Playwright and performer Makambe K. Simamba talks about performing for Black audiences [Video]

There was a unique performance of Handsome Alice’s production of Makambe Simamba’s Our Fathers, Sons, Lovers, and Little Brothers Saturday night at the Big Secret Theatre, when Simamba performed in front of an almost all-Black audience on Black Family Night.

The solo show, written and performed by Simamba, was inspired in part by the 2012 shooting of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, who was killed by George Zimmerman, a community patrol guard at a gated community who felt threatened by Martin’s presence.

Directed by Donna-Michelle St. Bernard, the show is a bit of a fever dream, with ‘Slimm”, aka Trayvon, waking up in the afterlife immediately after his death and trying to make sense of what has happened..

Simamba, who was born in Zambia, grew up in the Caribbean before emigrating with her family to Canada and studied theatre at the University of Lethbridge, uses her dance training almost as much as her actor training to physicalize Slimm’s …