Faith Evans as Selah

Faith Evans, a mass communications major, plays Selah. Evans found her approach to this role through an intense examination of the play's structure and imagery as well as some creative techniques to help her think and move like the character.

Examining the Script

Evans' study of the script included an analysis of the beats of different scenes. She noted that Selah "does not have the beginning or end of any beats." So she focused on breaking open each speech individually to understand every image clearly. She explains, "You have to make a choice in your own mind as to why your character picked this word at this time to make it make sense." Some of her images, such as the purple flowers the women use to cleanse Simone's house, are quite unusual and help to convey a unique spiritual moment in the play. But the character also uses some phrases multiple times. Evans notes that "Mercy on the child" means a variety of things depending upon the context in which the character says it.

Evans views the themes of the play as "sad and rather morose." But she sees the action as having many threads since "everybody's going on a type of journey. This young lady lost her husband. He is having problems trying to let his spirit be free. He's come back and lost his arm and he's detached from parts of him that he's used to having ­ his arm, his dick. This young lady's losing her mind or at least finding a new aspect of her mind. Another young person is going on this self-journey trying to understand her own gifts and capabilities.

On Sudden Shifts

Evans finds the playwright's style rather unique. She says, "there's a certain rhythm that's established and then every once in a while she'll just break it. It challenges you to understand the true nature of how people are. People turn on a dime all the time and do things that are completely unexpected. So it's keeping with the truth of human nature. Although she finds this writing style very life-like, Evans admits that it presents a challenge for the actor. During the playwright's first visit, the actor inquired about what she saw as contradictions in Selah. Evans noted that the character reports she could not read or write when she was a young women but "then later on she just drops out of the sky with all of this poetic and intense language." Svich explained that many real human beings have such contradictions. So Evans "made it like a challenge to broaden the scope of her because for an audience it can get boring if it's all one dimensional. You have to stretch and turn on a dime and show the audience something different about the character and show the audience something different about her relationship to another character."

On Playing Selah

Evans describes Selah as "a seer of spirits and the oldest member of the community. She's very in tune with the whole spirit world as well as in tune the young ladies that she surrounded by and the things that are going on in their lives" These qualities of the character guided her approach to performing Selah. She explains, "In order to play somebody who is more attuned. You have to be more attuned to the detail and the nuance of things going on around you." For Evans this often takes a very literal form, as "sometimes when I'm on stage and we have dust particles that float by and I focus on that and I'm like that's a spirit floating by and I attach my own meaning to regular stuff that's going on in the house or to the right or left of me. That's the way to do it. Know everything's significance and how it fits into your whole world structure."

Another thing that helped the actor "get into Selah-mode" was the work she did to create the physical performance of her character. Using her maternal grandmother as a template, Evans found a horizontal movement with her hips that made sense for the character. She also worked to ground her breathing quite low in the "swamp" of her body.