Darryl Stamp has a strategy to “avoid being shot for no reason” if he is pulled over by a police officer.
He opens all the windows in his car. Turns on all the interior lights. Places his license on the dashboard before alerting a loved one. He sets his cellphone up to record, then he places both his hands in clear sight on the steering wheel.
“I don’t want to be a statistic,” Stamp writes.
Stamp is a Black playwright who lives in Bountiful. This anecdote is a snippet of his haunting monologue, “American Survival Story,” which chronicles some of his experiences living in Utah. The monologue is performed by actor Terence Johnson, who delivers effortless humor and seriousness whenever it’s needed.
“American Survival Story” is one of eight snapshots into the lives of eight different Utah BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) playwrights, performed by eight actors of color in Plan-B Theatre’s “Full Color,” which opened last month and will have showings until Nov. 10.
From scary to liberating
The Studio Theatre at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center is the perfect setting for “Full Color” — the stage is set up as a campsite, allowing the audience a close-up look as the actors share stories like old friends.
The eight monologues capture treasured moments, like in “Here,” when Diné playwright Courtney Dilmore shares a story of healing at her great-grandmother’s home on reservation land. Others capture larger issues, like in “Let’s Not” by Tito Livas, who writes about the inequities people of color face in the theater world.
(Sharah Meservy) Terence Johnson and company in Darryl Stamp's "American Survival Story," one of eight monologues in Plan-B Theatre's production "Full Color."
“Full Color” is the third installment of the company’s Color series, following “...Of Color” in 2019 and “Local Color” in 2021.
Jerry Rapier, the artistic director at Plan-B Theatre, said the series took root in 2017.
“Race was being used as currency in a way it never had been before,” Rapier said. “I just felt like we needed to gather.”
Rapier said he didn’t know what that gathering would end up looking like, just that he wanted to see if anyone else was feeling the “unease and discomfort” he felt coming out of the 2016 election.
One Facebook event invite later, 51 people involved in the Salt Lake City theater community came together. They shared their experiences. They felt seen and heard. Rapier said two issues came to light as the meeting went on.
“One was how to help folks invite people of color to audition without only inviting them to audition for roles written specifically for their race or ethnicity,” Rapier said. “The second was a broader, deeper discussion about who should be telling, designing, [and] shepherding which stories, and who shouldn’t be.”
The second point became the focus of the first installment of the series, “...Of Color,” a writing workshop. When it ended with a showing of the playwrights’ work, Rapier said, “I felt something I had never felt before. I felt connected to my profession, my work as an artist.”
In 2019, four of the eight playwrights got to see their works staged, and in 2021, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the remaining four had audio of their works published. Two of those involved are well-known Utah playwrights Dee-Dee Darby-Duffin and Chris Curlett.
Rapier ended up asking eight playwrights, including Darby-Duffin and Curlett, if they would be interested in a third iteration of the series. They responded with enthusiasm and fear, Rapier said, because it was first-person.
“The characters were themselves and that was a scary thing once everyone started thinking about it,” he said, “but then it turned a corner from scary to liberating.”
Rapier said “Full Color” gives audiences a glimpse into a broad range of experiences BIPOC Utahns face.
“Very few pieces of theater can take you all those places,” he said, “There’s power in knowing that actors are on stage speaking the words of the playwrights who could live in your neighborhood.”
Unsettling Utah experiences
Darby-Duffin’s monologue, “Fried Chicken,” is performed by Yolanda Stange and captures Darby-Duffin’s experience at the Smith’s grocery store near one of SLC’s more eclectic neighborhoods — 9th and 9th.
(Sharah Meservy) Yolanda Stange in Dee-Dee Darby-Duffin's "Fried Chicken," one of eight monologues in Plan-B Theatre's production "Full Color."
“This is the neighborhood where it’s come one, come all, and we’re accepting,” Darby-Duffin said. “Sometimes our liberalism gets in the way of seeing the actual story. We think we are so open and progressive that we don’t see that these everyday things [and] little slights that kind of get brushed under the rug.”
In the monologue, Darby-Duffin describes one of these slights. She heads into the store to buy snacks for a road trip to Logan, and the clerk assumes her payment option is an EBT, or electronic benefits transfer, card.
The employee at the deli loudly announces that Darby-Duffin cannot pay for the food with an EBT card. “It was the audacity for me that made me want to write it,” Darby-Duffin said.
Writing the monologue was “cathartic,” she said.
The exchange transported Darby-Duffin back to her childhood, when some of her cousins used food stamps. Back then, the food stamps looked like Monopoly board game money to Darby-Duffin, and her cousins would have her pay at the store for them to avoid embarrassment.
“Immediately,” Darby-Duffin said, “I was like, ‘Oh, this is what they do to poor people. You make poor people feel less than.’”
Darby-Duffin responded to the employee by saying, “What is an EBT card?” Before leaving, she asked the cashier to go home and think about why she chose to act that way.
“I hope it does what I hope all theater does,” she said of the performance, “and that is to make you question yourself.”
A difficult place to acclimate
Curlett’s monologue, “Fox and the Mormons,” is performed by Alex Smith. Curlett, who grew up in a military family, came to Utah from Los Angeles.
“I’ve had to acclimate to different communities and countries, but coming to Utah was probably, by far, one of the hardest places to acclimate to … ,” Curlett said.
In his monologue, he explores the complexities of that acclimation as an actor and Black man.
“In the draining culture that is Utah, I played all the trauma roles. Shackled to stereotypes while others soared with freedom,” Curlett writes.
Curlett recalls a specific moment when he played the role of a slave who was sold from his family during the Civil War in a musical written by two white men. His character is accosted by a white man with a whip.
Smith’s portrayal of the cracking whip makes the audience sit still.
In another scene from that same show, Curlett talks about lying on the floor with other actors portraying slaves, watching as “lovely white women with parasols mocked us and walked around us like predators.”
He felt hurt watching his friends portray their parts so well. Curlett chronicles crying in the parking lot after that scene. “I was young. I had no idea or language for what I was experiencing. Being traumatized for a leering, eager white audience to see,” he said.
That scene was “just one of the moments of many I could have pulled from,” Curlett said. “But that one stood out the most because it caught me off guard.”
Curlett’s monologue ends with a specific call of action to audience members to share the performance’s messages. “Hopefully you hear us. You truly hear us,” Curlett said in an interview.
“Full Color” ends with Bijan Hosseini’s “At Least One.”
All the actors leave the stage, except Alec Kalled, who tells Hosseini’s tale of being half Persian in a post-9/11 world and being pulled aside by airport security whenever he travels.
Hosseini expresses his frustration at being pulled over often, and details one stop where a police officer told him, “Don’t think for a second I couldn’t shoot you and get away with it.”
It leaves the theatergoers suspended in tension. When Kalled — and Hosseini — exhale, the audience does, too.
