By SHARON EBERSON
a.k. payne sets the stage for their new play with a voiceover about the 2019 study that revealed Black women in Pittsburgh experience poverty at rates higher than in 85% of similar U.S. cities. Then they list strong Black women of Pittsburgh who have been inspirations, including Daisy Wilson, mother of August Wilson, both of whom walked the ground on which BURNBABYBURN! The American Dream now stands.
This time of year, we have come to expect a Wilsonian work at the landmark August Wilson House. In 2026, however, that slot has been filled by the world premiere of the new payne play, a co-production with Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company and a worthy fit to grace the landmark’s backyard performance space.
BURNBABYBURN! stands not in Wilson’s shadow, but as a flowering branch of his masterworks, rooted in lyrical, authentic language, local lore, and a repudiation of an American dream that has too often failed Black America.
Playwright payne focuses her artistry on generations of women whose passion for life keeps them going, despite deep-seeded prejudice and poverty that try to box them into a corner of their smoky city. This story is personal for the award-winning writer, who, like a present-day character in the work, yearns for connections to ancestors she has known only through photographs.
Kat Bruce, the luminous star of Once on This Island for Alumni Theater Company, represents that yearning as she reaches into the past to find the grandmother she has never met, but with whom she shares the name Sky. In the play’s journey through time, she confronts the original Sky, Hope Anthony, who radiates strength and dignity, joy and rage, in a lifetime of striving. Anthony, rarely absent from the circular stage, is a commanding presence, through the decades of Sky’s life.
Her transformations are breathtaking and often heartbreaking as Sky perseveres through a torrent of life’s limitations: Her larger-than-life mother, Myrna (Aisha Jordan Gunter), once escaped Pittsburgh for New York, but eventually returned to the violent man who physically abuses her. Myrna berates Sky, a 15-year-old mother who is set to follow the boy’s father, doomed dreamer Will (Anthony Grace), to start a new life in California — where it’s always sunny, and one can happily, “Burn baby, burn!”
To go west, Sky must leave her other love, Char (Destiny Nwafor, the epitome of strength and grace). Sky is the lifelong apex in a love triangle with Will and Char.
A telling scene of the time is when Sky returns to Pittsburgh from California, and goes to work in a factory, where Char is her boss, to a point. The Black women are forced to wear unflattering uniforms, allowed only leftovers from the lunchroom, and are paid less than their white counterparts.
As a queer Black woman herself, when Bruce’s Sky learns of her grandmother’s love for Char, she is all the more eager to get to know the woman she never met.
During a drive through Pittsburgh neighborhoods, the younger Sky’s father, Joyner (DeVaughn Robinson), wants to know why she is always asking about the past.
“I like to attach memories to things, so I know where I am,” she replies.
We get to dwell on that father-daughter moment, as Joyner starts to point out places from his life. For the young Sky, who is getting to know her grandmother through photographs, he is provideing more pieces of the puzzle about a past she is desperate to know, and which she believes will help her find her place in the present, and launch her to the future.
As the play moves through time, wardrobes and hairstyles change accordingly. A favorite moment is when Myrna releases Sky’s straight hair into a natural afro, symbolically unleashing her daughter’s untapped inner power.
Directed by Karla C. Payne, the cast is uniformly terrific. Grace comes to Pittsburgh as a Cleveland-born, Harlem-based actor who has worked with Terence Spivey, the director of Fences for Pittsburgh Playwrights last year. Grace is a dynamo, making the most of every entry and exit on the spider-like stage’s ramps. He is constantly wooing Anthony’s Sky, until his get-rich-quick schemes run out of steam in the California sun.
Robinson, a founder of Alumni Theater and frequently seen on Pittsburgh stages, ages believably from childhood to fatherhood, when there is always a flask in his hand.
Ambition, frustration, and alcoholism flow through generations, from Myrna to Sky to Joyner. Does sharing a name and knowing the past mean that the Sky of the present is destined to suffer or soar as her ancestors did?
The director’s notes offer that the journey of BURNBABYBURN! “is guided by the spirit of Sankofa, a word and philosophy that teaches us to go back and retrieve what has been left behind, and to carry forward the wisdom, truth, and strength that belong to us. To understand where we are going, we must first understand where we have been.”
Directed and executed with clarity and heart, written with the passion of experience, BURNBABYBURN! lets us know that just asking the questions puts Sky on a course to keep learning, keep growing and keep going, like those who came before her.
NOTE: On the outdoor in-the-round set, with showtime at 8 p.m., lighting the darkness in a relatively small space means audience members may be facing very bright stage lights (I wore my sunglasses throughout). The perimeter of the stage features stands with photographs representing key years during Sky’s lifetime, such as 1963, the year of Martin Luther King’s assassination. From your seat, you may be able to see only one or two of these as the play journeys through time, so I suggest making the rounds beforehand or during intermission (the play is about 2 ½ hours, with intermission). As always, if you are prone to attracting insects, bring bug spray.
TICKETS AND DETAILS
The world premiere of BURNBABYBURN! an 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/.
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