s 150th anniversary commemoration of the Civil War. St. Louis, MO. Director: Linda Kennedy.
• Staged Reading: March 22, 2014. 5th POTPOURRI! World Women Works Series: New Plays by Emerging and
Seasoned Playwrights. (RHYTHMCOLOR Associates in association with Voza Rivers/New Heritage Theatre
Group, Inc.) St. Philip's Episcopal Church, Brooklyn, NY. Director: Jeannine Foster Mckevia
• Staged Reading: Oct. 9, 2019, Inaugural Out-the-Box New Play Festival, Chicago Dramatists,
Director: Clarke Smith
• Staged Reading: Oct. 21, 2019, Bronzeville Arts Ensemble, St. John’s on the Lake (an “Enriched
Retirement Living” community) as part of its Live @ Saint John’s arts series, Milwaukee, WI,
Director: Sheri Williams Pannell
• Staged Reading: Dec. 10, 2023, Inaugural Telling Humans Play Festival, Chicago Dramatists,
Chicago, IL, Director: Clarke Smith

As a playwright Shelia’s penchant is to mine untold or little known stories from African American life, history and culture. The works are not history plays, but rather stories about people navigating the ebbs and flows of life in the context of the times in which they live.

Her other creative work includes:
• Writing the libretto for an African/African American-themed opera: Black Caesar. The score for the
copyrighted opera was written by the late Neal Tate, the first African American music director on
Broadway.
• Lyrics (copyrighted songs).

Shelia is the author of two non-fiction books:
• Cultures of America: African Americans (part of a series produced for middle school students by
New York publisher Marshall Cavendish)
• What Counts Most is How You Finish: Thoughts on Living Life to the Fullest (Xlibris)
(Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist in the Motivational Category)

Her professional writing experience includes working as a:
• Reporter for the Miami Herald.
• Freelance producer for Milwaukee Profiles--a feature-style program that formerly ran on Milwaukee
Public Television

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Scripts

Facing the Shadow

by Shelia Payton

Cast Size
8
Genre
docudrama/historic,
drama,
period,
political

Facing the Shadow is a character driven play set in Baltimore, MD in 1859—two years before the outbreak of the Civil War.

Maryland (a state located at the intersection of slavery and freedom) reflects the growing schisms and tensions in a country on the brink of war with itself.

These tensions and schisms threaten to upend the way of life for free people of color in the state’s most racially “tolerant” city...

Facing the Shadow is a character driven play set in Baltimore, MD in 1859—two years before the outbreak of the Civil War.

Maryland (a state located at the intersection of slavery and freedom) reflects the growing schisms and tensions in a country on the brink of war with itself.

These tensions and schisms threaten to upend the way of life for free people of color in the state’s most racially “tolerant” city.

As the members of the Free Women of Color Literary Society hold their monthly book discussion, they have no idea they will soon face a potentially life altering decision: whether to help a slave escape to freedom.

The penalty (should they be caught doing this) is that they and their families will be sold into slavery.

Facing the Shadow is rich in history and relevant because some of that history parallels what is happening today: challenges created by an economic downturn and income disparities, racial divisions, growth in anti-immigrant attitudes, political discord, and debates about whether state or federal governance should prevail.

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Black Caesar

by Shelia Payton

Cast Size
13
Genre
adventure,
biography,
docudrama/historic,
drama,
opera,
period,
tragedy

Black Caesar is an opera in two acts based on a historic figure (a tribal chief) who is captured and transported to the new world to become a slave.

Before the enslavement process can be completed, however, the ship is wrecked in a storm. Caesar, some of his fellow captives and some of the ship’s crew manage to survive and make it to shore.

Once there, Caesar takes control and organizes the group into a band...

Black Caesar is an opera in two acts based on a historic figure (a tribal chief) who is captured and transported to the new world to become a slave.

Before the enslavement process can be completed, however, the ship is wrecked in a storm. Caesar, some of his fellow captives and some of the ship’s crew manage to survive and make it to shore.

Once there, Caesar takes control and organizes the group into a band of pirates and marauders who capture a British ship, and use it to raid English and French vessels traveling along the Florida coastline. The pirates take cargo to sustain themselves and their colony. People are another matter. Unless they need to replenish their crew, the pirate band takes no prisoners--with one notable exception. Among those taken prisoner is a French woman who eventually falls in love with Caesar, and he with her.

Caesar and his band become the bane of England and France’s maritime existence in the New World. As the effort to capture him heats up, Caesar and his crew join forces with the pirate Black Beard. Eventually they are captured, tried and hung.

The opera takes place from 1698-1718, in the village of Abu near the Guinea Bay in Ghana and along the Florida Keys and in the Mid-Atlantic waters of what would become the United States.

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