New Haven Independent

Jafferis (pictured) is a homegrown playwright known for gritty, musical works about life in New Haven — gang life, drugs, violence, and hope.

He incorporates music into his plays, such as last year’s Kingdom with Fair Haven’s Bregamos community theater troupe. He called that one a “musical.”

Friday and Saturday, his arts high school alma mater — Educational Center for the Arts — is staging his latest work, Weird Sisters. This play, too, deals with drugs and gangs and other harsh realities of life in New Haven for young people. This, too, has music.

But this one isn’t a hip-hop “musical.” It’s a hip-hop “opera.”

The show opened Thursday night at the Little Theater on Lincoln Street. It continues Friday and Saturday night. Both shows start at 7; tickets cost $12.

Jafferis, who’s 32, admits he made a subjective “semantic” decision with his “opera.”

No one sings “operatically” in Italian in Weird Sisters. The balance between spoken word and song is about the same as in Kingdom. To Jafferis, his newest play an “opera” because of the strings and orchestral arrangements (“Hip hop has been sampling in classical and operatic music forever”) as well as the grand, melodramatic sweep of the story.

“The story is a very big story,” he said outside the Little Theater oduring the final rehearsal Thursday afternoon., “in which the little dramas of people’s lives are exploded and magnified.” Like in an opera.

The dramas include teen pregnancy, heroin-abusing parents, homelessness, and HIV. Jafferis drew the stories from the life experiences of female friends in New Haven; he used Macbeth as a touching-off point, with an updated set of witches. Click here to read the scene-by-scene outline.

“‘Hip-hop opera’ sounds a little more serious,” Jafferis said. “‘Musical’ sounds more froopy, like comedy.”

There’s some, though not much, precedent for Jafferis’s semantic leap. MTV staged a hip-hop adaptation of Carmen. “It is absolutely awful,” Jafferis opined. “It’s soap opera. It doesn’t feel real at all.”

Jafferis aims for the real above all else in his plays, including Weird Sisters, which again finds him working through, in fiction, the “crazy, traumatic experiences of my friends” he knew from growing up in the city.

In the program notes, Jafferis describes how he developed the play along with the students in ECA’s theater department.

“We started with a read-through of draft #5 of the script, followed by a week of hip hop improv workshops, in which we rapped and beatboxed and dared each of us to look and sound more ridiculous than the last. Then the students learned an ever-changing mix of 25 songs and raps by eight different composers and myself, all in various stages of completion.

“With the input of students and teachers, everything from individual songs to the ending of the show were cut and added and combined. The students wrote volumes about the personalities and wants and histories of their characters, all of which were helpful to me — since I am still trying to figure out who these weird people are.”

Weird or not, “opera” or “musical,” Weird Sisters has a story to tell. To a beat. Click on the play arrow for a sample.