When Zindzi Okenyo takes the Sydney Theatre Company (STC) stage in June for John Patrick Shanley's Tony award-winning play Doubt – the role played by Viola Davis in the film – it will be a particularly special moment: her fourth main-stage role playing a black woman in a 20-year theatre career. 'I'm really excited about it, I haven't had a black role for so long,' she says.
For the last five years, Okenyo has been working behind the scenes to create more opportunities and safer spaces for black performers, not as an actor but as a director. When we meet in mid-January, she's in rehearsals for her production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' Pulitzer and Tony award-winning dysfunctional family dramedy Purpose, opening at STC next week – with an entirely black cast.
It's a career milestone for Okenyo, but bittersweet. Born in Adelaide to a white mother and Kenyan father, she's spent much of her life and career as the 'only brown person' in majority white spaces. 'I haven't had the opportunity, as an actor, to be in the [rehearsal] rooms that I create,' she says. 'But for now, as a director, it's about … creating a dream space for these actors.'
In the last five years in Australia, African diaspora theatre has spread from the fringes to main stages like wildfire – fanned by a new wave of African diaspora and First Nations theatre-makers. Okenyo has been one of the key pyromancers. In 2021, she and Shari Sebbens co-directed a scrappy low-budget production of British playwright Jasmine Lee-Jones's anarchic comedy seven methods of killing kylie jenner. It was staged in a small Sydney theatre, with a women-of-colour team – and it went off. The season sold out, Taika Waititi and the cast of Thor turned up, and the show was remounted in Sydney and Brisbane the following year, and Melbourne in 2023.
African diaspora theatre has happened before in Australia, but nothing quite like this. The difference? 'We didn't make it for a white audience,' she says. 'We were like, we're gonna just make this for us, for our community … And everybody's welcome.'
