‘Another Hansberry’: Meet Emerging Bard Dionna Michelle Daniel

The action of Daniel’s metaphorical one-act drama, “Gunshot,” takes place on a spectral set where characters wake up to their condition and decide to make a change.

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Dramatist Dionna Michelle Daniel is emerging as a visionary voice of the stage. Only twenty-three years old, the North Carolina-born Daniel’s one-woman show Rain, River, Ocean and her ensemble piece Gunshot Medley: Part 1 have already been presented at theater festivals. On September 8, Gunshot opened for a theatrical run produced by one of Los Angeles’ most socially conscious, edgiest outlets, Rogue Machine Theatre, which won L.A.’s prestigious 2018 Ovation Award for “Best Season.”

The action of Daniel’s metaphorical one-act drama, Gunshot, takes place on a spectral set dominated by a tree used for lynching. The magical realist play defies easy description as its recurring African-American characters confront racism from slavery to the Confederacy to Jim Crow to today’s ongoing crisis of police and vigilante shootings of unarmed black people.

Gunshot has a vibe similar to Samuel Beckett’s Theater of the Absurd classic Waiting for Godot. Although Daniel’s style is very different from Lorraine Hansberry’s, who was only twenty-nine when her A Raisin in the Sun was mounted on Broadway in 1959, some see the up and coming playwright as being in Hansberry’s tradition. John Perrin Flynn, Rogue Machine’s award-winning Artistic Director, told The Progressive: “I would personally be willing to say Daniel has the potential to become another Hansberry—I see the same fierce intelligence, the same integrity, the same desire to expose the truth. Like Hansberry she is unwilling to accept the status quo.”

“I see the same fierce intelligence, the same integrity, the same desire to expose the truth. Like Hansberry she is unwilling to accept the status quo.”

Last year Rogue Machine staged Hansberry’s posthumously produced anti-colonial, Africa-set drama Les Blancs, and its co-star, Desean Terry, is now the director of Gunshot Medley: Part 1. In this interview, Daniel discusses her creative process, racism, and genre-busting.

Ed Rampell: So you grew up in North Carolina?

Dionna Michelle Daniel: Both of my parents are college graduates. My mom was a journalist and my dad a graphic designer. It was really quiet and I always had this yearning to get out of North Carolina, but I didn’t leave Winston-Salem—the home of Camel cigarettes and Krispy Kreme doughnuts!—until I went to college at California Institute of the Arts. I got a BFA in acting with a minor in creative writing, graduating CalArts in 2017.

Q: Is Gunshot Medley your first play produced for a theatrical run?

DMD: Yes. Both Gunshot Medley and Rain, River, Ocean started with the CalArts New Works Festival for students. Rain began as a one-woman show [performed by Daniel], but is now being turned into a full ensemble piece. In 2017 we took Gunshot Medley to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

When I started to write Gunshot Medley I wanted to tell the African American experience from slavery to now, but I knew that was a big task to tackle. I tried to figure out what is the soul of the collective black experience—to talk about the descendants of African slaves here.

In the play, the characters are in a “hereafter,” a type of limbo space that echoes the cemetery where Betty, Alvis, and George are buried. There is a tree [on the set], because George and Alvis were hung.

Q: Those names are derived from three headstones you saw in a North Carolina graveyard with just first names and death dates.

DMD: Yes. I was thinking of these characters as archetypes. Who are the revolutionaries we’ve had through history—whether it be Nat Turner, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Bobby Seale, and how we keep seeing them pop back up in history. Sometimes it feels like there’s no progress. Why are we still at this place of systemic racism in America, where so many black and brown people are incarcerated and being shot by the police?

I’m really a firm believer in Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, and the trauma passed on between generations, which Dr. Joy DeGruy writes about. I’ve never witnessed a murder or assault but there’ve always been microaggressions.

Q: Tell us about Gunshot’s music.

DMD: Onstage the characters play banjo, double bass and violin in a mix of Appalachian folk, gospel and spiritual music. I was adamant about there being a banjo because it’s an African instrument. The musicians are silhouetted. They should be an afterthought, the idea of spirits. The play needs to feel ritualistic and like a spiritual experience. The High Priestess is an incarnate of Oya, the Yoruba deity of the goddess that is wind. She holds the gates to the cemetery. She’s the mother of nine—the play was sparked by the shooting in Charleston and nine people died in that church. The traditional color of Oya is red.

The characters have metaphorical tasks they do in this hereafter space. Betty scrubs, feeling like she’s cleaning up the mess at the place where her trauma rises—the tree stump, the whipping post where she lost her babies. Gunshots are sporadically heard throughout the play. Intrinsically, as Betty hears those gunshots fired she’s wiping up her spilled blood, of her dead babies and of every other child, because she’s feeling people who are dying due to racism and police brutality.

George is like Charon, the ancient Greek character who leads people in boats to Hades.

The whole play is the process of the characters waking up to what their condition is and deciding to make a change.

Q: How would you describe the genre of Gunshot Medley?

DMD: [Laughs.] It’s a hybrid text—it’s a ritual piece with music. The artists I’m most interested in break form and genre, like Suzan-Lori Parks, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Beckett, and Shakespeare.

Q: Considering that you wrote such a tragedy I was surprised you have such a hearty chuckle.

DMD: As an artist I experience a plethora of emotions in one day. For me, it’s important to be a vessel for my work and to keep open, whether it’s pain, sadness or joy—it all lives within my art.

Q: Your play is called Gunshot Medley: Part 1. What will Parts 2 and 3 encompass?

DMD: Right now there’s not a Part 3, only an idea for Part 2. Set in the present it would be the present day version of the characters, looking at what it means to deal with the trauma of watching a black body die on your Facebook newsfeed, on your phone, and what that does to your psyche.

Q: And Rogue Machine is taking Gunshot to Watts?

DMD: When Desean Terry first approached me [with The American Saga series] he told me it was his mission to bring pieces to the underserved communities that needed them most. That’s what really sold me—getting it to Watts. That’s the goal. I believe it’s important to have arts education, for young people to see themselves represented onstage, to see stories they can relate to. For me this play is a meditation on everlasting love. I want to show black people in America their resilience.

Gunshot Medley: Part 1 will be performed at WLCAC Theatre in Los Angeles from October 5 through 14. Info: www.roguemachinetheatre.com.