Young playwrights use words to seek ‘power,’ tackle gun violence on stages nationally, including at Goodman Theatre

Echaka Agba, left, and Adhana Reid recite McKennzie Boyd's play,"Southside Summer," as part of a staged reading in the #Enough: Plays to End Gun Violence project at the Goodman Theatre, April 20, 2022.

On Wednesday, actors at the Goodman Theatre performed a reading of the plays, including Boyd’s “Southside Summer” and Buffalo Grove resident Wyn Alyse Thomas’ “Write Their Wrongs.” The project also had a flagship reading Wednesday night at the Lincoln Center in New York, and several other theaters hosted readings across the country simultaneously.

“It’s not normal but it has been woven into the fabric of what it means to grow up as a kid in this country,” Cotey said.Boyd’s play was in part inspired by her recent move to Englewood, where initially she used to stare out her window at the other kids playing outside. As she learned to love her new neighborhood, both from her own experiences and from talking to longtime residents about their experiences there, Boyd wrote the poem titled “Southside Summer.”

He thought the theater should be responding to mass shootings and gun violence in some way. Cotey saw the youth movements that stemmed from the Parkland shooting, young people organizing March for Our Lives protests. In 2020, seven plays were selected out of more than 170 submissions, Cotey said. This year, the two Chicagoland playwrights — Boyd and Thomas — were among more than 150 youths who submitted a play in the fall of 2021.Since launching the project, Cotey has learned a lot from the young playwrights, he said.

Before the play readings, kids in sixth to eighth grade presented poems, an acrostic and a description of artwork related to gun violence in front of about 20 people. “Salted Lemonade,” by Taylor Lafayette of Benoit, Mississippi, tells the story of an 18-year-old boy who convinces his mother to go out with friends after Thanksgiving dinner. Still mourning her late husband’s fatal shooting, Lisa, the mother, feels the only way to know her son is safe is by keeping him home.

She was in eighth grade when she learned that one of the students injured in the Parkland shooting was a childhood friend of hers. The character most adamant about taking action was the least affected by the shooting, hiding in a corner. Of the other characters, one witnessed the shooting, another was injured, and the third lost her brother in the shooting.

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