Would you adopt your son’s killer? Tacoma play explores forgiveness and family
“You took away my son and now you gotta be my son,” a mother tells her son’s killer in the new play, “Shattering”.
The play, written by a white author for a black cast, was scheduled to have its world premiere Friday in Tacoma.
“Shattering” spins on the themes of forgiveness and family, playwright Pat Montley said. In it, a mother requests that a teen gang member who helped kill her son be sent to live with her.
Tacoma Little Theatre is producing the play, one of six winners in the American Association of Community Theater’s NewPlayFest. The contest was created to bring new plays to community theaters around the nation. Winners are guaranteed that a theater will produce their play.
TLT managing artistic director Chris Serface and his production team read all finalist scripts in the competition. They put “Shattering” on the top of their list.
“This is the one that I had to sit down at the end and breathe,” Serface said. “It’s a powerful story that should be told.”
South Africa to Tacoma
Montley, 77, lives in Baltimore. She’s a retired theater professor at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, specializing in play writing.
The story line for “Shattering” came from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. One of the commission’s cases involved a white police officer who killed an innocent black man and his son.
“The judge turns to the (widow/mother) and says, ‘What justice shall be done?’” Montley recounted of the story she heard at her church. “The woman says, ‘My husband and my son were my only family. I want this man to become my son. He should come to my house and spend a day twice a month so that I can pour out whatever love I have remaining in me.’”
Montley was stunned by the story and sat with it for weeks.
“I cannot not write it because it tore my heart out,” she said.
The script calls for black actors, Montley said. In Baltimore, she’s exposed daily to news of homicides and gang violence of which blacks make a high percentage of victims.
But what did she know about the black experience?
For research, she interviewed adults involved in the juvenile detention system.
Then she had black colleagues and friends read the play. She held a reading of it in her living room with black teen actors.
At every turn she listened to feedback.
“I’ve made changes accordingly, often, based on what they recommended,” Montley said. “I’ve probably done as much as a white person can do.”
The plot
The play opens with a wordless prologue. The audience sees Jonah, a 15-year-old gang member, acting as a lookout while a young man, Sonny, is robbed. Sonny’s mother, DeeDee, pounds on a window. Sonny is shot and killed, shattering all their lives.
The first act brings a sullen and uncomfortable Jonah into DeeDee’s home. It’s revealed that DeeDee testified against the other gang members involved in her son’s murder.
Sonny reappears in flashbacks to reveal that the relationship with his mother was tumultuous from clashing religious beliefs. As Jonah reads Sonny’s journals, the murdered young man converses with him as the teen’s conscious.
Complicating the situation is Jonah’s girlfriend, LaBelle, who tells him the gang leader has ordered Jonah to torture and kill DeeDee as a warning to potential snitches.
“He’s in a bind to kill or be killed,” Montley said.
Among other themes, “Shattering” is a coming of age tale, she said.
“What’s it like to live in a neighborhood where if you don’t join the gang you become the enemy of the gang?” Montley said.
Acting versus real life
Where does a 77-year-old woman learn to speak like a 15-year-old black gang member?
Montley listened to the teens and other young people who have read the script. Not least among them is Donovan Mahannah, the 20-year-old Tacoma actor who plays Jonah.
“I just felt like some things were out of date, like references, a few bits of dialogue,” Mahannah said. He and the other cast members suggested changes.
In December, Montley spent a few days in Tacoma to work with Serface, the actors, a set designer and other crew members.
Dialogue is a subject itself in the play. At one point, Jonah accuses DeeDee, who is a physicist, of “talking white.”
“I don’t talk white,” DeeDee responds. “I talk educated.”
“I’ve had that line said to me in real life all my life,” said Robin McGee, 45, who plays DeeDee. “I was told, if someone says that to you just say, ‘I’m an educated woman.’”
As actors often do, cast members used their own life experiences to inform their characters.
“I had a lot of women in my life that were strong women, and I did pull from that,” McGee said. “How would my mother react to a 15-year-old son, or child, speaking to her that way?”
McGee did have a difficult time playing DeeDee as an atheist.
“A black woman in her 50s and 60s not believing in God is rare to me,” McGee said. “But then I understood that she’s a woman of science.”
Mahannah’s life and Jonah’s experience are quite different, the actor said. But he knows Jonah well.
“I was born and raised in Tacoma, Washington,” Mahannah said. “I’ve seen an array of different kinds of personalities and characters.”
Mahannah grew up on the Hilltop before moving to North Tacoma in the sixth grade.
“I couldn’t act tough if I tried, because I grew up with love and compassion,” Mahannah said.
In the play, Jonah teeters between boyhood and manhood. He can go from a streetwise thug to a mama’s boy in the blink of an eye.
“Any time the Jonahs of my life appeared, they weren’t too confidant in how they felt,” Mahannah said. Jonah represents the complexities of the black experience, he said.
Jonah is the smart kid who purposely flunks a test because he thinks it shows how cool he is. Growing up, Mahannah was sensitive to criticism within the black community that he wasn’t black enough.
“It really got to me because it was another black man making fun of the way I dressed, the way I spoke, maybe,” he said.
LaBelle, as a sort of contemporary Lady MacBeth, cajoles and threatens Jonah to murder DeeDee. But Jonah has bonded with DeeDee as they share the first stable home he’s known. And he questions whether he can kill another person.
LaBelle becomes more desperate after she finds out she’s carrying Jonah’s child.
Cynthia Kinyanjui, 25, who plays LaBelle, said her character has to grow up fast.
“I feel that it’s a real struggle through the show,” Kinyanjui said. “We see her super loving and then she’s a vindictive, manipulative little girl trying to pull the strings.”
Opening night
Because the work has never been produced it was still malleable for director, cast and playwright. Montley is flying out for the premiere. The play will most likely undergo more changes before it’s published.
Serface has brought national recognition to TLT in recent years. His musical theater background did not prepare him for the themes of “Shattering”.
“I am a guest in a different world that I’ve not been in before,” Serface said. He relied on the cast to offer course corrections. “Let me know if I do something that’s not appropriate or right for you,” he told them.
The play opens Friday, Jan. 24 and runs through Feb. 9.
‘Shattering’
Where: Tacoma Little Theatre, 210 N. I St., Tacoma.
When: Jan. 23-Feb. 9, 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays.
Tickets: $25 adults, $23 seniors, students/military, $20 children.
Information: tacomalittletheatre.com, 253-272-2281.
This story was originally published January 24, 2020 at 1:11 PM.
