I must apologize for being a little MIA. It wasn’t due to a bad break-up or being confined to a body cast or anything. Simply put, I was in the process of putting up the L.A. premiere of my first play, And Her Hair Went With Her, which opened on Friday at The Fountain Theater in Hollywood.

Today happens to be Mother's Day and, although I am not yet a mother, I can kind of relate to the feeling of creating something and giving birth to it. Writing a play, handing it off to a director and actors to bring it to life and watching your work unfold before your eyes is, in a way, similar to the mothering process.

There is pain involved… having a director who doesn’t seem to have the same vision as how you wrote it can cause complications. The director’s job is to read the play and bring the words on the page to life. This includes working with a team of designers — lighting, costume and sound, and leading them towards the right direction.

But what happens when these elements don’t seem to line up easily? We’ve all seen that stereotype of the frustrated writer pulling out tufts of hair — glasses on the tip of their nose, fuming about how nobody gets their vision. For me, it was more like twisting my hair into little knots and eating fast food and drinking way too much coffee.

I guess I need to start from the beginning to help explain better.

I started writing this play back in 2003, after I had come to L.A. for a brief stint as an actor. My agent at the time was begging me to “do something with my hair.” It was too Afro-centric.

“Can’t you make it so it goes downward instead of puffy and out? You know, like it rests on your shoulders — that’s what people really want to see — that’s what’s beautiful.”

After many close calls, a refusal to put a relaxer into my poofy kinky hairstyle and being fed up with the kind of roles I was reading for — the brokedown crack-addicted mother, ghetto girl and shallow best friend of the blue-eyed lead actress who never had any real character story — I became depressed and went home to Ohio to detox.

This is when I gave birth to And Her Hair Went With Her, a comedic play that deals with black women and standards of beauty.

This two-character play takes place in a hair salon, and the two actresses play not only the stylists, but the quirky clientèle that visit the shop.


The music of Nina Simone and the thread of the lead stylist Angie’s journey to follow her dreams and become a writer serve as the throughline. Angie also forms a friendship with a lesbian woman she is interviewing in prison for a book she is writing.

Tracie Thoms, (from RENT, Grindhouse and television’s Cold Case) and Tonya Pinkins (Tony Award winner and All My Children) star in the L.A. run of the show.

I was really passionate about trying to find a black female director for the show — and discovered that not only are there very few of them but, because there are so few of them, they are all busy working on a show.

I ended up choosing a female director who was not black. I assumed, because she was a woman and of color, she would be able to relate. As it turns out, this is not an assumption I should have made.

After a rather grueling four-week process with actors stepping forward to help with direction, a team of confused designers and a deadline looming, it somehow came together and was performed in front of a full house last Friday to thunderous applause and gregarious laughter.

For me, this was a process of learning how to let go. This brings me back to my original analogy of comparing the process to motherhood — writing it was the birth, rehearsals were the tougher toddler years that take tremendous patience and, in the end, as with a teenager, you argue a lot, but at some point you have to let go.

As writers, we get so sensitive and protective about our work which is understandable. But unless we are satisfied with it simply staying on the page in black and white, we must be able to entrust it into the hands of others to bring it to life — even if it’s not exactly the way we pictured it in our heads. Sometimes a director is going to hit the nail on the head and sometimes they will simply hit their thumb. Either way, it is the writer's job to step aside and give the actors, director and designers room for their creative expression and interpretation.

Tracie and Tonya shine in the show — a must-see comedy about identity, friendship and finding one’s true passion. It plays through June 15 at The Fountain Theater in Hollywood. Tix are $25. Come check it out and support if you are in L.A. and let me know what you think if you come through. You can also check out the website at www.andherhair.com.