Photo Credit: Kori Price
Some of you may not understand what goes into the creation of a theatrical production. So, I thought I would bring you into the thinking, research, and intricacies of this particular type of creation. Below is the academic side of theatrical creation. Unfortunately, I can’t bring you into the rehearsal room, but I’ll get you as close as I can.
Blood at the Root (BATR) by Dominique Morisseau is a partially devised one-act play that, at times, fictionally and accurately depicts events in Jena, Louisiana, in 2006. Six young Black boys were charged with attempted murder for a schoolyard fight. The piece, told from the perspective of the students within the school, dives into the deepest of waters for conversations surrounding homosexuality, racial violence, intent, and the inaction and subsequent reaction to three nooses being hung on a tree located on school grounds. Morisseau was commissioned to write the story for Penn State’s acting program. The piece was to be used as a pedagogical tool for actor training in devising and applying the techniques they were being taught. She had wanted to write something concerning the Jena Six, as they are called, and this commission in 2013 gave her the perfect outlet to do so. The piece is a skeleton consisting of 22 vignettes that tell multiple stories within the larger concern of young Black men being charged with attempted murder for a school fight.
Morisseau does not shy away from any of the intricacies inherent in these conversations. She gives each character a very full background and life, and allows us to see how those things influence the decisions they make. What began as a teaching tool for college acting students quickly becomes one for the audience. Although Morisseau resisted calling herself an activist at first, she has since embraced the title and responsibility, realizing that her particular voice can be used to illuminate misconceptions and battle stereotypes which disproportionately affect the Black community. She is one in a line of descendants of this radical lineage, which began during the Black Artist movement of the 60s and 70s. By structuring the piece as partially devised, she allows each producing entity to put their own mark on it, to find something unique to their local, and invite it into the conversation.
It is this freedom and the unique structure that invite the application of Afrofuturism, dance, and music as additional characters to aid in the storytelling. Morisseau’s instruction in her author’s note to build the cadence of the words on the foundation of Hip Hop cements the piece within the Black Aesthetic and demands the use of Ritual Poetic Drama to gestate its creation. Utilizing the Black aesthetic to create a theatrical piece that is part memory, part history, and Afrofuturistic in its non-linear treatment of character construction and freedom for devising, this play demonstrates how structural elements are used to construct a story that is both historical and prophetic.
Black Feminism can be described as an ideology and movement that centers on the experiences and struggles of Black women. As a theoretical framework, it acknowledges the intersectionality of race, gender, and class in the shaping of identities and social positions. It addresses gender-based oppression and recognizes the effects of racism and sexism faced by Black women. This framework has been passed down from theatrical mothers, women who learned to hold their own alongside male playwrights such as Amiri Baraka and Ed Bullins, of the Black Artist Movement. Alice Childress, Sonia Sanchez, and Adrienne Kennedy were just some of the women of this time who pioneered a Black, female perspective in theatre. Dominique Morisseau is a daughter of this radically political feminist worldview.
“Radical Black women of the 1960s through the 1980s frequently argued “the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism nd imperialism as well as patriarchy”, according to the Combahee River Collective (Burrell 61).”
The ways in which Black women serve the Black community are also the ways Black female playwrights serve the theatrical community. The main female characters mirror the same work that Back women are asked to do in their community. Burrell points out very specifically that these need not be plays concerned with protest, but they do examine how race, capitalism, patriarchy, gender, and gender roles “affect the quotidian experiences of Black people (Burrell 62).” It is no accident that the main argument, the first and last word of BATR are delivered by a Black woman. One of the elements of these plays from contemporary Black feminists all have in common is a deeper exploration of gender theorization alongside issues of race and class.
BATR is no different as the scene “Interrogation” is an examination of how the two boys whose lived experience is similar are the ones who fought each other because of gender and race differences. Although the play does cast the only Black woman as a somewhat stereotypical loud and assertive woman, she is not the only one cast in that light. It also becomes a study to view how audiences and other characters react to Toria vs. Raylynn, and how they are treated in the play, also mirrors life. The Black woman is threatened with arrest and expulsion, while the pushy white woman is exalted. Toria gets to deliver the call to action to the audience after recounting how she and her family are the good white people. Even after being put in her place by Justin, she gets the last word. BATR, while securely steeped in the Black feminist tradition, also has echoes of lynching dramas from the 1920s. These plays were only beginning to be recognized as a genre of theatre on their own in the late 90s.
“Lynching dramas, then, provide insight into an understanding of “race” as a social construct in the United States since they reflect a distinctly American phenomenon shaped by the African American struggle for survival in a white-dominated culture, as well as the simultaneous existence of inter-racial conflict and cooperation that has characterized black-white race relations throughout American history (Stephens 655).”
