October is LGBT History Month, which recognizes important moments for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. The play “Starting Over” can help with that conversation.
Ma’at Production Association of Afrikan Centered Theatre, which is more commonly known as MPAACT, presents the story of love, tolerance and identity Oct. 21 at Governors State University’s Center for Performing Arts in University Park.
“What you hope to do is create a dialogue where you can build bridges, which means accepting people,” said Reginald Lawrence, executive director of MPAACT, via phone from his Chicago home.
“That’s why this play is valuable. It isn’t a play about being transgender. It’s about love and obstacles. The gender reassignment that one of the characters is undergoing is one of the many obstacles in their relationship.”
Lawrence was part of a group of student activists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who formed MPAACT (www.mpaact.org) in 1990.
“It just opened up a wonderful window for us to look at all the possibilities we had as black people. We weren’t seeing that same type of conversation in popular art at the time — on television or in movie theaters or in the literature we had our hands on and certainly not reflected in classrooms,” he said.
“That’s some powerful stuff for a 20-year-old. That’s life-changing stuff once you get your hands on it. We went into the business of doing exploration.”
Dedicated to developing, nurturing and sustaining Afrikan-centered theater, Chicago-based MPAACT has been involved in an arts education program, main stage productions, master classes, original music, a playwright’s laboratory, a publishing company, standing productions and workshops.
“I’m particularly proud that I’ve built an institution that came out of the emotional needs of a couple of college kids and has figured out how to find legs in that regard,” Lawrence said.
“I’m pretty proud of the fact that we get to add to this conversation about our full humanity in ways that most of the popular media tend to skip over.”
He created “Starting Over” under the moniker Shepsu Aakhu, which is the name he uses for playwriting.
“I was at a comedy club in Los Angeles and I was actually rather shocked at how much homophobic material they were doing,” said Aakhu about what led to him writing “Starting Over.”
“We’re going to watch two kids in their senior year of high school in a small little town. That story line has that interracial couple trying to deal with being an interracial couple in that particular place and that particular time and all those stresses about that.
“There’s a concurrent story line where we watch these same two people reunite 15 or 20 years later in a major city in a high-stress corporate environment. Only one of them is transgender now. We’re watching what their relationship was when they were younger and what they are now.”
Adult content and nudity are featured in “Starting Over.” There will be a postshow discussion with the cast and Aakhu, who received the 2012 Joseph Jefferson Award for outstanding new work for “Speaking in Tongues: The Chronicles of Babel.”
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“Starting Over” is part of GSU’s Center for Performing Arts’ Made in Chicago series, which brings Chicago-based theater, dance and musical ensemble companies to the Southland. The final show in the series is “The Blues Hip Hop Experience,” co-produced by Billy Branch and Sylvia Ewing, on April 21, 2018.
Jessi Virtusio is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.
‘Starting Over’
When: 8 p.m. Oct. 21
Where: Governors State University’s Center for Performing Arts, 1 University Parkway, University Park
Tickets: $28 adults; $25 ages 65 and older; $10 students; limited seating available
Information: 708-235-2222; centertickets.net