A Conversation with Lacresha Berry
Lacresha Berry (Berry for short) is a Queens-based playwright, actor, singer-songwriter, and teacher with a master’s degree in costume design from New York University. She’s performed her one-woman shows in schools and theaters across the US, and she’s also a tour guide for Black Gotham, an immersive visual storytelling project celebrating the African diaspora in New York City since the seventeenth century. We met up for lunch at Champs, a vegan diner in Williamsburg.
Your new play Tubman reimagines the abolitionist icon as a high-school student in twenty-first century Harlem. How did you get the idea?
I’d been a one-woman-show performer since college. I had started to study Anna Deavere Smith, Sarah Jones, Staceyann Chin, Whoopi Goldberg—a lot of these solo performers inspired me. I grew up in Kentucky, and I wrote a show with seven songs and monologues about famous Kentuckians. I basically wrote Brown Girl Blue Grass to make Black Kentuckians visible. That was very personal and very autobiographical, and I was very passionate about it. It was an homage to my father (who passed away in 2010) and my family. So, I was coming off of that.
In 2016—with the election campaigns and all the police brutality—I saw a Facebook post that read, “In times like these, what would Harriet Tubman do?” And I was like, yeah, what would she say? How would she feel right now? My genre of one-woman-show-ing is taking historical voices and putting a narrative to them, taking the research and creating a story from it, connecting the dots. The stuff that wasn’t said. Making a bridge. I taught history at the time—juniors and seniors. What would they listen to? The songs came next, because I’m a singer and a songwriter first. Then it came to me that Harriet is a girl in the classroom who’s overlooked—or maybe she’s too looked at, to the point where everything she does is under a microscope because she’s a Black girl in school. What if I missed a lot of the Harriets in my classroom because they were “unruly”—an arbitrary category put on Black girls? I’m coming from a Black woman’s body too. How I was raised was “adults speak, and children listen.” You don’t have a voice until you reach eighteen. My mom was an awesome role model, so not any shade on her, but just the society that we lived in during the ’80s and ’90s. When I became a teacher, I didn’t want to shut my students down in the same way that I was shut down. How can I deliver the story without indicting anybody but the adults who are part of the system? I didn’t want to indict the child; I wanted to indict the adults who don’t reflect on the behavior that we provoke in students. I think we do a lot of provoking.
Then I started reading Monique W. Morris and Kimberlé Crenshaw, two major voices on the criminalization of Black girls in schools.XI They did a study about girls who were kicked out because they were playing with their braids in class. I read about one girl in the news who got her hair cut off by her teacher. A girl fell asleep in class—she had sleep apnea—and she was suspended. These are seen as criminal activities when you’re in a Black girl’s body. So, Harriet Tubman is facing expulsion in 2018 because she’s using her critical thinking.
As a teacher—a good teacher, one who’s considered proficient and greater—you have to consistently self-reflect. You have to ask yourself the hard questions: “Am I biased? Am I coming in with a skewed view of what these students are?”
You started performing Tubman pretty quickly.
It was crazy. I finished performing Brown Girl Blue Grass in September 2016. It was so successful in Kentucky they had me back four times, so they said, “Why don’t you just debut Tubman here? Will you be ready by February?”
[nervous laughter]
I said, “Well, I can be.” I finished writing the show in January and I had to memorize it by February 17, 2017. I got to my Airbnb and studied my script for eight hours a day until the show went up.
Why do you prefer the one-woman show over ensemble acting?
I can control the narrative. I do a lot on YouTube and Instagram to change the narrative, or reframe the narrative, or create a brand-new one, and make sure that we’re all seen in various ways and not just one way. I do a lot of work on that in the beauty and hair world and in the theater world.
I love what you said in your interview with Kim-Julie Hansen about why you want to be photographed—“I want people to see what a vegan looks like. This is what a natural-hair woman looks like, this is what a Black girl from Kentucky looks like.” We think of selfies as self-indulgent, but they can serve a political purpose.
Harriet Tubman was the second-most photographed person in the nineteenth century. (The first was Frederick Douglass.) In daguerreotypes from 1865 on, you had to sit down and pose for fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes. That’s much more deliberate than a ten-second recreation of your surroundings. She always wore white, and there was a certain way she held herself that was very deliberate. Even in the 1800s, they were focusing on their image, and that was relevant to what I was already doing. I was like, “How can I do that for myself outside of the Tubman show?”
She did other things that sounded like me: she walked a lot, and I’ve walked all the way here before. Champs is five miles from my house. I have a dog now, and I walk her everywhere. I named my dog after Tubman—her name is Minty [Harriet Tubman’s nickname]. And she was doing her best work in her late thirties and forties, when she was a spy, a nurse, working for the Union army. That picture of her that was circulating when she was “young”? She was forty-one or forty-two. We’re so obsessed with youth that we tend to think forty-one is “washed up,” but I’m thirty-nine and I’m just beginning my work.
We need more artists like you who are being vocal about their veganism, but in a way that’s like, “This is who I am, and this is what I do.”
And not attacking people. Some people are very hardcore, but I’m not into that. I can be right, or I can be effective. I’m not going to call someone a murderer, especially in communities of color—that’s just not a word we should be using in general when it comes to us. Racism in vegan spaces has been difficult too. I was part of a vegan Facebook group, and, after three police killings in a row, I was feeling so sad and helpless, but when I mentioned it in the group they were like, “This is a group for animals. We have enough groups fighting for human rights.” So, I left. It just didn’t align. We have to be compassionate across the board.
That’s what I’ve dealt with—being a vegan and being active. People focus on the aesthetic as opposed to the ethical choices we’re making. They get caught up on “there’s only white vegans,” or you should only be a certain size. I wasn’t in veganism to lose weight; I was listening to my body, and eventually the ethical work came. Lately most of my work has been in the cruelty-free beauty world.
But it’s so funny, my students always say, “Miss Berry, you are strong. O-M-G, Miss Berry!” I think that’s why I always go back to teaching, because [the students] are literally a boost. They give me so much more life than I ever asked for.
What’s your advice for aspiring artists who are working on their self-esteem?
Berry performing Tubman in 2018.
We’ve all been there, and oftentimes it’s what we’ve allowed ourselves to think for a long time—which might not ever be true, but it feels so real. Tell your thoughts they’re lying to you. Consistently practice. Find somebody you find value in and start sharing your work with them. When I was in high school and college, I went to open mics. I wasn’t good, but I got it off my chest. Having a platform for self-expression, even if it’s just to one person, will help your confidence. I know it’s a cliché, but I’d talk to myself in the mirror, perform in the shower. Put yourself around people who are going to uplift and empower you. Don’t listen to the negative self-talk. Try to find things that stimulate your senses to help you create more work. I say to my students, “You’ve got it already; it’s just tapping into it.” I try to pass this on to my students: agency and advocacy. “I’m worth this, I want this, I deserve this.” I want to make sure my students get that from the time we spend together in class: advocating for yourself.
@berryandco, @airtubman, @berryberrystylish
Lacresha Berry
XI Monique W. Morris wrote Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools (2015), and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is the author of Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Under-Protected (2016).