Mojo and The Sayso at Oakland Theater Project

Oakland Theater Project 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. Based on the 1973 killing of a 10-year-old boy by the 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 unfoldalong with new truths and the possibility of healingin a play full of what the playwright herself termed absurdity, intimacy and magic mayhem.