I wrote the first draft of Esai’s Table as part of the Brooklyn Generator, a monthly playwriting challenge where writers were given about a month to write a full-length play culminating in a public reading.

I remember being kind of horrified by the idea, which is exactly why I signed up. I sensed I would grow as a writer by facing that fear. I ended up writing the play over the course of five days in November of 2014, in honor of Michael Brown.

I’ve always felt like this play was gifted to me. My part in it was agreeing to accept that gift and to use my skills as a writer to shape it into something that could live onstage. The play feels sacred to me, and over time I’ve come to understand it as a kind of medicine.

From the beginning, there was a burning desire to create a container for young Black men where they could be seen, valued, loved, and honored. A space where they could express the fullness of their humanity, their hopes, fears, dreams, and joy.

Earlier that fall, I had been commissioned by Keith Josef Adkins and The New Black Fest to write a piece for HANDS UP: 7 Playwrights, 7 Testaments, a national project created in response to the killings of unarmed Black men, asking Black male playwrights to speak directly to their experiences. That process required a great deal of emotional excavation and left me with only five days to write Esai’s Table.

I remember sitting in a café in Oakland, knowing I had to produce something quickly, and deciding to trust what I felt had been building inside of me for months, almost as if the world of the play had been taking shape in another dimension, waiting for me to access it. I let it come through without censoring it.

What emerged was expansive and strange and alive, a mercurial trickster figure, cartoon animations, including a flying baby superhero, traditional chain-gang songs, and a night sea journey atop an ancestral table. It felt like my inner child had taken over, just creating freely and without apology.

Looking back, that was my first experience with what I now understand as Afrosurrealism. The language for that came later through D. Scot Miller’s Afro-Surreal Manifesto, which helped me understand that the surreal and the real were never separate to begin with.

The Brooklyn Generator reading was held on November 30, 2014 at Spike Hill in Williamsburg, directed by Christopher Burris.

From there, the play began a long journey of development across the country, moving from New York to North Carolina to Minnesota to California and back again.

Along the way, I had the opportunity to work with a number of directors, including Bianca LaVerne Jones, Daryl V. Jones, Lester Purry, Kimille Howard, and others, and to collaborate with brilliant Black actors who have brought these roles to life in deeply meaningful ways, including Marcel Spears, Jonathan Burke, Dyllón Burnside, Jayy Dubb, Steven Hill, Hampton Fluker, Eden Marryshow, Benton Greene, Caleb Eberhardt, Keith Randolph Smith, Billy Eugene Jones, Brett Gray, Curtiss Cook Jr., and Charles E. Wallace.

One major milestone was being selected for Cherry Lane Theatre’s Mentor Project, where I had the opportunity to work with Stephen Adly Guirgis and director Danya Taymor.

It was an extremely rich experience that allowed me to work with a full design team and see the play up on its feet as a fully realized workshop production, with all the bells and whistles, and helped anchor the play within the Cherry Lane lineage in a way that has meant a great deal to me.

The pinnacle of the play’s journey so far was the world premiere co-production between Cherry Lane Theatre and JAG Productions in October 2019 at the Briggs Opera House in White River Junction, Vermont, directed by Stevie Walker-Webb.

Jarvis Green, founder of JAG and my brother and friend, has been a fierce champion of the play. As part of that production, we collaborated with the Dartmouth DALI Lab, where founder and faculty director Lorie Loeb and her students helped develop animation and projection elements for the piece, expanding the visual language of the play in ways that felt aligned with its world.

I first started working with Patience Lekien during the Mentor Project, when he was just out of school, and I’ve come to think of him as a little brother. A Congolese visual storyteller and multidisciplinary artist, he created the initial illustrations for that production, joined us again for the world premiere, and most recently designed the graphic for the Cherry Lane Alternative announcement. It’s been deeply meaningful to witness his growth over the years, and I’m incredibly proud to see him now stepping into his own as a filmmaker.

After a hugely successful run, the play was slated to transfer to New York and open at Cherry Lane’s mainstage in March 2020.

After a few weeks of brush-up rehearsals at a studio, we were a day away from moving into the theater when we received an email that everything had to pause because of COVID.

It was devastating. There was real momentum behind the play, and for me it felt like a shift in my trajectory as a writer. More than anything, I was about to share this story with a wider audience. There was care being put into community engagement, especially with Black audiences, and a real sense that something meaningful was about to happen. And then everything stopped.

Like the theater community at large, we kept thinking it would resume in a month, then two, then three. Eventually, Cherry Lane was sold, and that chapter came to an end.

About a year later, I brought together a new team, including Julie Crosby, Jarvis Green, Daryl Sledge, and Stevie Walker-Webb, who was once again attached to direct, to try to move the play forward again.

We had a really beautiful and successful reading at New York Theatre Workshop, but once again, the momentum didn’t sustain.

Over the past eleven years, I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on this journey, on the many false starts that are so much a part of making theater, especially with a piece like this.

What has stayed constant is the impact of the play itself. Sitting in rooms across the country, witnessing audiences respond, seeing Black men feel seen and held by the work, has been one of the most meaningful experiences of my life.

Through all of this, Angelina Fiordellisi and Mary Geerlof have been consistent champions of the play. Their belief in the work over the years has meant a great deal to me.

In the fall of 2025, I met with Mary Geerlof and Nicolette Norton of Cherry Lane Alternative, and we began talking about the future of the play.

When Mary shared that the Alternative was interested in producing Esai’s Table as part of that lineage, it felt deeply meaningful.

To now have the opportunity for the play to finally receive its New York premiere, with an organization that has long been a creative home for me, is something I don’t take lightly.

I’m honored, and I’m excited to share this story.

In Remember Me Remember the stage becomes the architecture of a fading mind. Set within the walls of a memory care facility, stories from different decades and spaces overlap, creating friction between the caretaker’s anchored reality and the resident’s fragmented temporalities. These perspectives create a dizzying, fractal experience where the familiar becomes strange, and the strange becomes home.

The play explores the delicate, humorous and painful interaction between those holding the thread of history and those watching it unravel. Scenes are deliberately presented with missing pieces. The caretakers attempt to build a coherent setting through daily activities and the marking of time. The residents reinvent the space and, dialoguing under their own gaze, fill the gaps with undecipherable memories that often contradict the world around them.

Memory is the primary aesthetic and structural choice of the piece. As opposed to a linear narrative I am working with a fragmented distribution- mirroring the partial vision of a patient in cognitive decline and the clinical, repetitive routine of the facility.

Remember Me Remember was originally commissioned by People’s Light Theater as part of their New Play Frontiers (NPF) commission and is in development with Laurie Bernhard and Spark Theatrical.

Returning to Cherry Lane Alternative feels like a true creative homecoming – this is where I wrote To the Bone, Pas de Deux (Lost My Shoe), and other plays. I’m so grateful to be back.