The question that writer and activist Pearl Cleage asked in the closing of her essay “Mad at Miles”—“Can we continue to celebrate the genius in the face of the monster?”—receives something of a twist in Dominique Morisseau’s Sunset Baby. The play is being staged by New York’s Signature Theatre, where Morisseau is a premiere resident. The protagonist is a man named Kenyatta, a Black former revolutionary and political prisoner who, when the play begins, shows up at the home of his estranged daughter, Nina, to ask for a batch of letters that her mother, who was involved with the Black Liberation Movement, left behind when she died. Sunset Baby is dedicated to and inspired by Morisseau’s own father, a Haitian immigrant, revolutionary, and mathematical genius. In Sunset Baby, characters work to “find freedom in various ways and define freedom socially and in their own personal lives,” she says. Theater ultimately is “a place where artists and folks should be able to gather and practice being unapologetic about who they are and exploring the people and the places that are significant to them.” —Rhoda Feng