Theater About Love Hate and Hope
Mosaic Youth Theater – a place, unlike school, where it’s okay to be different: loud, or gay or talented
by Jane Slaughter

In an echo-filled building near the Detroit River, on the grounds of a fort last in use in the War of 1812, a group of teenagers is rehearsing a play about "love, hate and rhythm." Although their troupe, Mosaic Youth Theater, bills itself as "multicultural," most of the kids are African American; a few are white.

Mosaic tackles the big subjects, the hard ones. The company’s play "Crossing 8 Mile" was about the divide between black Detroit and its white suburbs. Last year’s "2001 Hastings Street" was set in Detroit’s famed Black Bottom community in the 1940s, when segregation colored everything – or did it? This year’s "HeartBEAT" looks at love and hate (and rhythm) in all their dimensions, from teenage crushes to societal prejudice.

To warm up, director Andrew Strickland gets the kids moving: "Gentlemen, you are the Titanic. Ladies, you are an iceberg." The kids climb on each other’s backs, lie on the floor, belly to someone else’s shins. Both during the exercises and when they’re just standing around talking, their normal teenage exuberance and desire to show off is increased by their theatricality and lack of inhibition.

Andrew gives feedback: "You need to follow through till I say ‘freeze.’ Don’t fall apart into silliness. You do great work – you’re too good not to tie it up with a bow. You grab the audience from the beginning – you need to take the same skills and apply them all the way through to the end."

To sharpen their audition skills, each member must perform a monologue from Shakespeare. "Want is at the basis of every human action," Andrew coaches them. "You don’t do a monologue ‘happy’ or ‘sad.’ That’s the wrong question. You ask, ‘What does my character want?’" What Andrew wants is a modern translation for each line.

Blending the modern and the classic is what Mosaic does. "Crossing Eight Mile," based on "A Comedy of Errors," was performed in 17th-century commedia dell’arte style, in exaggerated white masks. "HeartBEAT" is very loosely based on one of Aristophanes’ plays. "What Fools These Mortals Be!" was, of course, a version of "A Midsummer Night’s Dream."

But every play gives the viewer an up-close and sometimes painfully personal look at what it’s like to be a teenager, a black Detroit teenager in particular. Each cast member writes, anonymously, about events and feelings from their own lives. These stories are used in creating the plays. The love and the hate are so vivid, so specific, that the director sometimes takes pains to tell the audience, before a performance, that none of the actors is playing his or her own story.

For some kids, Mosaic is a lifeline, a place, unlike school, where it’s okay to be different: loud, or gay or talented. For others, it’s a place to get the strokes that are in short supply at home. For all of them, it’s a chance to learn what it means to be a professional. And, somehow, it’s the act of putting on a play – becoming at the same time a fictional character and someone whom others can absolutely rely upon – that allows kids who’ve had nothing to believe in themselves. At Mosaic, the kids are encouraged to pursue their art after high school, but they’re also told to always have a back-up plan, which begins with college.

A hundred artists – actors, singers and technicians – make up the Mosaic ensemble. They have performed all over the U.S., including at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. They have played in London and Singapore and were the U.S. representatives to the World Festival of Children’s Theatre in Copenhagen. Actors interviewed for this story were Kizzmett Pringle, 16, Detroit; Lamar Davidson, 16, Detroit; Iman Milner, 14, Detroit; Shavonne Coleman, 16, Detroit; Jaazmine Parker, 16, Detroit; Carmen Phillips, 16, Lathrup Village; Lynniesha Ray, 15, Detroit; Ciarah Mosely, 12, Detroit; Jeffrey McCants, 17, Detroit; Jonathan Black, 14, Farmington Hills; Timothy Candela, 19, Detroit; Gabriel Doss, 14, Detroit.

I asked the actors whether being part of Mosaic had changed their lives.

Jeffrey: Going to a school like mine you deal with black males who want to be thugs, but they’re really not, and females who want to act like they got attitudes all the time. Coming here, I don’t have to deal with that. I don’t like the whole thug thing.

Lynniesha: Because they’re on all the time.

