Zora on My Mind began as an experiment with devising. Writer/Director Anita Gonzalez met Diana Lawrence at a musical theatre event in Chicago around 2018. Anita invited Diana to become part of an ensemble that included singers, composers, actors and dancers who met several times over a three-year period (2019 to 2021). Our goal was to explore how a collective of artists might create a musical that built on the language (literary and physical) of the African American writer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston. Our early experiments coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic. We called ourselves Covid Black and collectively developed songs and movement scores in support of a loose story line about a woman named Key and an interloper in her life named Malik.
“Key” was to be the Black woman that Zora would want to see.
Later we added the device of two writers working tell the story of Key from two different perspectives. The book and songs were created simultaneously through a series of developmental workshops with the cast and with the devising team. The musical was a semi-finalist for the 2021 O’Neill Music Theater Conference.
In January 2022 we began assigning team roles with Anita as the book writer, Diana as the composer and Alexandria Davis as the choreographer. We worked with dramaturg Jordan Ealey and director Kym Moore to refine the script and characters so that we would be able to have a full workshop at Georgetown University in June 2022. In the workshop, we were able to develop a 60-minute draft of the production and to determine that the intention of the project is to create a suitcase show that can tour and elicit conversations about Black womanhood, mental health, and identity. There are currently 15 songs in the show and 65 pages of text.