At the party after the opening of Chinaka Hodge’s play Mirrors in Every Corner at Intersection for the Arts, Dwight Huntsman, one of the stars, said he enjoyed playing a character, who, like him, is from Oakland. 

“A lot of other plays I’ve done, I had to do a lot of research,” he said. “Here my research was just driving home.”

Indeed, as Hodge weaves her tale, the playwright covers a lot of familiar recent history – Hurricane Katrina, Sept. 11, the war in Iraq (one character joins up), and the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, but the play is rooted in family life, right here in the Town.

Mirrors is Hodge’s first independent production and tells the story of an African American family in Oakland, spanning the years from 1988 to the present. The play is about identity and starts from the premise" What if one of the children in an African-American family was born white?"

Hodge, 25, said the idea for having a white member of a black family came from several different sources. 

“With one friend, I have these conversations on interracial dating and the importance of preserving the black family and it feels like a conversation that never gets to an end, so I thought how can I make it more productive?” Hodge said. “Then I have a friend who was in an interracial relationship and she had a line in a poem about being scared to have a child that doesn’t look anything like her.”

Hodge says each character in the play is in some way an extension of her and how they explore what race and family mean come out of her experiences, such as being called a white girl because of the way she spoke or being the only black female in her AP classes at Berkeley High School.  Expressing all those different thoughts is one of the reasons Hodge, who has won all sorts of accolades for her performance poetry, including Best Poet of 2008 from the East Bay Express, moved into writing plays.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph, the director of Mirrors in Every Corner, has known Hodge for years through Youth Speaks, a literary arts organization where he is the artistic director. He says the two have an easy shorthand working together. Joseph calls Hodge a fearless writer, and he doesn’t mean just her taking on race.

“When I really see her reaching for and achieving edge is the way she talks about Oakland and family – we just don’t have too many non-reductive pieces about the town,” he said. “A lot of pieces about Oakland kind of pit us vs. them. With this there are just all these ways in.”

Hodge, who split her time growing up with her dad in West Oakland and her mother in the Oakland Hills, and now lives near Jack London Square, said she was thrilled to set her play in Oakland.

“I think that I’m much more an Oakland nationalist than anything else,” she said. “That’s what one professor called me and it stuck.  I love writing about where I’m from and the changing landscape of West Oakland, and what it means if you stay in one place but everything around you changes.”

In many of their conversations in the play, the family sits around the table, playing bid whist. Hodges says this also comes out of her experience.

“Whist for my family and a lot of the families I know allows for very candid and playfully argumentative conversation,” she said. “It’s a way to talk about serious issues and I wanted to give the family a kind of fixed location in the house. The bid stays the same all evening and I was just playing with the idea of time. The hands of cards come and go but there’s a timeless quality.”

The play is very much a collaboration of local artists. A high school friend of Hodge’s, Ambrose Akinmusire, composed a jazz trumpet score for the play, and there are DJ mixes from local DJ Treat U Nice.  Evan Bissell’s set doubles as an art installation about family and neighborhood that attendees can view before the show.

Actor Dwight Huntsman said that having so many different art forms to work with adds to the portrait of the family.  “It really sets the scene,” he said. “It’s like having another character in the play.”

Like his character, Row, Huntsman was a kid watching the San Francisco Giants play the Oakland A’s in the World Series on TV as the quake happened. “We lived in the projects over on 66th Avenue,” he said. “We could feel the shaking, but at the time we didn’t really know how traumatic it was. Then we started getting phone calls and found out about the Cypress being down.”

In the play, Row has a twin sister Ninth (Traci Tolmaire), and a brother Watts (“Yes, like the riots,”) played by Daveed Diggs. Margo Hall enacts the roles of both the mother, Willie, and her daughter, Miranda, called Random, who is born white (“As rice or flour or other things that also come in brown that you don't worry about.”)

Hodge says one of the ways she tried to invite people into the play was by staying away from making proclamations. 

“In the play, Willie asks Watts, ‘What would you do if you were me?’” she said.  “That seems much better than saying, ‘This is what you should do.’ It’s much easier to move forward from a question than a statement.”

Hodge is really asking Willie’s question of the audience as well. Her play brings up questions about race, family and neighborhood that she hopes people will talk about after they leave the theater.


Mirrors in Every Corner plays at Intersection for the Arts through March 21.