Calgary’s Arts Commons welcomes indie play highlighting Black lives beyond #BLM headlines

Makambe K. Simamba is the powerhouse actor and writer behind a new indie play opening this week in Calgary’s Arts Commons.

“Our Fathers, Sons, Lovers, and Little Brothers” partially inspired by the story of Trayvon Martin, follows a 17-year-old black boy beyond death, into the first moments in the beyond.

Simamba says the show is about the life that he lived and the death that he didn’t choose, specifically from the perspective of a teenager.

“If you think about the movement of Black Lives Matter, we remember George Floyd for the worst day of his life, we don’t know his favourite colour, or the people he was kind to, or what his favourite breakfast cereal was. We just remember the worst thing that ever happened to him,” she explains. “Associating death to the name is not enough; I wanted us to think about — when we see one of these names whether it is George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, or women like Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland — that we are like, ‘Oh, they had a life.'”

She says she wanted to give the audience an hour to spend time with the character and get to know them, rather than focusing on the circumstances of their death.

Simamba, who identifies as a woman, says the story touches on her first hand experience of anxieties she has for her own younger brother and her nervousness for him in certain spaces as a young Black boy.

“I also have a younger sister. I realized the fears and anxiety I have for my brother walking through the world and the fears and anxiety I have for my sister walking through the world are different,” she said. “I wanted to focus specifically on the male identifying experience because it is different from mine.”

Simamba recalls witnessing a conversation between her father and brother when her brother about 12 years old. Her dad explained what to do if faced with law enforcement.

“My brother just didn’t get it, he was like, ‘Why would someone want to hurt me because of what I look like?'” she said. “That was a big inspiration, the dissonance between what is the child’s perspective of what’s safe, what’s acceptable, what is actually dangerous for me? And what is the adult’s perspective and what does that look like from a black male perspective for the different ages.”

As part of the research for the show, Simamba dressed masculine while walking the streets one winter in Toronto to watch how people reacted to her. She says not only did she see people react differently to her presence, but she felt nervous in different situations while presenting as male.

Simamba is a Calgarian, but the show itself was workshopped and premiered at B Current Performing Arts in Toronto in 2019. That year, the show won the 2019 Dora Awards, one for Outstanding New Play and the other for Outstanding Performance by an Individual in the TYA Category. 

Handsome Alice and Verb Theatre’s “Our Fathers, Sons, Lovers, and Little Brothers” runs Sept. 13-23 at the Big Secret Theatre.