Oakland Theater Project Presents Bay Area Premiere of Aishah Rahman's THE MOJO AND THE SAYSO

Up next in its 2022 season, Oakland Theater Project (OTP) presents the first-ever Bay Area production of the 1989 play The Mojo and the Sayso by Aishah Rahman, a writer, professor and active participant in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Directed by Ayodele Nzinga, the production will run June 3-26 at OTP's theater at FLAX art & design (1501 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Oakland CA 94612).

Based on the 1973 killing of a 10-year-old boy by New York City Police, The Mojo and the Sayso mixes comedy, drama and fantasy in its exploration of devastating loss. The play centers on the Benjamin family, three years after the death of their 10-year-old son Linus at the hands of an off-duty police officer. Father Acts finds escape in repairing and restoring automobiles. Mother Awilda has leaned into her faith and her pastor for solace. Their son Walter, renaming himself Blood, looks to action and violence. As the family revisits their loss, layers of grief unfold-along with new truths and the possibility of healing-in a play full of what the playwright herself termed "absurdity, intimacy and magic mayhem."

A prolific playwright who described her writing style as reflective of a "jazz aesthetic," Rahman was ahead of her time in experimenting with form, mixing magical realism with sharp-edged comedy in a context that copes with unfathomable tragedy in order to reveal the profoundly human cost of racial injustice.

Rahman's work was a forebear to Marcus Gardley, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Lynn Nottage, Jackie Sibblies Drury, and others that are celebrated today. Her work carries a grounded sensibility of her time congruent with the work of Lorraine Hansberry, but it also risks reflecting back a mystery of the human existence that complicates her form - one that resonates with our shared reality today.

OTP is delighted to welcome Ayodele Nzinga, the founding producing director of the Lower Bottom Playaz, Inc. (Oakland's oldest North American African Theater Company) to direct The Mojo and the Sayso. The cast includes Dane Troy, Paige Mayes, Reginald Wilkins, and Stanley Hunt.

"The Mojo and the Sayso is an extraordinary play written in the tradition of magical realism that tackles the overwhelming mystery of grief," said OTP Co-Artistic Director Michael Socrates Moran. "Written decades ago, the play acts as both prophecy and as a timeless chronicle for how we cope with unfathomable loss at the hands of naked injustice. Not adequately recognized during Rahman's lifetime, The Mojo and the Sayso is an exceptionally moving work that interrogates the absurdity, strangeness and humor of coping, and offers redemption in ways that only theater can-by inspiring our imagination toward what is at once magical and all too real. This is a jewel of a play within the American theater that should be produced all over the country, and we are exceedingly grateful to have the opportunity to produce it at the Oakland Theater Project. And we are thrilled to have this extraordinary cast and creative team, and the brilliant insight and directorial prowess of Ayodele Nzinga at the helm."

The Mojo and the Sayso is the third of six productions in Oakland Theater Project's 10th Anniversary 2022 Season, "The Eye of the Storm: Meaning vs. Power," an exploration of hope, meaning, and transformation.

Oakland Theater Project is continuing its investment on accessibility and safety and is offering every production with a livestream and video on demand option. Audiences can watch the livestream performance on Saturday, June 18 at 7:30 p.m. or on demand from June 19 to July 10.

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