Standing tall and speaking loud can become impossible when every morning you wake for a school theatre curriculum that denies or defiles your existence. Stories, you quickly learn, can harm as easily as they heal. There are stories that crack open a teenager’s mirror with an outreached pale grip binding them to centuries of tropes and words like barbarous, savage, exotic, ethnic, sexy to the white male gaze.
For years, I avoided the mirror; my body had become merely the memory of violence. Cast as Titania and Tamora in high school, I had initially trusted that both roles offered magical opportunities to embody power. But a white male director’s increasingly abusive sexualization, racialization, and fetishization withered my hopes. Caved my chest. I wondered if theatre would always feel this painful.
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it’s common to fuse the casting of Titania and Hippolyta—meaning that the actor’s body may not only be disrespected as Titania by Oberon, but also colonized as Hippolyta by Theseus. Brazilian and femme, my body carries this ancestral memory, and as the director casually demanded Titania and Hippolyta each be assaulted “harder” through the course of the play, I couldn’t help but wonder who that choice was serving. I was told, “Lines are so blurry in the theatre.”
In Titus Andronicus, the title character conquers Tamora’s people, and a cycle of violence ensues. In rehearsals, the warm expressiveness I had inherited from my foremothers was called “barbaric.” Tamora’s experience unfolding alongside my own made me yearn to erase my very self as I heard, again and again, This is how you are. This is how it is.
I wouldn’t have recognized agency if we had locked eyes on the street.
Speaking with other artists, I’ve learned that my high school experience was not at all
