Aiyana Straughn will be challenged to take audiences from a Manhattan playground to a Crimean battleground in the Virginia premiere of Jackie Drury’s Marys Seacole, a play based on the real-life story of a Jamaican-born nurse who cared for British soldiers during the Crimean War.
Staged at Live Arts February 14 through March 2, the play connects the story of Seacole with modern times by linking her to other caregivers between the 19th and 21st centuries.
It’s Straughn’s Live Arts directing debut, but it’s not her only experience using theater to connect audiences with Black women’s history.
In 2021, the Charlottesville Players Guild performed She Echoes on the Vine, a play written and directed by Straughn and based on the life of her grandmother, at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center.
Straughn also included her mother, aunts, and herself in her original play, an interweaving of the past and present that reminds her of the stories told in Marys Seacole.
“There are some similar themes for me in using actual oral histories and historical narrative of women of color as the basis for writing a piece, but interweaving vignettes of modern-day scenes,” she says.
Straughn, who lived in Charlottesville before moving to Atlanta, worked as an actress in multiple local shows, taking on the roles of Black Mary Wilks in August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean with the Charlottesville Players Guild and Nya in Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline at Live Arts.
She says she drew on these plays to help actors connect with the intricate Black and African history in Marys Seacole.
“Accumulation of those experiences, not just directing, helped me be able to dive right into such a complex piece,” Straughn says.
A movie buff throughout childhood and a high school theater participant, Straughn says she was first inspired to use theater to reflect her identity as a dark-skinned Black woman while working with a writing group during her undergraduate years at Ohio State.
“I began to see the vision of wanting to elevate the stories of people that looked like me, and it continued to evolve from there,” she says. “I very much believe in theater as holding the lens up to society, a mirror up to ourselves.”
In addition to providing a reflection of society’s relationship with caregivers, and especially Black women caregivers, Straughn is hoping the play’s local cast will help Marys Seacole resonate with Charlottesville audiences.
“One of the things that we talk about as a cast is, why this show? Why now? Why are we telling this show in Charlottesville?” she asks.
According to Straughn, the Live Arts production team has made an effort to answer that question by incorporating small, visual elements local to the area throughout the play.
“I’m really excited for the people locally today, for the themes to resonate with them, to see Charlottesville and the surrounding areas in this, and walk away with a different perspective,” Straughn says. She is most excited for audiences to see the second act of Marys Seacole, which she compared to the overlapping timelines in Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s 2022 film Everything Everywhere All at Once.
“The actors are just doing such a brilliant job with playing multiple characters throughout this show, and then having to play multiple characters even within a single scene, I think it is just going to be such a joy to watch,” Straughn says.
Following its 2019 New York City premiere, Marys Seacole was produced in Washington, D.C., London, Chicago, and Connecticut prior to its Virginia debut.