These dramas were the logical answer to appeal to a country hell-bent on continuing to subjugate Black people through fear rather than forced labor and imprisonment. While art has always been the way for our society to have uncomfortable conversations, especially when Black people began to be part of the creation, the main problem with these plays was that they were played to the part of the population that didn’t need to be convinced of the evils of lynching. The majority of them were financed by the NAACP and produced in metropolitan areas with a majority Black audience and performed within Black-controlled spaces, like HBCU campuses, or antilynching organizations. As those were the only spaces that would support their production. So the issue of “preaching to the choir” became prevalent. However, the research about these dramas since their creation has died off, illuminating the perspective that Black writers who employ lynching in dramas are engaged in an exorcism of the trauma rather than a retelling of it. This exorcism, based on ritual practice, is meant to heal the trauma created from the historical acts by reconstructing the narratives around lynching and the purposeful erasure of the Black body.
“…black writers who graphically portray lynching scenes in their writing to be “active tradition bearers,” perpetuating an oral tradition bent on “racial survival”…focuses on the literary reinforcement of or alternatives to the stereotypes that commonly surround white mob violence against African Americans (Stephens 656).”
BATR uses the hanging of nooses as a catalyst for a conversation surrounding what constitutes violence, what a proper reaction to violence is, who is allowed to have a
Photo by Wil Kerner. Chelsea Smith and Nicholas Berkley (right), Olive Moxham and Isaac Thorne (left).
constitutes violence, what a proper reaction to violence is, who is allowed to have a reaction to racial or social violence, and the consequences for that reaction depending on race and gender politics within our society. It is a historical pedagogy, a current conversation, and a warning of the future all at once.
Five main structures that are present in the show are music, iconography, history, Blackness, and time. The title is taken from the lyrics of the song, “Strange Fruit”, made famous by Billie Holiday. Holiday was reluctant at first to record the song, as performing it would shift her professional profile toward being seen as a protest singer. The song was met with criticism from prominent Black entertainers of the time, including Paul Robeson and John Hammond, who called it “an act of self-immolation (Stone 54)” for portraying Black people as victims. In my version of the show, I grew the influence of music to include songs that would have been in the zeitgeist of the students involved in the Jena Six case. Each scene was transitioned with a chorus member singing a song that either foreshadowed or emphasized an emotional moment.
The opening of the show began with each cast member wearing headphones and singing a song as they entered, building up to a cacophony of sound. In the moments before the scene titled “Willie Lynch”, actors enter into red downspots of light while Nina Simone’s version of “Strange Fruit” plays in the darkness. The audience is forced to listen to the song in its entirety before the lines of the scene begin, before the nooses are hung, before a mechanical noose drops above the audience’s heads. The use of music also aids in the conversation of time and, in particular, Black temporality. Black American music, in its creation, plays with rhythm and speed, and Nina Simone is a singer who employed those structures in unpredictable ways.
“Through Simone’s musical composing, for example, she cultivates a sonic method of participative, critical reflection (dis)orienting or displacing (perhaps suspending) anticipated emotions with the juxtaposition of her tempo and repeating lyrics…The tempo and repetition of contrasting lyrics ushered listeners from a passive listening stance to an active one (McGhee 19).”
McGhee examines how Black female artists singularly alter grammar, time, and sound in their creation of art, bending them to what she calls a “Black subjectivity” that is both a carrier of trauma and the means of liberation from it. She posits that Black American music is an “aural manifestation of philosophical approaches to social environments,” drawing on all aspects of sound. Morisseau’s insistence that the play’s speech find their foundation in Hip Hop, coupled with this subjectivity, is the root of the play’s bend toward Afrofuturism.
Photo by Wil Kerner. Eva Strait and Nicholas Berkley
There are multiple instances of iconography within the show. Each of them is a powerful evocator of emotion. Having them grouped inside one show adds to the emotional build toward the conclusion. Nooses, we have already spoken about. Trees have been spoken about tangentially as we spoke of the lyrics of the song. Its connection to the text becomes clear as roots, leaves, and growing become a recurring motif within the text. As “Flick of My Pen’ begins, Colin talks about how the “bad feelings” have “roots”, how they’ve “been grown in the same soil”. He also talks about protest within the context of the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s, as he invokes the documentary Eyes On the Prize. Once again, Morisseau brings the past up to inform the present while speaking to the future. Immediately following this piece, the rest of the cast recreate a protest with signs bearing slogans of protest. Some of them are rooted in 2006, and others in the Black Lives Matter or Movement for Black Lives that would have been in full swing in 2013 when Morisseau wrote the play.
