“What is the world we hope to see?”

An interview with the creative team of Furlough’s Paradise—playwright a.k. payne, director Tinashe Kajese-Bolden & choreographer Dell Howlett

By Ashley M. Thomas, Co-Dramaturg for Furlough's Paradise

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ASHLEY M. THOMAS: There are many creative team members involved in this process, although the play is a two-hander. Can you speak to the kind of magic embedded in the story that invites a wide range of collaborators to the table?

DELL HOWLETT: It starts with a.k., who made space in the writing for multiple ways for the piece to be animated. a.k. talks about what the characters bring and what lives in their bodies. It takes someone thinking about the sounds, colors, movement, and the fingerprints of liberation. It’s necessary we have different points of view to animate, vivify, and make that expression particular.

a.k. payne: One thing I love about theater-making is the way it invites us to expand our ways of knowing. We each bring something vital to the table. I am free to boldly declare when “I do not know” because in the most ideal theatrical room, we have nourished an environment that can prioritize our collective knowledge. I hope this play invites that kind of collaboration. Liberation can’t be made in isolation.

AMT: a.k.’s work is inherently multimedia. It evokes magic that doesn’t singularly imagine words being said, but a feeling to be had. What better way than to invite people to the table to materialize such feelings?

AMT: From Audre Lorde’s “Eye to Eye” to bell hooks’ Sister of the Yam, there are so many traceable influences of Black kinship at the heart of the play. What are some of the ways that’s being channeled both directly through Mina and Sade’s relationship, and also in the room as a creative team?

TINASHE KAJESE-BOLDEN: Telling a story about finding freedom in ourselves and each other had to be embedded in how we built this production right from the beginning, including our audition process where we wanted to be in community. There’s also how the characters call in literary references like for colored girls..., we want to bring in our artists’ influences.

akp: I’m reminded of our pre-show speech at the Alliance Theater production. It was about existing together and asking the audience to turn to their neighbor in a Black church aesthetic, acknowledging that we were existing in the same moment. I’ve been thinking about what it means to not take for granted any chance to be with people and simply exist.

AMT: Embodiment and dialogue are often seen as separate mediums but the two are inextricably linked. Can you talk about how the text calls for an integration of both, and the work to bring that integration to life?

akp: I love when Ntozake Shange says, “I can’t count the times I viscerally wanted to attack, deform and maim the language I was taught to hate myself in,” yet she creates beautiful plays with stunning poetry. She’s using this language because it was given, but she’s aware of the limitations, and I find that moving. I often think how body can be in a dance with language, and how language can be a tool to get to a thing that the body is trying to say, and how they can exist together.

DH: Yes, I love that. I’m going to say what you said again, because it says so much to me, which is how the body can be a tool to get to what you are trying to say. How do you begin to discover how language and embodiment crash into each other? The process is about how we arrive at embodiment that’s true and self-possessed. As a choreographer, I’m interested in an aesthetic that is muscular. All these things have to be present.

TKB: The underbelly of the story is about migration. Our bodies are still holding, and when I say “ours,” I am naming the African diaspora. a.k. has given us this beautiful meditation on decolonizing our tongues—a gift we need to become truly unshackled. The first thing that enslaved us was our body. Once shackled, it wasn’t just our tongue that was colonized, it was the way that we communicate with our bodies. This opportunity to remove those boundaries is reaching for radical hope. How we express ourselves has no choice but to be a physical manifestation of our speech.

AMT: Time is a major integration of both elements because it marks a ritual of the body moving and evolving. They get new information, embody it, and act on it.

AMT: What are some of the ways you hope this story builds community amongst audiences and beyond?

TKB: As a director, what’s important is the authentic relationship between characters. I think an audience is going to come in thinking that they are going to be hearing a story about confinement, and I want them to leave with a clearer understanding of the possibility of freedom.

DH: Yes, there’s something about doing a play with two Black folk at the center that’s about abolition—abolition of the spirit; about the freedom of something that we don’t usually get to see Black folk reconcile. Even if people don’t know they’re seeing a play about freedom, they will know at the end something has been reconciled.

akp: I hope this creates space to have fertile ground for imagining what abolition can be collectively. It can’t happen without creative imagining. We have to ask, “What is the world we hope to see?”

AMT: This is the third production of Furlough’s Paradise. The number 3 represents growth, expansion, and innovation. What are some ways you hope to bring this energy to this production?

DH: I’m bringing these physical ideas and making them manifest. I’m also excited by synthesis. What sounds animate the movement, what are the visual ideas that are at the heart of those sequences?

TKB: I want to lift up a.k. because it’s a very particular artist that not just recognizes, but seeks evolution in their creative process. Having that first professional production and expanding on the visual aesthetics while scaffolding the language has set us up for innovation, where now we know the structure of the container. At Geffen Playhouse, we can invite necessary creative abrasion that interrogates ideas, allows us to fail forward, and invites everybody’s slice of genius.

akp: That means so much to me, and it’s such a gift. I’m excited to have a choreographer in the room. In this rendition, I’m curious about innovating toward specificity in what the body is doing and how the characters exist in space. I’m interested in Afro-surrealism—that’s what this play leans towards. How do we look at Black life and turn the camera so it resembles what we’re feeling? How do we allow for the surreal by centering our own gazes?

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Furlough's Paradise

APR 16 – MAY 18, 2025
WEST COAST PREMIERE
GIL CATES THEATER

Written by a.k. payne
Directed by Tinashe Kajese-Bolden
Featuring Kacie Rogers & DeWanda Wise

Cousins Sade and Mina used to be inseparable. Now leading very different lives, they return to their childhood town for the funeral of their mother and aunt. While Sade is on a three-day furlough from prison and Mina experiences a brief reprieve from her career and life on the West Coast, the two try to make sense of grief, home, love, and kinship. As the clock ticks down, the cousins grapple with their conflicting memories of the past and their shared hopes for the future. Poetic and theatrical, Furlough’s Paradise explores family dreams of a utopia yet to be realized.

This production is made possible, in part, by support from Cast Iron Entertainment. Geffen Playhouse’s Theater as a Lens for Justice initiative provides access to this production and supplementary programs for populations impacted by incarceration and is supported, in part, by Jayne Baron Sherman. Audience Engagement initiatives for Furlough's Paradise are supported by The Sheri and Les Biller Family Foundation.

This project is supported in part by:

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