Dreamscape – 10 January 2026

Dreamscape creatively tells the story of Tyisha Miller through a character named Myeisha (Natali Micciche), a nineteen year old girl who was obtained twelve gunshot wounds resulting in her death after a concerned relative called the police because Myeisha had fallen asleep in a parked car at a gas station. The storytelling methods lean into hip hop, dance, and culturally rooted linguistics to create an utterly unique theatrical form in which Myeisha’s life is celebrated even as the coroner (John “Faahz” Merchant) pronounces each successive bullet wound. From Myeisha’s sections, we learn that dance is not just a method of telling a story, but also an important part of the character’s life, making each successive blow to her body more devastating to hear.

The basic format of this poetic endeavor alternates between the coroner describing each bullet wound in very precise medical specificity and Myeisha telling a story about how she used that body part when dancing in a music video or choreographing dance routines with her cousins. We glimpse how each body part can bring a person joy, and it holds us close to Myeisha with a startling intimacy as we see how these parts create a whole person. Natali Micciche plays this role at the intersection of what it means to be a teenager: the easy self confidence of life with no consequences and the timidity of being a teenager and not knowing much about the world yet. Playwright and director Rickerby Hinds leans into breaking the fourth wall and having this character form connections to us, particularly the white folks in the audience who might not know much about Black culture or traditions. The text lets us into this world through talking about Kwanzaa and barbeque so that we can see the joy and strength in traditions even as the other shoe is dropping—it allows us a cultural lens from which to feel that we want to be part of Myeisha’s in group—but only when it is convenient and fun for us. Allowing us to feel a twinge of our own hypocrisy lends the story an authenticity that keeps us at arms length from the shock of the killing—we want the fun parts and then we want to look away when things get violent.

It would have been easy for this to be a one person show where Myeisha tells us about her life, her culture, and her aspirations, but what elevated this show to excellence was John “Faahz” Merchant’s presence on stage. He created the world around Myeisha in a myriad of ways that transformed this piece from a monologue into a choreopoem that felt so alive with sound and movement that the whole room felt imbibed with the richness of everything that makes up a person’s life. Faahz’s beatboxing skills are truly on a level by themselves and the amount of sound and texture he added to the performance was dynamic and awe-inspiring. Using every register of the human voice, Faahz created characters, music, and life, helping guide the audience towards the hard questions about a cop so scared of an unconscious teenager that he would smite her with twelve bullets and end her life.

Though Dreamscape speaks of an intense topic and asks that we not look away, it has fun moments of levity reminding us about how full of possibility teenage years feel and the importance of fostering a culture of ujima (Swahili for collective responsibility for solving our problems), the principle of Kwanzaa celebrated on the night that Tyisha Miller was killed. This Gestalt of this production ignited a passionate feeling of ujima in its audience. When I sat down to write this review, I discovered that there were no charges related Tyisha Miller’s death despite her body being pierced by twelve bullets. Humanity as a whole must move from ujima to imani (faith in the righteousness of the African American struggle for self determination), the principle celebrated on the last day of Kwanzaa. When we as all of humanity truly believe that we all deserve the same concept of justice, we can make it so.

I attended this performance on a press pass from Berlin Rosen.