In her landmark essay “Mad at Miles,” the Black novelist, playwright, and activist Pearl Cleage tussled over the question of what she should do with her love of Miles Davis’s music.
On the one hand, his songs soundtracked her life and played her into her “Bohemian Woman Phase. The single again after a decade married phase.... The cool me out quick cause I’m hanging by a thread phase.” On the other hand, “he was guilty of self-confessed violent crimes against women such that we ought to break his records, burn his tapes and scratch up his CDs until he acknowledges and apologizes and agrees to rethink his position on The Woman Question.” (In the intervening years, the Woman Question has been superseded by the Problematic Male Artist Question.)
The question that Cleage asked in closing—“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, which was originally written more than 10 years ago, is being staged by New York’s Signature Theatre, where Morisseau is a premiere resident.
The protagonist in this case 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. Nina knows they’re worth a fortune—“Every asshole from left to right has been calling me trying to get their hands on this treasure,” she says—and refuses to part with them for what he’s offering.
She’s brusque and has no respect for her “has-been pseudo activist” of a father, who languished in prison and was absent for much of her childhood. “Ain’t nothin’ sentimental about a dead revolution,” she scoffs during one of their fraught conversations. Morisseau, 45, tells me that the play is, in part, about how a father and daughter navigate a rift in political ideologies, and the sacrifice involved in the struggle for a better world.
Sunset Baby is dedicated to and inspired by her own father, a Haitian immigrant, revolutionary, and mathematical genius. Morisseau, who grew up in the 80s, remembered that her father carried a video recorder almost everywhere he went. He sometimes recorded parts of a political manifesto, and after he died, the recordings passed on to Morisseau, who counts them among her most prized possessions. When she re-watched her father’s videos, she saw things “in him that I didn’t quite see in the flesh. There’s a way in which I felt closer to him when I stumbled upon him in the videos.”
In some scenes of Sunset Baby, Kenyatta, who has a bit of a Fanonian streak, speaks into a camera about change and how “violent revolution is sometimes necessary.” But he also speaks to Nina, via recording, about sunsets, skylines, waterfalls, beaches. “I am giving you who I am. Recorded. The truth. Me in totality,” he says.
Morisseau, who grew up in Detroit and is now based in Los Angeles, is as quick to credit her kin as she is other muses. Paradise Blue, the first play in her trilogy about Detroit, is dedicated, in part, to Cleage, whose “Mad at Miles” essay “gave me the ammunition and bravery to deal with community accountability in and out of my art.”
When she was starting out, she felt compelled to write about Black women—characters she rarely saw onstage. She’s since become a highly laureled writer: she wrote the Tony-nominated book for the Broadway musical Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations, served as a co-producer, writer, and editor on the Showtime series Shameless, and is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Windham Campbell Prize, and two Obie Awards.
Through it all, one thing has remained constant: theater is “a liberation sport” for Morisseau. In Sunset Baby and later plays such as Confederates, 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.”
Sunset Baby begins previews at the Signature Theatre, in New York, on January 30, and opens on February 20
Rhoda Feng is a Washington, D.C.–based writer whose criticism has appeared in 4Columns, Artforum, the TLS, the New Republic, and The New York Times. She is the winner of the 2022–23 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism
