In the sparse light surrounding the stage, Tai Brown personified an older Southern woman, recalling a forbidden love. She was a 17-year-old girl writing to a mother that would never respond. She was a mentally challenged child realizing it’s OK to be different.

Offstage, Brown is a junior acting major at Syracuse University, born and raised in New York City. She is a sister of Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority with a passion for the arts. But for one day, her self-produced, one-woman play allowed her to be characters she didn’t have the opportunity to play at school.

‘Borderline Bitter,’ a project that stemmed from a collection of poems and monolouges Brown wrote, premiered this summer at the off-Broadway theater Engelman Recital Hall. Though the show started as a one-woman endeavor, the overall production was full of collaboration.

The end of Brown’s ‘Borderline Bitter’ is actually how the show started — a poem she wrote after breaking up with her ex-boyfriend. All of the pieces in the play were written over the past summer, starting in the beginning of May. The pieces were gathering in her computer’s hard drive and a red leather book, worn and cracked from years of use.  

The monologues and short stories found a common thread —a woman’s resilience, she said.

‘It’s different stuff revolving around women and love and how they can go really far emotionally, and they can go bitter, which is something people associate with women,’ Brown said.

Most of Brown’s inspirations came from everyday things: a train ride, a comment from a friend, her mom, who she said is the strongest person she’s known. Her mother was an inspiration for her poem ‘Hercules,’ which speaks about a hardworking woman wanting to provide for her family.

Brown’s mom, who came to the U.S. from Jamaica with nothing, now owns her own business and her own home.

‘(She) has instilled values in me to always take control of my own life, to be poised and to have beauty and brains,’ she said.

Brown has taken her mother’s ideology to heart. Starting her theater career at age 10, she went to a performing arts high school, where she pursued acting. She’s working on her second book — her first one was a collaboration with her peers when she was in high school on a collection called ‘Confessions of a Teenager. ‘ She was a flash dancer in ‘Friends with Benefits’ and wants to travel the world to perform in small villages, but not before she lives in Los Angeles next summer to help further her movie career.

‘I want to heal people with my work,’ she said. ‘Even if it’s only one person. ‘

With the written pieces complete, Brown started imagining how her play would work onstage. She researched different venues and found a home for ‘Borderline Bitter’ in the Engelman Recital Hall of Baruch College. She set a date and started recruiting other talents to help her tell the story.

 

Brown found Matt Bent when she was running late to work. The 15-year-old drummer played on upside-down paint cans in a subway when she approached him to perform in her show. She said it was a last-minute addition to the show, but had dreamed about putting drums in and made it happen.

Incorporating different people into the performance makes the show more multifaceted, Brown said. She said she wants the audience to relate to her show, but it helps when other people onstage understand the concept as well.

She acknowledges the play is still a work in progress. Brown hosted a Q&A session with audience members, asking for feedback after the premiere. She plans on using some of that feedback later in the semester, as she wants to bring her show to campus.

Brown and Ana Thorton, a fellow SU student who sang in ‘Borderline Bitter,’ are partnering up again to find the best local home for the performance. Brown said the Underground in the Schine Student Center would be an ideal setting because of its small, intimate environment, but she thinks there wouldn’t be enough room. In some ways, Brown thinks bringing her play to a college setting is perfect.

‘We’re not teenagers, but we’re not complete adults because we still have meal plans,’ she said. ‘I know that this is something that everyone kind of needs to hear. ‘

Brown said she wants to incorporate more students in the actual show, not only as audience members. She said she wants to make it bigger, even if it means her play can no longer be a one-woman venture.

‘I don’t want it to lose the fact that it’s the journey of women and the love a woman can feel,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t want to lose that. But I want it to be as big of a story as possible so that many people can listen and say, ‘Yeah, that’s my story on stage. ”

smtracey@syr.edu

Published on September 5, 2011 at 12:00 pm