Jeffrey: Right. They act like they don’t want to be in class and they don’t want to be in school, and it’s like, where you gonna get to after that? But here you got people with goals, who want to go to college, who want to succeed. So that’s definitely changed my life.

Carmen: Me at the beginning of my first year of Mosaic and me at the end of my first year of Mosaic were two different things. Before Mosaic, I didn’t really come into the city for anything. I live in Lathrup Village, bordering Birmingham. I mean, Shavonne’s my girl now, but when I first came to Mosaic, I was like, "They’re listening to what? And why are their shoes not tied? And what on earth is going on? And get me out of here."

For me, Mosaic opened my eyes. Like, now I listen to 105.9 [rap] instead of DRQ [pop]. I wish I could give that experience to everyone, just to let somebody else – not just a different racial culture, but a different culture than what you’re used to, change who you are a little bit. Not change you, just make you better.

Jaazmine: Being at Mosaic made me grow up, because I was used to having everything my way or being the best at everything. Then when you get put into a group where everybody is the best at what they do, you have no choice but to grow up.

Timothy: It helps me in finding out who I am, helped me work on my character – my character in life, not just my character on stage.

Kizzmett: It’s given me the opportunity to meet people I wouldn’t have met. One of my better friends, he’s a caucasian. In any other situation I might not have became so close to him and now I am, and for that, Mosaic just brings a joy into my life.

Jon: I used to have pretty much no friends at school. I always seemed to be the strange kid, the dramatic kid that no one would want to be around. Once I got here, everyone else was dramatic, so I just fit right in for once in my life. I can now feel more comfortable interacting with people at my school even though they aren’t the same as me.

In "HeartBEAT" I was the character Hephaestus; the Roman name is Vulcan. I had no emotion through the entire show. You’re a god, you’re regal. But I could feel all this hate and the love from the other people on stage, although it was really just their energy, but I could feel it bouncing off of me and not being able to absorb any of it because it would affect my character. I sort of had to bounce it all off.

It reminded me that sometimes you can do that – if someone is giving you hate, you can just bounce it off. It’s not the same as ignoring it, because you realize that you’re gonna have to deal with it, but you’re just not letting it get to you.

When the cast prepared for "2001 Hastings Street," they were assigned to interview Detroiters who had been teenagers during the 1940s, when African Americans were a minority of the city’s population. The play juxtaposes the daily humiliations of segregation with the sense of worth and place that came from living in a cohesive community.

Lynniesha: We had a lot of blunt stories about racism. I had a monologue in the play about working at an army factory and a white manager followed me, he’d tell me to lift this crate. He said, "Don’t you know you colored girls are mules for us white people?" Me personally, I’ve never really experienced harsh racism, but I was like "Ohhhh, okay, I didn’t know it was like that." Once you get a big dump on you for the first time, it’s like "Ohhh-kay, so now you put something in my mouth that I just had a nice taste of."

Gabriel: There was basically two parts of town, which was Black Bottom and Hastings St., which was majority African American. And the rest of Detroit was majority caucasian-populated back then. We came to the realization that even though there was so much segregation back then, in the group that we were portraying, the Y-Gs [a community youth group] – it wasn’t necessarily racism all the time. Because while they were still teenagers they had friends that were of other races. The YGs had black and white participants. They all got along. But as the play progressed they did get into some issues about "You can’t go on this side of town," or "You can go in the theater, but you have to sit in the balcony."

I say it got more intense as they became adults, because when I interviewed the people, they were like, "Yeah, before we got arrested by the police, or before we had this experience, we were best of friends, but a lot of stuff changed when we got older."

Jaazmine: One thing I noticed was that there was a difference between races, but more so than the different races there was a distinction between classes. It didn’t matter if you were poor, all the poor kids hung together. The majority of all the poor kids might have been African American, but it’s like, you live with me, you live around me, we’re just alike except our skin color is different, so I’m going to embrace you.

Lamar: It was different the way they obeyed their parents and people who were older than them. I think now there’s a lot of disrespect for adults in the fashion that, "She’s not my mama" or "He’s not my mama" and "I’m not going to listen to them because they’re not my mama." But back then, hey, if you did something wrong, not only were you going to get a whipping when you got home, but the people who you come across in your daily fashion will whip you too. And I think that’s how they came together as a family.

Kizzmett: When we first got the script and we saw how racism was, it made me appreciate everything that my grandparents and their grandparents went through so I could be friends with this person and I could eat at the same facility with this person. It opened my eyes to all the struggles that came before me and how blessed I am now.

The kids know that much has changed in regard to racism, but then, they wonder, how much?

Lynniesha: I’m in an activity at school called forensics. It’s the Scholastic Forensics Association. To go to a suburban area of white schools – it’s gorgeous, they have so much stuff that we don’t have.

Still, my school, DSA, is known for having the best team in the state because we have a lot of really good drama and speech kids. I remember somebody saying, "Oh, you know DSA always wins because they do those black pieces." I’m like, "Why can’t you see the concept of the piece more so than the color behind it?" Excellent work is excellent work regardless. That sort of shocked me.

Kizzmett: I wouldn’t let myself go to a historically black college and only let myself be exposed to what I already know, which is African Americans. But on the other hand, any other college that I go to is going to be predominantly white and I’m going to find racism.

My parents were telling me that when I go into the work world it’s going to be that way, too. I’m going to have to deal with racism. Probably not as blunt as it was back then, but it’s going to be there.

I have to realize that I live in a white world. Specifically, with the field that I want to go into, engineering, that’s a white male world. That’s just the way it is. Things are not going to change.

Jeffrey: As far as racism goes, you see it every day. I may live in a mostly black community, but I can go to a white-owned store, or any store, and they’re afraid of black people. They’re afraid that I might try and steal something. I went to a video store once, and this wasn’t even a white guy, it was an Arab, and he came out of his hole, his bulletproof protection, just to make sure I didn’t steal anything, and then told me to get out. It’s not even white people anymore, it’s everybody.

Ciarah: Same thing about people of your own color – in my school, they talk about me because I’m a little bit darker than the rest of the people. They say "Oh you darky" and all the rest of this crap. We go to an African-centered school, and it makes absolutely no sense. They always talking about girls: "Oh, I want me a light-skinned girl with long hair." There’s so much self-hatred in them, and culture hatred.

Shavonne: With "Crossing 8 Mile," we confronted the stereotypes. It was a lot of stereotypes that I didn’t realize were stereotypes, I just thought them to be true. There was the funny ones like "black people like chicken." Or all people from the suburbs talk a certain way. All people from the city wear baggy clothes, even the girls. Or everyone in the suburbs was named Becky. The play helped me realize that I was stereotyping and it helped open me up.

Jaazmine: This was used as one of the monologues in "HeartBEAT": I remember the whole time I was growing up, I always said I was either going to go to medical school or into law. The school that I used to go to, a really suburban Christian school, my teachers and my principals all the time used to sit me down: "Well, it’s nice to have high dreams, but I really don’t think you’re going to accomplish that, so maybe you should aim a little lower, like what about nursing school?" They used to come to me: "Oh, you’re so outgoing – have you ever thought about going into entertainment? That seems like it would suit you perfectly."

When I was little I was educated on things like the minstrel show, and I felt that was how they displayed African Americans in the school I was at. You weren’t good enough to be in their academic games. African Americans were good enough to be in their choirs and to be put up on stage to sing and act stupid and entertain the audience. And I really, really did not agree with that.

We got no kind of education about different African Americans. Black History Month was like "What?" in our school. Every year in our heritage book we had this very small paragraph that said there were slaves, Abraham Lincoln freed them, couple years later Martin Luther King came along and said you weren’t free and then he got shot. And that was it.

In ‘HeartBEAT,’ an African American girl talks about her brother’s ‘racial profiling’ of Arab Americans.

Lamar: I think after September 11 there was a lot of hypocrisy going on. Blacks were always being profiled – say you walk in a store, the manager’s always looking at you because they think you’re going to steal something. After September 11 the Arabs were getting profiled, and I think blacks forgot what it was like to actually go through it. They were like "Oh, watch her, watch him, they’re Arabic," instead of how it felt to be profiled when you were black.

