“Mlima’s Tale” – a searing and socially conscious play by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner – is coming to South Florida with a fresh new interpretation by Zoetic Stage. The play will make its Florida debut at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts as part of its celebrated Theater Up Close series and run from Oct. 13-30.
“[It’s] a beautiful play, a hard play, an enlightening play,” said Zoetic Stage artistic director Stuart Meltzer, who added that he hopes his company’s take on it will “explore a storytelling that is not common.”
It will be Zoetic Stage’s 35th production in 11 years and its first
(Courtesy of Zoetic Stage)
Jerel Brown as the personification of Mlima’s tusks.
since the pandemic began.
Nottage, currently the country’s most produced American playwright, is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for drama and a recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” fellowship. She’s known for creating striking works that predominantly focus on working-class people and the Black experience.
She also allows theater companies the artistic liberty to utilize movement and film in the play – and Zoetic Stage is seizing that opportunity to present something “incredibly different and incredibly bold,” said Meltzer.
“Mlima’s Tale,” which premiered off-Broadway at New York’s Public Theater in 2018, follows Mlima, an elephant whose life is taken for its ivory tusks. The animal’s spirit follows the tusks through the clandestine ivory market, telling a story that captures not only animal emotions, but human contention.
Elephants possess the largest brain of all land animals and are highly intelligent, social and sentient beings. These endangered, regal giants are killed for ivory more often than they are born, leaving approximately 400,000 African elephants on the planet. And if poaching defiantly continues at its current rate (the United States, China and the United Kingdom have instated near-total bans on the ivory trade), elephants could become extinct in the next decade.
(Photo courtesy of Justin Namon)
Paul Torres Wong plays a master carver inspecting the tusks of Jerel Brown’s Mlima in “Mlima’s Tale.”
In an effort to do something about that, the production is partnering with Ron Magill, renowned wildlife expert and photographer, and the director of Zoo Miami. At the close of the play’s Oct. 23 and Oct. 29 performances, he’ll lead discussions about elephant endangerment. The hope is that he’ll be able to reach audiences on a tangible level with the devastating numbers and facts.
Zoetic Stage is also collaborating with distinguished choreographer Herman Payne, a Juilliard graduate who is currently on the faculty of Miami City Ballet. His relationship with Meltzer traces back to high school at New World School of the Arts. After years individually pursuing their careers, the two are collaborating for the first time in this remarkable production.
Film curation will be provided by Delavega, whose work will bring a visually impactful component to the stage.
The play’s cast is composed of local BIPOC actors, including Jerel Brown in the title role. He’s portrayed animals on stage in the past – such as Aslan from “The Lion the Witch, and the Wardrobe” and in “Madagascar” – but this play requires much more versatility as Mlima appears as three different iterations: the elephant, its spirit and the embodiment of its tusks.
Brown says he loves how “poetic and protective” his character is.
“How would an elephant walk through the Savanna while it’s being hunted and personifying that as a human? I want the audience to feel a connection, to recognize hurtful things that they cannot look away from,” said the actor.
To research his role, Brown visited Zoo Miami and also watched countless National Geographic videos to study how elephants eat, walk, are raised and “talk” to each other, through minute sounds created with their trunks that humans cannot detect.
(Stuart Meltzer)
Paul Torres Wong and Jerel Brown during rehearsals for “Mlima’s Tale.”
The most difficult part of Brown’s role is playing this animal with an emphasis on its soul.
“This is an actual being that we share the planet with, and people are just using its teeth as a luxury item,” he explained.
Brown feels there are numerous parallels between the elephant ivory trade and the slave trade, especially in how both happened on a global scale.
“I see Mlima as a parallel to how Africans were taken and traded internationally for greed and corruption, how people are ripped away from their families and traded and sold off,” he said.
“Mlima’s Tale” also addresses how elephant poaching occurs in the most impoverished African villages, by people who need to survive and do whatever that takes, “even if they have to hunt and kill these elephants to make pennies,” said Brown.
“The central message of ‘Mlima’s Tale’ is a call, a 911, to act now,” said Meltzer. “Too many lives are at stake and those lives are not only elephants, they are human.”
If you go
(Courtesy of Zoetic Stage)
Zoetic Stage artistic director Stuart Meltzer, Zoo Miami communication director Ron Magill and actor Jerel Brown pose with elephants at Zoo Miami.
The Arsht Center
1300 Biscayne Blvd.
Miami, FL 33132
“Mlima’s Tale”
Oct. 13-30
Thursday to Sunday
$55-$60
For more information call 305.949.6722 and go to ArshtCenter.org