Lucy Gellman Photo
Jafferis and student.
In a quiet upstairs room at Long Wharf Theater, a group of students were getting Thanksgiving preparations underway, bowing their heads as they began a sort of prayer-cum-beatboxing. Aaron Jafferis, Hanifa Washington and Angela Clinton made chewing noises in 4/4 time. At Aleta Staton’s direction, they were riding that rhythm as hard as they could.
God thank you for giving Pilgrims guns and and, like, axes
To protect their turkey rights and assets
And protect their white asses.
Washington belched on cue. The group, still relatively new to the script, dissolved into a fit of laughter.
But the core of what the group is doing isn’t so funny. Friday night, Jafferis’s multipart “Giving Thanks” will be one of 72 one-minute plays performed at The Every 28 Hours Plays NHV at Long Wharf Theatre (LWT). As the local performance of a national event, Every 28 Hours takes a staggering and contested statistic — a black person is killed by a police officer, vigilante, or security guard every 28 hours — and opens it up to playwrights and actors. Like “Giving Thanks,” each of the 72 plays is inspired directly by the Black Lives Matter movement.
Because demand for Friday’s free performance has been so high, Long Wharf staff members have been working to figure out an encore for the community later in the month.
Born out of the 2014 project The Ferguson Movement, a national creative response to the killing of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson and police violence more broadly, Every 28 Hours comes from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and The One-Minute Play Festival, in collaboration with University Of Missouri-St. Louis acting professor Jacqueline Thompson. From Oregon, Associate Producer of Community Claudia Alick was a catalyzing force; from the One-Minute Festival, Producing Artistic Director Dominic D’Andrea.
Forming a national collaboration, the three began working last year toward a collection of plays that addressed the continued and systemic violence against people of color that has continued, and continued to occupy the national consciousness, in the United States throughout the year. The works — 72 of them in all, by playwrights, activists, and drama geeks who sought to bridge the two across the country — were split into thematic “clumps.” And then the scripts were sent out with a title meant to make people think about lives, and how much they mattered outside of any statistic.
“I mean, every 28 hours? Every 48 hours? Every 98 hours? How many hours does it need to be?” Alick wrote in the packet with which she sent the scripts to participating institutions across the country.
Nearing rehearses with Ony Obiocha.
It was partly by chance, partly by fortuitous timing, and largely because of New Haven’s activist community that Long Wharf Theatre joined a roster of over 80 participating organizations. Last summer, LWT director of community engagement Elizabeth Nearing was on the phone with Alick about something else entirely, when Alick told her about the project. Jafferis’s name got thrown around. And then Alick asked: Would Nearing be down for joining the project, and adding New Haven actors to the mix?
Nearing’s response was immediate. “I don’t know how,” she said. “But yes.”
Almost a year later, she and Jafferis have recruited groups of actors and non-actors alike from Collective Consciousness Theatre, CT Core, People Against Police Brutality, Ice The Beef, Common Ground High School, Educational Center for the Arts (ECA), Showing Up for Racial Justice, and other organizations to participate in the plays, which traverse casual but deadly racism on a city street to a social justice‑y Thanksgiving rap to white-centric history lessons to a person’s afterlife.
Terrence Riggins and Steve Scarpa rehearse.
“One of the things that spoke to me so much, and one thing that I struggle with, is: How do I contribute to this conversation and how do I participate in a way that I make the world a better place?” Nearing said in a conversation Wednesday afternoon. “I am a white woman working for a historically white institution. I want to find a way where I can use my skills to contribute. If I in any way am able to bring stories and perspectives together, if I can bring people together in a way that they’re able to build [community],” that’s the point.
“Theater is a place where we can expand perspectives,” she added. “Doing one play by one person only gives you one thing. Part of the strength of this project is the cacophony of voices involved.”
Wednesday night, rehearsals gave a glimpse into those layered voices, and the multigenerational group of professional and aspiring actors, advocates, writers, and students taking those voices on. Dressed in a blue sweater and a matching blue scarf, Staton was mentally miles away, slipping into a grief-stricken whisper as she became a mother, surveying her son’s still-warm, lifeless body after a deadly altercation with police. Playing a spectral character, Terrence Riggins murmured something about his hands, barely audible as the room swallowed his voice.
In an upstairs conference room, Planned Parenthood advocate Pierrette Silverman was trying to learn her way through a script that required more physical acting than anything else, bodies falling backwards haphazardly as if they had been sprayed by tear gas.
And across the hall, Jafferis and his group were still giving thanks. Or, something like that. One teenager read:
from any brown people who might seem suspicious
since they come from a race the Pilgrim militias deem vicious
The adults mimed guzzling turkey. A few began to belch, choke, and vomit on cue yet again.
“It’s stressful putting together so many pieces in so little time … especially with the local victims of police brutality, whose stories are so close I can hear their voices shake with trauma,” Jafferis said after the rehearsal. “I feel bursts of anger and sadness … but all of that is overwhelmed by gratitude for the many good people giving their heart and soul and time to this. I’ve rarely seen activists and theatre-makers cross-pollinating so deeply; as someone bridging the gap between both, it makes me feel useful.”
It is unexpected and invigorating, he added, that the project has already been working as a catalyst outside of the theater, getting People Against Police Brutality and Black Lives Matter New Haven to talk about how their attempts to organize the Civilian Review Board and simultaneous presence in the project “has sparked and challenged ideas about theatre’s purpose and aesthetics.”
“I sometimes talk to my students or colleagues about how making art about hard things can change your relationship to it — from victim or passive witness to creator,” Jafferis said. “I’m feeling that happen in my own life right now. I feel like a whole person in this project, like my actor self and activist self find the root of those two words and the root of me in this common imperative: Act.”
Every 28 Hours NHV takes place Friday, Oct. 21, at Long Wharf Theatre at 7 p.m. The event is free. Because space is limited, attendees are encouraged to arrive early.