Several scenes later, during “This Just In…” Toria vocalizes what she has begun
to write for the school paper while De’Andre literally dances behind her. In my
production, I had a live drummer playing the rhythm that was to be her keystrokes and
had my actor work with a choreographer to create a Hip Hop-infused dance to
accompany her speech. As she gets to the repetitive words near the end, De’Andre
becomes stuck to the floor. His movements become more and more frantic as he tries to free himself and realizes he cannot. Having made the decision to keep the nooses
up once they were hung, I saw no need for the actor playing De’Andre to wear
handcuffs or be dragged away. The symbolic dance of joy that becomes terror was
effective enough to convey what needed to be said in that moment, coupled with his
appearance later in a prison jumpsuit, just in case someone was not paying attention.
Morisseau uses the history associated with all of this iconography to create emotion
from memory, present as well as a warning and dread of the future simultaneously. By
turning the historical trauma of nooses being hung upside down and making the Black
body the subject telling that story, she uses history and the Black lived experience of
the character and actors to infuse the story with emotion and weight. Blackness is the
last structural item to discuss. Although we have been discussing it as we have
discussed everything else, Blackness warrants its own callout.
Morisseau carefully constructed the race of all the characters, the roles they would play in the storytelling, and how they would illustrate the ways in which these particular cases are strange. For example, Raylynn is the quintessential Black woman. She is the caregiver to her family because her mother is gone; she is the keeper of the memories for the family, she is the impetus for the story, and the one who tells us the story is over. Raylynn does the work within the play that a Black woman does out in the world. This is how intricately and expertly Blackness is woven into this piece. Within the use of this Black subjectivity, Blackness is used as a layering over the white characters, looking at them through the lens of Blackness. Of course, we cannot forget how Blackness is infused into the storytelling by Morisseau, insisting that the cadence, rhythms, and tone rely on Hip Hop as inspiration. It is also the infusion of Blackness that completes the turn toward
Afrofuturism. The altering of subjectivity, the non-linear use of history and time, how
characters can be named students with very solid histories and stories, and
simultaneously be one of many students that protested, are just a few ways this play
uses Afrofuturism. The theory turned genre is, in fact, another way for Black creators to
imagine a future that the Western world had not, a world that not only has Black people
in it, but one that is inextricably shaped by our presence. It is the logical extension of
this Black subjectivity that alters us from the being talked about to the main author of
the speech.
Photo by Kori Price (L to R) Isaac Thorne, Chelsea Smith, Nicholas Berkley, Olive Moxham, Jude Hansen, Debise Folley, Michael Moxham, and Eva Strait.
BATR tells a history that this country has never wanted to acknowledge and decided to shove down the throats of Black people with fear and terror, to silence us. This play gives glimpses into the pieces of the story, flashes in between the colors of police lights, where the story bleeds through. It is simple, and hopefully, a seed of knowledge that can grow into something other than a tree with nooses hanging on it.
Closing the book on the production of this play, its contents, and meaning has allowed me to unpack my thoughts and feelings about the piece in ways that the actors were able to do onstage every night. The play is an artifact, a conversation with your best friend, and a warning of what could happen if we don’t talk to each other simultaneously. It uses the roots sewn by Black Americans, in soil that did not want them, that tried to poison them, as the lens through which to view the story. It is memory and metaphor, rhyme and rhythm, pushing itself through and bending time to its will. In the end, Blood at the Root is as haunting as the song from which it takes its title.
WORKS CITED
BURRELL, JULIE. “Postindustrial Futurities in Contemporary Black Feminist Theater: Lynn Nottage’s Sweat, Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew, and Lisa Langford’s The Art of Longing.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 42, no. 1, 2021, pp. 58–91. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27127891. Accessed 5 Apr. 2026.
McGEE, ALEXIS. “Queer(Ing) Sound, Time, and Grammar: Black Women’s Methods for Generative Prosodic Rhetoric.” From Blues to Beyoncé: A Century of Black Women’s Generational Sonic Rhetorics, State University of New York Press, 2024, pp. 97–138. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.18254741.8. Accessed 30 Apr. 2026.
Morisseau, Dominique. Blood at the Root. Concord Theatricals, 2017.
Stephens, Judith L. “Racial Violence and Representation: Performance Strategies in Lynching Dramas of the 1920s.” African American Review, vol. 33, no. 4, 1999, pp. 655–71. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2901345. Accessed 5 Apr. 2026.
Stone, Chris. “Blood at the Root: ‘Strange Fruit’ as Historical Document and Pedagogical Tool.” OAH Magazine of History, vol. 18, no. 2, 2004, pp. 54–56. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25163665. Accessed 5 Apr. 2026.