Playwright and actor Makambe K. Simamba’s commitment to community has shaped her approach to the theatre. “[I aim] to be of service through my ability to tell stories,” she says.
“It’s part intention and part experiment,” she explains. “What does that look like as a storyteller, this idea of serving your fellow man? That idea of being part of a community, giving, supporting, uplifting, and doing good… It’s an idea that I love. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to make didactic theatre that’s like an after-school special, but it does speak to questions about the reason for the work.”
This philosophy lies at the heart of Our Fathers, Sons, Lovers and Little Brothers, a one-woman show written and performed by Simamba. Offering “a protest for all Black life beyond headlines and hashtags,” this rallying cry of a play has garnered two Dora Awards since its 2019 premiere. This Friday, it opens here in Calgary, thanks to a co-production between local theatre companies Handsome Alice and Verb along with Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre.
“I started writing it in 2012 because I was shaken by the killing of Trayvon Martin,” says Simamba. “I looked at him and saw my little brother… and I was like, what would it be like not to have that spot at my dinner table?”
Within the world of the play, Simamba plays an imagined character named Slimm, a 17-year-old Black boy navigating his first steps into the unknown after being killed.
Simamba was born in Zambia and raised in the Caribbean before moving to Alberta. She studied theatre at the University of Lethbridge and participated in a One Yellow Rabbit Summer Lab Intensive in 2016. It was here that she presented Our Fathers publicly for the first time.
“Within that space, at the end of the three weeks of the summer lab, there’s been a tradition, a little 10-minute solo show,” she says. “[This show] was pretty much the same concept: a young Black boy steps into the space, whatever the space is, which happens to be the theatre, and he doesn’t quite know necessarily or fully understand where he is, but there is a sense of him being in the afterlife… trying to figure out a process, like, ‘Where am I?’ ‘What am I doing?’ ‘What am I doing here?’”
After the Summer Lab Intensive, Simamba workshopped the show locally with Downstage, Alberta Theatre Projects and the Banff Centre’s playwrights lab before premiering it in 2019 with b current Performing Arts, a Toronto company devoted to “Black and Brown radical experimentation in content and form.” The production was later expanded and produced by Tarragon in Toronto (where Simamba has since relocated) in association with Montreal’s Black Theatre Workshop to tour Canada before coming full circle and returning to the prairies.
“Coming to Calgary now to sort of do what feels like the final version of the thing feels like a dream,” says Simamba. “Canada still has a lot of healing to do. I’m a Black performer, but I think deeply right now about Indigenous lives: the lives of children, all of those babies that were found at the residential schools, and the idea of children being buried before their time…. This play gives space for everybody to see themselves or their families. Yes, of course, it is about the fight for and advocacy for Black life and Black childhood, but if you remove some of these labels that we separate ourselves with, it’s just a story about a boy who left the earth earlier than he was planning to.”
With Our Fathers, Simamba is inviting Calgary to release some of our collective trauma and laugh along the way. “I promise there’s jokes,” she laughs. “But really, I hope to be in service with this piece to create a safe space for everybody to let that energy move through and to create space for people to come together and process. I think that sometimes we need to have a good cry.”
Our Fathers, Sons, Lovers and Little Brothers runs at the Big Secret Theatre in Arts Commons from September 13 to 28. Get tickets at handsomealice.com
