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Onstage and off, a musical takes on D.C.’s gun violence

2023-11-22 00:00:00.0 华盛顿邮报-华盛顿特区原网页

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Jo’Hari Payne hadn’t seen his eighth-grade English teacher in eight years when, months ago, on a whim, he decided to find her online and write her a message.

Payne was 21, working at GameStop and wasn’t sure if Caity Schneeman would even remember him.

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Of course she did, he recalled her saying.

What followed was a reunion, then a collaboration, and now a musical that will see Payne stand on a stage this week and play the lead role. When I spoke to him on a recent afternoon, he was getting ready to rehearse.

“I didn’t expect this to come from sending her a message after eight years,” he told me.

This is a musical that is unlike any other in the D.C. region. It is the first major production by the nonprofit organization Schneeman, a performing arts teacher at the Cardozo Education Campus, founded to pull more young people into the arts. She created the organization at the urging of a late D.C. official who was tasked with reducing gun violence and believed in empowering community members to find ways to achieve that.

The musical, which is called “Once Upon a Rhyme,” is both a student production and more than a student production. About two dozen young people ages 14 to 26 make up the cast and crew. Some are Schneeman’s students. Some are her former students. And some were never her students but wanted to be a part of what they saw happening on and off the stage.

“It’s their safe space,” Schneeman said. “We’re in a city and in a school that is very trauma-filled. And when they come in here, they can be anyone they want to be, and they know they are always loved, unconditionally.”

The city is in crisis when it comes to youth violence. The violence is derailing lives and claiming lives. Young people are hurting and killing others, and they are getting hurt and killed. From the outside looking in, a musical may not seem the most obvious way to combat that violence. But Schneeman isn’t standing on the outside. She spends her days with the young people who are at risk of getting pulled into and lost to that violence, and in the past several months, she has witnessed how working on the musical has helped them.

She has seen it give them a purpose, a platform and a community. She has seen them come from different neighborhoods six days a week and stay late into the night to produce a musical they are proud to share with the public.

“Theater is a perfect opportunity for them to be heard,” Schneeman said. “So many of our young people who are engaging in crime, they don’t feel heard, and when they don’t feel heard, they don’t feel they matter, so life has no value. … No child wakes up and says, ‘I want to be somebody who steals a car, I want to be somebody who carries a gun.’ They don’t. That’s not what any kid hopes they become. Young adults, either. That’s not what they want. They want employment. They want safety. And they want to belong.”

Schneeman said she was encouraged to start the nonprofit Theatre 202 by Linda Harllee Harper, who before her death in May at the age of 57 served as director of the city’s Office of Gun Violence Prevention. The last time I spoke to Harper, we discussed the grants her office was giving to community members and nonprofit organizations to turn their ideas for combating gun violence into action. At the time, she described that money as acknowledging that the “answer to this gun violence is in the communities.”

The unseen, creative way D.C. is fighting gun violence

Schneeman said she was able to use that grant money to pay the cast and crew for their time and work. She also raised money through a GoFundMe site and used some of her own to cover those costs. “They would want to do it for free, but they can’t,” she said.

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The cast is expected to perform the show on Thursday, Friday and Saturday night at Cardozo. Schneeman said the auditorium can seat about 1,000 people, but so far, they have only sold about 100 tickets. She worries about those empty seats. So do some of the performers.

“I want more people to be exposed to this,” said Lorenzo Johnson, who stars in the musical. “This is a beautiful moment. It’s a new show, a new company, and with some people who have never done theater before. Everything about this is saying ‘fresh start.’”

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Johnson, who is 21, said he had been waiting years to work on a production again with Schneeman. He was in ninth grade and, by his own description “a little lost,” when she first encouraged him to try out for a play.

“I was about to follow the traditional path — go play football, go chill with the guys — but nope, I found theater,” he said. “She showed me something new. She showed me something about this world. This is a part of me I didn’t even know I had. I never thought I’d be an actor. Never.”

Johnson said after graduating from high school, he did some acting, but the pandemic derailed his plans. When he found out that Schneeman was holding auditions for the musical, he asked if he could try out.

Johnson said he understands why people might not see a musical as helping ease gun violence. He also understands why many young people in the city carry guns, because he used to, until about a year ago. Giving young people more productive ways to escape their problems and find success allows them to make better choices, he said. “People are not getting enough opportunities, and when opportunities are presented, it’s not recognized, because people aren’t used to seeing it,” he said.

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He and Payne also said that young people in the city could learn something from watching the story that plays out on the stage. The musical, which was written by Ronvé O’Daniel, Jevares Myrick and J Kyle Manzay, is described as telling the story of “Prince Pharoah Harper, a Black boy turned man battling between two worlds of authenticity.”

At one point, these lyrics flow from the stage: “Life or death. Freedom or jail. Heaven or hell. We gotta save Prince from himself! Breathe, breathe: inhale, exhale: This is your life. You have a choice. How will you proceed?”

“A lot of people are living Prince’s story and don’t even know it,” said Payne, who plays Prince and co-produced the musical with Schneeman. “They adopt these personas that they truly don’t believe in or they truly don’t even relate to and they try to become something that is not them.”

“Sometimes,” he added, “you just need a bit of extra affirmation that you are enough and that’s all you need to be.”

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