Karla Payne Directs Premiere Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre-August Wilson House coproduction
By SHARON EBERSON
If you don’t know the names payne and Payne, you haven’t been paying attention.
Unrelated by blood but entwined as theater artists with vast local connections, award-winning playwright a.k. payne and director Karla C. Payne are collaborating on a play with deep roots and insights into the Black experience in Pittsburgh. A descriptor of the play that opens on August 29 reads: “Four generations of women draw nearer to one another as they confront the truths of motherhood, love, loss, and a city that both holds and haunts their dreams.”
Set in the Hill District and Homewood, the premiere of BURNBABYBURN! the american dream is a co-production of Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company and the August Wilson House. The play features a scene where the protagonist, Sky (Hope Anthony) leafs through a photo album, “and asks questions of her grandmother across time,” notes payne, whose own family photos have offered insights and mysteries to solve as they journey through the past.
Along with the production of BURNBABYBURN!, payne’s projects include working with Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh, where “part of that practice is bringing Black artists together to look at their family photographs and tell stories inspired by them,” they said. “And so that circular model to me is feels very evocative of the work that I’ve been doing.”
“This is a multi-generational story … because it’s really Sky 2 (Kat Bruce), trying to go back and get the things that she doesn’t know about her family. She doesn’t know this grandmother. So it’s, ‘How do I go through letters and her old photos and photo albums, and go back and get the knowledge of her. And through that process, she actually meets her grandmother.”
The generational work is reflected in beyond the names in the program. Karla Payne and a.k. payne’s mother attended the same music program at Duquesne University, and the playwright notes that Bruce was seen recently as the lead in the production of Once on This Island by Alumni Theatre Company, one of the Pittsburgh theater programs that nurtured payne.
Rehearsals at the former Madison Elementary School — reclaimed by Mark Clayton Southers as Madison Arts Center and home of Pittsburgh Playwrights — have brought to mind payne’s grandmother, who attended the school.
Having her play about a family’s deep ties to Pittsburgh debut at the August Wilson House comes with its own profound significance.
“I grew up here; the city means a lot to me. My people have been here since the early 1900s,” payne said. “Honestly, Gem of the Ocean is my favorite Wilson play, and my people moved up here at the same time as Citizen Barlow, that early 1900s era. And so that whole [American Century] Cycle meant so much to me growing up here. I read all his plays when I was in ninth grade, on my own, just because I was so inspired by characters that sounded like my father and the lineages of the Black men in my family. I think that it’s been really, really meaningful to be able to bring this play back here.
“When it was up at Yale,” they continued, “it was cool to do it there, too. But I think the land itself, being able to rehearse at Madison, which is where my grandmother went to elementary school, being able to do it in the backyard, it’s really special.”
August Wilson had an affinity for poetry and the language of his plays has been described as lyrical. The same label has been attributed to a.k. payne’s scripts, as in the case of Furlough’s Paradise, winner of the prestigious 2025 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.
“Some of BURNBABYBURN! is actually written in stanzas, so it really leans towards the poetic. But at the same time, which is very fascinating, it really reads just like dialogue,” Karla Payne said.
The play was first heard in Pittsburgh, with Anthony as Sky, as part of the 2019 Momentum Festival at City Theatre, where payne is currently an Artist in Residence, and where payne was twice a Young Playwrights Festival winner.
Asked about their local mentors, payne began a long list, but still feared they were leaving many out. They noted that one of their first playwriting teachers was Kathleen Donnelly at Pittsburgh CAPA, “and then along the way, I got really inspired by Kim El and Mark Clayton Southers … Monteze Freeland was in my first play at City, so he really inspired me, too. Deesha Philyaw, she was based here for a while and lives elsewhere now, but taught the August Wilson class when I was in high school that I loved and just really developed my first full-length play in that space. … There’s so many, more than I can name.”
They add that Dr. Barbara Rudiak, the president of the City Theatre Board of Directors, “has been a long time supporter and person that I just deeply admire. She was my principal in elementary school, and just really supported me back then.”
Freeland, the actor, playwright, educator and administrator who currently is Artistic Director of Alumni Theater, programmed the current Pittsburgh Playwrights season. He performed in payne’s first produced play, as part of the Young Playwrights Festival. “Even then, I knew what the rest of the country would soon discover: a.k.’s pen holds diamonds,” Freeland wrote on the PPTC website.
He reached out to young playwrights such as payne and Ty Greenwood (Paradox of Education) when putting together the current season, and matched the payne/Payne team.
“I was asked about the proposition of directing a piece by a.k., and I was like, ‘Oh my God, absolutely, I would love to.’ Sight unseen. I hadn’t read it. And then, when I did read it, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m the perfect person for this, if I do say so myself,” said the veteran Pittsburgh actress. Payne was recently seen onstage in barebones productions’ Infinite Life, a who’s who of prominent Pittsburgh actresses.
For BURNBABYBURN!, “I have the most amazing ensemble cast, and the catalyst is Hope Anthony, who is the embodiment of a.k.’s actual grandmother, and she almost never leaves the stage. It’s like this whirlwind of activity that happens around her,” the director said. “And we round off the cast with, Kat Bruce, who plays Sky II, who is actually the embodiment of a.k. herself.”
With Kat Bruce, cast members include Anthony Grace as Will, Destiny Nwafor as Char, DeVaughn Robinson as Joyner, and Aisha Jordan Gunter as Myrna (with Willa Catherine “Katy” Cotten as Myrna on September 5).
Coming off the success of Furlough’s Paradise, about two estranged cousins who reunite in their hometown for a family funeral, BURNBABYBURN! would seem to build on a foundation of generational family ties.
“I think my body of work is all informed by one another,” payne said. “Each piece kind of builds upon the next, and is connected in some way. And I think I learn more about myself and my practice from each play. This one was kind of a really established part of what I’m curious about in terms of time, and time bending stories, and breaking how we understand linearity, and thinking about how characters reach across time for one another.”
Furlough’s Paradise featured two characters in a one room over three days, denoting “an illusion of realism, but suspending that in really key moments. … Whereas this one, I think we’re very much enmeshed in this choreopoem-esque flow of surrealist time.”
for the premiere of BURNBABYBURYN! at the August Wilson House.
(Image: Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company)
A change immediately noticeable to anyone who has been to a performance in the August Wilson House backyard is that the BURNBABYBURN! will be presented in the round. It took a while to configure the seating, the entrances and exits, even the terminology (there is no upstage or downstage, Payne explained), “So when we all got past the learning curve, we just took off running,” the director said.
“When Miss Karla told me that, I was so, so excited about the premise of it,” the playwright said. “I’m always interested in how we can turn the gaze inward and think about how we are seeing one another through theater. And I think that this play is really an invitation to do that.”
TICKETS AND DETAILS
The world premiere of BURNBABYBURN! the american dream, a coproduction of Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company and the August Wilson House, is outdoors at the August Wilson House, 1727 Bedford Ave., Pittsburgh’s Hill District, August 25-September 13, 2026. There will be a 2 p.m. matinee on Saturday, September 12, indoors at Madison Arts Center. Tickets: https://www.pghplaywrights.org/season-info/burn/burn-tickets/.
Categories: Arts and Ideas, Our Posts, Show Previews
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