Zulynette stood on a stage blank enough that it felt like a void. “This show is a spell,” she said. “If you have lived a life, you have a story to tell.”
She was introducing A Little Bit of Death — now available on Long Wharf Theater’s website through Dec. 11 — an evening of storytelling she put together that is part of Long Wharf’s new One City, Many Stages program.
In teaming up with Zulynette, the Long Wharf’s artistic leadership is making good on its promise to ground the theater further in the community around it, even as it wrestles with the restrictions imposed by the pandemic.
Earlier this year, Jacob G. Padrón, Long Wharf’s artistic director, mused that Long Wharf might be exploring the possibilities for outdoor theater in the community if eased Covid-19 restrictions would allow it. For a brief moment this fall, it appeared that A Little Bit of Death would be the first production able to have a small live audience — outdoors, in Edgerton Park. But then the number of cases began to rise again, and restrictions tightened. Long Wharf responded by turning the storytelling production into a film, which the theater has now made available for free.
Storytelling and spoken word — which the Hartford-based Zulynette has deep roots in — thrives on being performed in front of a live audience. Verbal reactions from the crowd are expected and encouraged. Slam poetry contest judging, to some extent, takes spectator enthusiasm into account. Zulynette’s previous incarnations of the show (this is its fifth year) were all performed in theaters. What is it like to move from stage to screen, and more specifically, our screens?
This year’s installment of A Little Bit of Death featured the multitalented cast of Masem Enyong, Diana Aldrete, Ebonie Goulbourne, Andrew Dean Wright, and Jas LaFond. In each case, their pieces transformed from theatrical pieces designed to fill space to film pieces that suddenly felt very up close and personal. If something was lost in dramatic power — if only in not being able to experience it communally — something was gained in clarity and intimacy. This dovetailed nicely with the themes as Zulynette outlined them in her introduction. The thread that held all the stories together, she said, was time, and “there is revolution in taking the time to heal.”
Enyong offered the listener an engaging journey through the many facets of her identity, from Cameroonian granddaughter to artist to culinary worker to at first reluctant and eventually enthusiastic farmer (or “plant mama,” as she called it) to mother. She described how her family raised her with strict discipline, and how she resented it as a child because she didn’t understand why. Later, when she became a mother and found herself having to her young son The Talk about how to survive an encounter with the police, she had a moment of revelation.
“Right there I realized my grandmother wasn’t trying to stifle us,” Enyong said. “She was trying to keep me alive.”
She described how the generosity she learned from her Cameroonian family allowed her to negotiate U.S. holidays with ease. Thanksgiving wasn’t a part of her culture, but “feeding people abundantly” was, and she realized how much pleasure she got from it — “just like my grandmother,” she said.
“So here I am — a whole me,” she said. As she continued on her path, she said, her memories and experiences had given her “everything I need to grow through life.”
Aldrete described the tension she felt as a queer Latine, stuck between the cultures of the United States and Mexico, feeling more Mexican culturally, yet partaking, not without guilt, of the privileges of being a U.S. citizen. She was, she said, the first hope for “many ancestral dreams” — yet wrestling with her sexual identity at one point was so difficult that, at one point, suicide felt like a possibility. “That’s something I don’t think I’ve said out loud,” she said.
Meanwhile, she said, “I struggle wit the fact that I was born in this country.” In her youth, she traveled back and forth between Milwaukee and central Mexico with her family, driving thousands of miles. She felt more Mexican; “coming in the U.S., I would always think: ‘I’m tired of the U.S.’” But “who am I to question my parents’ decisions to give my sister and I a better life?”
As an adult, she decided that as a citizen of the United States, it was her “obligation” to critique it — to bring its painful history out into the open and reckon with it. Inviting death as a transforming spirit to the stage, “I call death to old paradigms of America,” she said. “I call on death to wash away this toxicity…. Death can invite the creation — to imagine new possible futures.”
Aldrete turned out to be a gifted songwriter, singer, and guitar player as well. In her songs, she nimbly and beautifully addressed the themes she talked about. “I’m going to a town that has already been burned down,” she sang. “Tell me do you really think you go to hell for having loved?”
In the next segment, Zulynette interviewed Ebonie Goulbourne on how she learned the formula for “unfucking” herself — lessons learned from sheltering during Covid-19.
At the beginning of the shutdown, she said, “I was supposed to be going to Aruba.” Instead, “I was stuck having to listen to my own thoughts, and feeling the pressure to do more healing than I was already doing.” This extended not only to her relationships with family and friends, but to her relationship with herself. “It’s been 10 years in this one year,” she said.
She thought of herself as strong and independent — yet “how come safety and disconnection are the same thing for me?” she said. She was the first in her family to go to college; should she feel guilty for hating her white-collar job? It felt “a little icky” — and yet she was unhappy.
She worked through much of her issues through yoga. “Going to the mat forced me to quiet some of the talky thoughts,” she said. “I got inside my body.” That created the space to do different work. And “when I stopped doing the work, I noticed there was just more work.” Perhaps she was now on a different path, but it was one that also carried her back to herself.
“Thank you for speaking with me, Ebonie,” Zulynettte said.
“Is there pie?” Goulbourne said in response.
“Of all the natural resources we’re running out of, it’s time that we waste the fastest,” said Andrew Dean Wright, beginning a spoken-word piece about getting sick with Covid-19 during the protests over the killing of George Floyd. “It’s good to be here. It hasn’t always felt like it, but it is.”
For Wright, the year had been the continuation of long-standing questions he has struggled with for his life. “How much of me is by effort or design? How much is mortal or divine?” he asked. “Sometimes I don’t want to love myself…. Sometimes I believe it when I say that it won’t be OK.” The turmoil of the outside world and his interior life mirrored one other. “I don’t want to be told that I’m perfect the way I am,” he said. “Don’t lie to me.”
But Wright found sources of strength in everyone around him — the people who were showing compassion and perseverance through it, the people who made up the community he belonged to. As the year was drawing to a close, Wright settled on a pointed metaphor: “Love is a pair of shoes in a world of broken glass, and that’s how we’ll get past this,” he said.
Jas LaFond ended A Little Bit of Death with a performance that combined drag and personal narrative to talk about what it felt like to be human. They recalled standing in a department store as a child holding clothes from both the boys’ and girls’ section. They “took to wearing T‑shirts and jeans until I hit 13,” they said. “But now I am that big-bodied bitch.”
They remembered standing in the doorway of their adopted mother’s bedroom. “I’m told that I do not know enough to know” about being bisexual, they said. That their sexuality was “white people shit.” But now, they said, “I am that handsome bastard.”
They then recalled walking through downtown Montreal, “a newlywed with my new husband in tow. “No one makes a face” when they entered stores. “When I venture out alone,” they were treated the same as everyone else. “Is this what it’s like to be five-fifths human?” they asked.
