Newsletter 27: Shadows and Light in the Grove

My play, Shadows and Light: The M Ensemble Story, has been selected for the 2026 Coconut Grove Theatre Festival! In its second year in existence, the festival seeks to bring theater “back” to the historic Coconut Grove neighborhood, also known as Miami’s Little Bahamas.

Shadows and Light theatricalizes the M Ensemble, the oldest and longest-running professional Black theater company in Florida. Founded in 1971 on the University of Miami’s campus, the company emerged in response to Black students who felt overlooked in departmental casting. These students were part of the first wave of integration at UM and experienced the dissonance of an expanding theater curriculum in the Jim Crow South. Upon graduation, they transitioned from the university landscape into the greater Black Miami community. Moving beyond the magnifying glass of the ivory tower, their mission centered on preserving and promoting African American culture and experiences through the performing arts.

A multimedia theatrical journey about a Black Miami company determined to endure, Shadows and Light offers an opportunity for public engagement with research-to-performance methodologies. Centering the company’s founders, T.G. Cooper, Patricia Williams, and Shirley Richardson, the work moves through moments of collaboration, fracture, and return, imagining how a company is shaped over time. I set the story against Miami’s cycles of development, displacement, and political scandal. Blending history, memory, and imagination, the play asks: What happens when survival itself becomes a form of artistic resistance?

If you are in Miami on April 18th, please come! I would love to hear your thoughts as the play continues to develop and unfurl toward full production. The theatrical conceit activates the imagination through archival fragments and oral histories. In this sense, the work is a collection of stories. I began interviewing the company in 2024 and hosted the “History Seminar: A Seminar on the Historical Legacy of the M Ensemble in South Florida” this past fall as part of the play’s ongoing development.

During the seminar, the company showcased an exhibit displaying nearly 55 years of theater-making. Featuring production posters, newspaper clippings, and period props, the exhibit functioned as a masterclass in African American storytelling—and a true history lesson for Generation Z, many of whom had never seen or touched a rotary phone or kerosene lamp, prop or not.

Following a tactile and visual engagement with the company’s archive, the seminar transitioned into a screening of The Golden Years, directed by McKinson Souverain and my dear friend Chasity Hart. Like The U, the film historicizes the company’s early formation within the context of Liberty City and the McDuffie riots.

To conclude our time together, seminar participants engaged in a “Story Circle.” Independent research consultant Judy Pryor-Ramirez adapted the Story Circle Interview Method for data collection from the Story Circle practice developed by the Free Southern Theater and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Rooted in the Black Freedom Movement, the Story Circle gathers community members in a circle to collectively process lived experience through the healing balm of deep listening and shared testimony.

After engaging the exhibit and documentary through a more top-down format, participants gathered in a circle with the surviving company founders and current members to discuss race relations, community, theater, academic institutions, and performance.

This intergenerational gathering revealed the beauty of sharing both collective and individual histories in a circle. Like a story unfolding onstage, there comes a moment when it no longer belongs to any one person. It becomes something each member of the circle must carry. It is my hope that Shadows and Light will forge a circle that offers audiences the magic of the ensemble—magic that words alone cannot hold. I’m honored to steward this circle and bring the M Ensemble “back” to the Grove.