Q&A with Playwright Donnetta Lavinia Grays

January 28, 2026
by ETC Marketing Staff

Theatre has a unique ability to reflect society, encouraging audiences to view the world from perspectives they may not have considered before. Unlike passive forms of media, theatre invites active engagement. Where We Stand embraces this shared experience, encouraging audiences to participate in the story and reflect on our collective responsibilities to one another. In this Q&A with ETC staff, playwright Donnetta Lavinia Grays discusses the inspirations behind the play and explains why audience participation is essential to its meaning.

What inspired you to create Where We Stand? Were there specific media or historical events that influenced your writing?

The story of this show begins at the Public Theatre’s Mobile Unit. Stephanie Ibarra, who helped run the producing side of the Women’s Project (WP) Lab, saw me performing in the Mobile Unit’s Twelfth Night. These productions travel across all five boroughs, performing free, truncated Shakespeare for communities with limited access due to finances, travel accommodations, or incarceration. The beautiful thing about those productions is that you roll out a carpet in the middle of the room, and you, the actor, are engaging with the audience. After watching me work, Stephanie said, “Let’s commission you to write something for the Mobile Unit.”

What I wanted to do with this piece was center those communities onstage through heightened language, which is why it’s written in verse and includes a musical element. During this time, I was living in Bed-Stuy, and I saw the community change—how people who had lived in that neighborhood for years either decided to sell their homes or were pushed out. I kept asking: What does neighborhood improvement look like? At what cost? And who are we pushing out?

I’m always interested in putting myself on trial in my work. It’s not about finger-pointing. It really is about asking these questions: Who are we? What are we doing? Who are we to each other? What is my responsibility to these folks who’ve been cast out? You can never stop asking those questions. It’s a solo piece, so it’s going to be kind of poetic. My intention was to cast people in the audience in real time, so you’re already a part of the story.

Why did you choose the solo format as opposed to an ensemble cast?

Number one, I had this actor I thought could do anything.

Are we talking about you?

No, no. When I did it, it was a real struggle to get myself on stage. It wasn’t a vanity piece, but I had to take it out of my hands to see if it worked.

I’m interested in this idea of a central storyteller that gathers us and gets down to the basics of storytelling. There’s a fire we gather around, and we have to tell what happened today. It’s an oral tradition of playwriting, passing down history, especially in Southern culture, where I come from. I’m often moved to write language with the sound of the way that I grew up hearing it. It’s very much about how text and songs blend and continue pushing the story forward, a sort of experiment of virtuosity.

Also, I know that actors love language, and I miss big, heavy, juicy monologues. There are a lot of lines with subtext that I’m seeing now, but I love a nice, juicy piece of meat that I can just gnaw into. I know that if I enjoy it while I’m developing the play, actors will enjoy it, and the joy in performing is part of the gift of storytelling.

(Above photo: Donnetta Lavinia Grays performing in the WP production of Where We Stand.)

At the end of the play, the audience votes: exile or forgiveness? Why was it important for you to make that decision participatory?

It feels to me like we’re building up to that moment. It’s a shared space—an egalitarian sort of space. The audience is cast, and they go on this journey . . . and now they have a responsibility. A vote felt like the only natural place to go for me. It’s like: We’ve done this thing; you don’t get to just go out into the world now. You have some skin in the game. Oftentimes, when we go to the theater, we feel like we’ve done the work just by going. Well, what if you had to put yourself on the line a little bit? What if the audience is just as vulnerable as the performer?

And that’s what makes each performance different every night, both as a performer and audience member.

I think part of that is because you have the person sitting beside you, whom you either have to show up for, impress, maybe have some guilt toward, or you have self-righteousness, and you want to. What I want to do is sort of casually expose us just a little bit. People bring what they’re going through into the space, and the MAN represents whatever this moment means to them.

Since you’ve played the MAN, what has surprised you most about audience reactions?

When we were developing this—although I didn’t play it in this instance—I remember the audience. Everybody was like, “No, we want to keep him in town,” and there was one woman who was like, “I don’t know him!” When I was playing it, it felt dangerous that the conversation was happening on my body. But that was what it required in order to get some sort of honest answer. It was a deeply vulnerable experience.

At its core, what are you hoping people take away from seeing this piece?

My greatest wish is that people continue the conversation outside of the theater. This was one of the last pieces people saw before [the COVID-19] shutdowns, such a strange time in history. This play was built around community, as the beginnings of isolation started. It felt really surreal.

At WP, we had an audience of formerly incarcerated folks come to the show, and they had very different perspectives on what the man’s condition was. They voted in surprising, split ways.

Then at Baltimore Center Stage, community workers, politicians, and people who did work on the ground came to us saying this is what the play brought up for them—how it’s reflected in this community.

“It reminds me of this street.”
“It reminds me of this project that never got done.”
“This project that completely eliminated this community without regard.”

Don’t let this be the start of a conversation and not the end—or the answer. That’s for your community to arrive at.

Where We Stand runs January 31 through February 22, 2026.