Iman: I don’t think it’s right to say, "Well, this one person did it so everybody is like that." Because there are Arab people that live around me, and I go to their houses and eat with them. I’m not like, "Oh, just because you’re an Arab you must be related to Osama bin Laden." I wouldn’t want to be treated like that. And that’s what everybody has worked so hard for – to not be treated that way.

Shavonne: One thing I noticed after September 11 is that everybody all of a sudden wanted to be careful about racial profiling. There was a lot of stuff on the news about "They’re our brothers" – they had all those commercials. I really appreciated the fact that everybody was so careful to try not to racial profile, but at the same time I kept thinking, well, when it was the blacks were getting racial profiled, I didn’t see those commercials on the air talking about "They’re our brothers." That struck me more than anything.

Jaazmine: I was watching the news and they’re saying not to do it. They’re saying, "Arab Americans, that’s how they are, don’t act negatively toward them, because that’s their culture." But at the same time, they’re saying, "African Americans, the reason why this is happening to you – stop wearing the baggy jeans, stop having the tinted windows in your car, stop wearing your hats on backwards and stop this and stop this."

My thing is the freedom of expression. The way they’re saying that African Americans should stop doing this and they won’t get racially profiled, I think that’s actually invading one of our civil rights, freedom of speech and freedom of expression. It’s making them the victim. You’re telling somebody to change who they are in order to accommodate you.

I asked whether, in a play about love and hate, there were rivalries among the cast members, jealousies or even hate. Or racism.

Iman: There are rivalries, but they’re not big deals. It’s always a sense of family. In a family there’s certain uncles that you don’t like being around and certain cousins that you’re like, "Please don’t come over to my house this weekend because I really cannot stand you sometimes." And that’s how it is at Mosaic; you never hate them, you’re just like, I don’t want to be bothered with this person today.

Kizzmett: The few caucasian people that we have in Mosaic, we joke around and we’re like, "Hey, what up, cracker?" It’s taking something negative and changing it to a positive. The fact that we can do that with each other, I think it’s a good thing. Of course you wouldn’t go in public and say that, but while we’re here …

Tim: I don’t think that there’s people our age that look at color as much as our parents do. It gets old – that’s all I have to say about racism. It gets old and it gets really disgusting.

Jaazmine: There’s a bit of rivalry, but you know if anything goes wrong, they have your back, and that’s a wonderful feeling. I remember during previews, there’s a scene where we’re all standing together and we were supposed to be frozen. I was rocking back on my heels, and I felt two people behind me, and one of them said, "I got you, don’t worry about it. Just lean back on me and I have you." That is the best thing in the world, to know that somebody has your back – physically, mentally and everything else. Me and this person might not be the best of friends, but I know they have my back if something goes down.

Jeffrey: If you be in Mosaic you cannot hate anybody. I’m serious – you will quit and it will be a better company without you. I know a lot of people who have conformed. The biggest thing is homosexuality. It’s not an issue, it’s just a difference. Like I say, at my school, for example, with the thugs, it’s all about being a man and if you’re gay you ain’t a man. If you are going to be in Mosaic with that mentality, you will not last.

You will not last in this company if you do not like white people. Our director is white. You cannot be in this company without being okay with a lot of things. It is too many different religions, so you can’t be, "I’m Christian and my way is right. And I will conform you to my religion." You can’t do that.

Jaazmine: One thing that people have always told me that you want to be judged on is nothing on your outside but the quality of the person you are. Like Dr. Martin Luther King said, the quality of your content. He had a dream of that, and to me Mosaic really is his dream. Because when you walk through these doors, I don’t know anywhere else that it’s like that – you aren’t looked upon as what race you are or your gender or your sexual preference or the way you look, how long your hair is, what shade of skin you have, or anything else, your size, nothing. You are based on the quality of your content. Here you’re not even based on how smart you are or where you come from; you’re based on your talent, and not even so much your talent – how well you use your talent. Everybody still talks about Dr. King’s dream, but to me Mosaic is living his dream.

You asked how can we bring the races together. Anybody that wants to see how people can coexist together from all different cultures, different backgrounds, bring them to Mosaic, because we are living proof of the fact that it can happen. There was nobody forcing us to do it, we had to do it on our own.