Review: Francisca Da Silveira’s Minor•ity Asks Who Gets to Tell What Stories

Sami Monroe (Nimene Sierra Wureh) is a wünderkind theatermaker who does it all. She’s a Ghanaian American “director slash playwright slash dramaturg slash intimacy coordinator,” as she announces whenever she has a chance. And, after a big early success—apparently she’s won a Tony for directing a revival of Lynn Nottage’s Ruined—she’s been invited to represent the art form at Diaspora Now!, an African arts festival in Paris.

Like Sami, the contemplative but overstuffed minor•ity tries to do it all, too. Playwright francisca da silveira’s minor•ity, a co-production of WP Theater and Colt Coeur, tackles a litany of topics seldom studied onstage: the demeaning demands of a majority-white consortium of arts funders on African diasporic artists; which artists get to tell which stories across global Black communities; and the cultural and generational clashes between Gen-Z Americans and everybody else. Minor•ity frames the play as a storyteller’s fable, but da silveira’s ideas, ripe as they are for discourse, lack a plot sturdy enough for them to flourish.

Fortunately, though, director Shariffa Ali’s smoothly staged production is anchored by a commanding performance from Nedra Marie Taylor as Céza, a Cape Verdean painter whose work relentlessly reimagines the volcano in the town where she grew up. Céza is struggling to overcome years of artistic block. That dry spell coincides more or less with the dissolution of her relationship with Cheikh (Ato Essandoh), a Senegalese-British storyteller who’s back on the conference circuit to raise money for an afterschool program he wants to launch back home. Céza, Cheikh, and Sami are appearing on a panel together while Céza battles backstage to finish a blank canvas to appease her funders.

Taylor’s Céza is impeccably poised and a bit austere, but that’s hiding a hungry, homesick rage beneath her impossibly cool surface. She could be a volcano about to erupt, too: when she furiously spits red wine onto the white canvas, it’s like a burst of boiling lava. Taylor is equally compelling at conveying Céza’s early suave assuredness and her splintering facade; she also makes comic drunkenness delightful.

It takes the perceptive Céza no time at all to read Sami’s national background like a book: “Americans are always the ones with identity issues.” Sami, overcome in equal part by self-importance and self-doubt, constantly calls out Céza and Cheikh in somewhat condescending terms they don’t even understand: “I hope you’re not trying to, like, gatekeep ancestors,” she tells Cheikh when he questions whether her theater work runs as deep as his storytelling.

Sami, in her outsiderness both to this global artmaking world and to this intimate relationship, is a third wheel. And because she’s constantly annoying Céza and Cheikh, interrupting their reunion and insinuating herself into their personal and professional business, the character risks annoying us, too. She’s just too much of a caricature and too clueless an observer of her co-panelists’ reactions, her portrait too uneasily satirical, to persuade us that da silveira really respects Sami as an equal-footed participant in the play.

It’s only in a potent monologue about a Juilliard audition, in which Sami imagines her white adjudicators as “grotesque salivating monsters trying to convince a young Black girl to choose their institution and she’s just slurping the drool dripping out of their mouths,” that the character snaps into focus.

Moreover, since the play needs to maneuver the characters into place again and again in order to keep the conversation flowing, minor•ity’s plot frequently feels contrived. Technical delays force the trio to spend more time together while they wait. Céza’s giant canvas shows up in the green room instead of in her designated studio space so—rather than requesting to have it moved to facilitate her tortured, private process—she’s constantly working in a spot where Sami and Cheikh will keep encountering her. And, even though the whole play has a storytelling frame in which the typical rules of verisimilitude may not apply, the obvious false note of a green room that only three panelists at a global conference ever enter starts to get distracting: where’s everybody else?

These complaints may be plot-point quibbles, but minor•ity can’t afford to have its audience distracted when da silveira has so many important things to say. At least whenever Taylor’s Céza has the mic, minor•ity’s politics and polemics feel as thoughtfully thorny as they ought to.