A Voice Heard

Student playwright Malaina Moore uses the stage to spark dialogue on racial inequities she’s experienced firsthand

By Lora Strum

Malaina Moore is recounting the heartache and hilarity that inspired her to write White Privilege — her artistic take on inequities big and small from the perspective of young people navigating racism in post-9/11 America — when she becomes suddenly subdued.

“I get scared sometimes,” she admits. “I have three brothers, and writing this play was my way of protecting them.”

Using the arts to educate the world on the injustices threatening those she loves is what Moore, a senior in the Diederich College of Communication, aspires to at Marquette. White Privilege, a play exploring the societal advantages often experienced by white people, hit the community with the subtlety of a load of dynamite.

“It blew up right away,” remembers Debra Krajec, the show’s director and associate professor of digital media and performing arts. “At the end of that first performance people were standing and cheering. Students of color … were crying. Everyone was overcome.”

Premiered early in the main-stage season, White Privilege wasn’t expected to draw a crowd, let alone sell out all three of its performances. “Nobody does that,” insists Stephen Hudson-Mairet, chair and associate professor of digital media and performing arts.

Because it is a student-written piece, Hudson-Mairet was unsure how people would react to White Privilege. He laughs about that now that the play has received many accolades. Now that it was selected to perform at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (Region III) in January 2019 and also won a national Citizen Artist Award for its social justice impact from KCACTF. Now that it has garnered Moore a Difference Maker Award from Marquette President Michael R. Lovell and positioned the young playwright as a rising star.

But hidden in the play’s success is Moore’s own struggle with identity.

Moore spent her childhood in racial silos. First attending school on the “white side” of Milwaukee before enrolling at Rufus King International High School, where, though the student body was diverse, Moore still saw herself as a racial “other.” “I was always looked at as this perfect black person … who had to have all the answers,” she recalls.

Moore’s first months at Marquette were no less difficult. Immersed in a predominantly white culture, Moore struggled to make friends as she pursued a degree in theatre arts. She became depressed and considered transferring to a historically black college.

But from that sense of ostracization, Moore examined the disconnect she felt among her white peers and, through conversation with other black students, found they too saw a major, and historic, chasm between the black and white communities at Marquette and in Milwaukee.

That gap was evident in Moore’s Acting III class where five white and two black actors couldn’t find a play to perform together. “All the plays were written for a white cast,” Moore says. “I could play the mamie or the mermaid — whatever supernatural creature has no color — but there wasn’t a play for all of us.”

So, she wrote one.

White Privilege is a mélange of Moore’s observations — of a girl she knew in high school, from a seminar on gentrification in Milwaukee — and thoughts on Kim Kardashian and cultural appropriation; President Donald Trump; Marquette; inside jokes; casual conversations.

To synthesize these ideas into a cohesive work, Hudson-Mairet tapped Krajec — a 35-year veteran of Marquette’s Theatre Arts program — to direct. Her response: “I’m an old white lady. Am I really the right person for this?”

But Krajec, like many who touched White Privilege, found power in listening and confronting ignorance. Hudson-Mairet supported the further development of the play through Marquette’s Phylis Ravel Theatre and Social Justice Fund, a special endowment for initiatives with social justice themes. The endowment connected Moore with Marti Gobel and Marcella Kearns, two Milwaukee theatre professionals, who led play reading and writing workshops with professional actors who guided Moore and added another layer to the play’s take on race.

Gobel and Kearns helped Moore refine her work until it became the comical and gut-wrenching piece the actors performed. Rene Leech, Comm ’19, portrayed one of the play’s most vitriolic racists, and when questioned at talkbacks — discussions between cast and audience — about including such a hateful portrayal of the white race, Leech stood by her polemic character.

“If she wasn’t an extremist, if we toned her down, this show wouldn’t ring true,” Leech insists.

“But White Privilege was … for people who were ready to see something thought-provoking and, sometimes, uncomfortable.”

Not everyone in the community was ready. Before White Privilege opened, the Theatre Arts program and Moore received hate mail. As a safety precaution, a Marquette plainclothes police officer attended every performance, but otherwise Hudson-Mairet declined to respond directly to the letters. “The play stands and speaks for itself,” he declares.

Moore embraced the fury her play ignited in certain circles. “You learn in anger,” Moore explains. “Anger shows you’re listening.”

For Brielle Richmond, the only black actor aside from Moore in the original Acting III class, exploring anger while performing White Privilege was critical to her self-expression. “This play became a way for others to hear me without an argument,” says Richmond, Comm ’19. “It was a play, but it was also our voice.”

That voice spurred immediate change in the community — Judge Carl Ashley commissioned a performance of White Privilege as the keynote for the Race, Equity and Procedural Justice Committee’s annual conference that addresses implicit bias in local law enforcement, and a white woman cut off her dreadlocks after seeing Richmond’s character explain how the hairstyle appropriated black culture.

At Marquette, the play has encouraged students of color to point out white privilege on campus — such as the dearth of plays with strong black leads — and spurred Hudson-Mairet to continue working toward making his department more inclusive. He hopes Moore publishes White Privilege so the rest of the world might also make this change.

But for Moore, the themes in White Privilege are emotionally taxing, and she lingers on the thought of writing just “a regular play.” With that, she pauses again, reminded of her brothers. One of them spent time in jail. In spite of herself, she doesn’t think she could make art that ignores that reality.

“I feel compelled to give black people a voice because I know I have such a strong one,” she says. “For me, theatre is not just an outlet … but a way to talk about real issues.”

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