Playwright Nambi E. Kelley Discusses “Hero: The Boy From Troy,” Her New Musical About John Lewis, at WHBPAC took time from her busy touring schedule from her new musical, Hero: The Boy From Troy, to talk with Hamptons.com. Her musical brings to life the inspiring journey of civil rights icon John Lewis. The show will be at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center for one day only, on February 7th at 7pm. The music and lyrics are by Joe Plummer, and this show will offer audiences of all ages a profound exploration of Lewis’s early life and his transformative path to becoming a national leader in the fight for justice.
Ms. Kelly said, “It was the middle of a pandemic, and I have a dear friend who I went to graduate school with, who worked over at the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera House, and they have a program called Gallery of Hero. She reached out to me to see if I was interested in doing a commission, saying I could write about anything I wanted. Actually, as it turns out, they had never, ever in the history of that entire program, which I think is over 40 years in fact, hired a black writer to write one of their commissions. So, I was the first.”
Ms. Kelley who although she was born in Harlem was raised in Chicago said she chose John Lewis because at that time he was very active as was Black Lives Matter especially “post George Floyd and all of that.” She explained John Lewis, “ā¦ was just in my spirit a lot and so I thought I really wanted to give him to the next generation of people because he’s been a hero of mine for decades and a hero of the directors.”
Since it is a musical Ms. Kelley said, “The music spans genres.” She explained the show has a young Lewis preaching to chickens, so there’s a gospel element. Expanding she said, “There’s a John Lewis big solo at the end, so it almost is reminiscent of like Benny and the Jets, like Elton John. Yet, with the very beginning it’s sort of like a Hamiltonesque spoken word, kind of rap.”
The original show has evolved. Ms. Kelley said they did a five or six months run in Pittsburgh along with a 2023 regional tour between West Virginia and Pennsylvania with, “a different cast, different director, and almost a completely different script. That script kind of was more focused on John Lewis figuring out a place where he wanted to belong in the world and then realizing that he had to create it himself.”
She said the present version of the Hero: The Boy From Troy “ā¦ is now about the difference between good trouble and bad trouble and how we can be activists in our own lives.” Explaining why the rewrite, Nambi E. Kelley said, “It was just John Lewis, but now what we figured out was if this is for the children, we had to figure out a way to actually make it more relevant to them. It’s not that it wasn’t. It’s just we just needed a little bit more fine-tuning.“
She and her creative partner, the director, Daniel Carlton, went to a hermitage artist retreat in Canada. She said, “I was nominated for this retreat where I can go hang out, and they give me housing, and it’s beautiful. Here is an opportunity for you to go develop with whatever you want for three weeks. I said perfect. They sent me to Canada, and it was like three hours outside of Toronto, and basically, it was a cabin in the middle of a lake; you had to take a boat in order to get to the property.“ It was there on that lake the show was, “reenvisioned, refined, tuned to focus it in this direction to really strengthen the lead character Jaden and to tie his lesson more specifically into the John Lewis’s lesson so that a young kid can watch it and then say, oh, that’s me. Yes, I have anger sometimes, too, or I don’t know how to deal with this, or I watched the kid get bullied, and I did nothing. So (we made adjustments) to make it much more relevant to our young people.”
Why a musical? Ms. Kelley’s answer, “The musical part of it was actually one of the parameters of the commission, they wanted it to be a musical. ā©And I was like, oh, okay. And when I started doing the research and realized that John Lewis wanted to preach to chickens as a child, I thought, oh my God, this is perfect, singing chickens!”
Joe Plummer who does the music and lyrics has been in Ms. Kelley’s orbit since she first became a professional artist. “That’s when I really first met him on the scene,“ Kelley explained, “ā¦and then realized you know my aunt and you went to high school with her. And that’s in Chicago, yeah, they went to high school together in Chicago.”
Hero: The Boy From Troy is a 45-minute one-act play, but it is interactive. Playwright Kelley said, “There are moments where the audience sings with the cast and with the chickens. Then usually we do like a short talkback.”
When asked, although the show has a very strong message, There will be some light moments. There’ll also be some laughter, some drama, and some awareness of the situation, and at the end, it’ll all tie up with some sort of important moral. Ms. Kelley replied, “That’s absolutely right.“
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