minor.ity – 19 April 2025

minor.ity begins with a Senegalese storyteller (Ato Essanndoh) inviting the audience into a tale he’s going to tell. He pulls back the curtain to a modern-day story about Diaspora Now, a conference showcasing Black artistic excellence on a global scale, this year based in Paris. The characters, Ceza (Nedra Marie Taylor) from Cape Verde, Sami (Nimene Sierra Wureh) from the United States, and Cheikh (Ato Essandoh) from Senegal, are at odds because of their history and lack of it. Ceza and Cheikh are former lovers, whereas Sami is a young artist at the conference for her first time trying desperately to connect with both of them, but a little naïve about what is going on around her. While Sami seems to genuinely think the conference is about celebrating Black artists, the others are after wealthy patrons whose money might enable them to live easily while creating (or not creating) meaningful art.

Sami stirs up old feelings between Ceza and Cheikh, but to her it is a fun piece of gossip; she doesn’t seem to realize or care that people’s lives are at stake. Though she feels like she doesn’t have any power and is meddling to gain favor, she doesn’t realize how much power she actually holds to influence the course of their lives or the space that she takes up as a woke American wanting to be loud and proud. The most thought provoking conversation of the story was one in which Ceza clarified for Sami the shaky grounds on which Sami’s accomplishments stand. Sami won an award for directing a production of Lynn Nottage’s Ruined. Ceza rightly points out that neither Sami nor Lynn Nottage has ever been to Congo, and that Sami’s “research on [Nottage’s] research” is highly derivative and very far removed from any understanding of what it might be like to live in war torn Congo. This conversation is at the crux of the thematic pulse of minor.ity: who has the right to tell stories? At what point is foreign/diaspora amplification of a story an affront to the story itself? Should we all only be telling our own unique story?

But if we choose Ceza’s route—if we choose to accept that we should not speak about that which we do not personally know, then what is the point of hearing a story? There is no point to an artistic process that exists in a vacuum and gate keeps our right to be deeply moved by it. How can we understand others’ history and culture if we do not hear it (or consume art, dialogue, and stories in whatever form they take)? As Cheikh’s framing of the story at the beginning clearly establishes, the art of storytelling has a role for the audience. The audience is meant to actively participate. The purpose of his storytelling is to pass on a story and a moral. He received that story from an elder above him and has the duty to pass it on. Even if not everyone is suited to be the vessel that passes it on, surely there is a duty to process what is heard and ponder the moral of the story.

Cheikh does this with Ceza after the shocking conclusion of the play in which the American who has spent the whole weekend talking about decolonization, wage theft, and the importance of Black people’s livelihood, steals Ceza’s and Cheikh’s patron by using African garments to pander to white donors in the same way that she accuses Cheikh of wrongfully doing just a scene before. Cheikh and Ceza both assert that they did not come to this conference to be Sami’s mentors. Yet Sami learned. She learned all the wrong lessons. Predominantly, she learned that if a story isn’t about her and she is not the main character, then she can exercise her ability to take resources from others to make it so. She learned that the world can be cutthroat and full of judgment, and that what she might consider her in group in some settings might not want to embrace her unconditionally everywhere she goes. She learned that in order to survive, you need to be ruthless, not friendly. She learned that not everyone who looks like her agrees with her. Yet the story cuts off before the most important lesson: what does she do with what she learned? Does she learn that what she did was okay? Is she visited by any guilt later down the line? Is there a cost to being ruthless, and is it worth it?

The curtain closes on Sami before we find out the answers to any of these questions, and we close with the lessons that Cheikh and Ceza have internalized from this conference. Ceza has learned about the importance of going home, both literally and metaphorically. Cheikh has learned that storytelling isn’t always natural and easy, and that it is hard to speak ill of another—it’s also hard for him to speak ill of himself. Looking back on the play and being reminded that we were seeing it through his lens brought to light that even though he wasn’t loud about it, he painted himself as the hero. He took care of Ceza. He never had a genuinely hurtful shouting match. He was mostly calm, cool, and collected. He let Ceza and Sami have the most hurtful fights. It’s important to think about where we cast ourselves in the stories we tell. Are we able to be honest? Does honesty matter in the context of a story?

minor.ity gives voice to a lot of questions we don’t want to think about. How could art not be genuine? What’s the point of a conference if not to share actual, truthful stories about your experience? Is money really the primary factor in what creates art or an artist? After all, Sami lives with her parents and has the luxury of not needing money as badly as the other characters—is it a literal privilege to make art in the sense that you have to be financially privileged to be able to afford to do so? Like Cheikh, I am unsure how to pick a moral among many possible morals. Instead, minor.ity gave me something better: many perspectives. As minor.ity displays, Blackness is not one thing that a conference can present as a united image or idea. Culture is a multifaceted, dynamic, shifting, living thing—just like the art of storytelling.

I attended this performance on a press pass from Vivacity Media Group.