Like Minnie Riperton.” And McKenzie “is Mahalia.” I’d rather just meet people and say ‘Let’s work together.’ You know what you know when you know you know it.” “I’m very blessed and highly favored with this ensemble,” Jones says. Edward Leonard is also in the cast (as “Man”).

The cast includes NaTasha McKenzie as Mother Shaw, Lena Morisseau as Mabel, Vette Berrian as Velma, Andresia Moseley as Wanda, Candace Marie Henry as Jeanette and Treshel Johnson as Yolanda. And then it has to be spiritually accepted. Mother Shaw and the others hope to straighten Yolanda out, “and their activity is to get her a crown – it has to be earned, but it’s spiritually given. The metaphor, Jones explains, is that the ladies’ hats – signifying life lessons, signposts and roads well taken – are their crowns.

“So it doesn’t have your normal sort of ‘protagonist and antagonist.’” “It’s told in an almost poetic way,” says Bob Devin Jones, who’s directing this Tampa Bay production. There’s a word in the script that sums it up nicely: Hattitude. Raved the New York Times: “What comes across in Crowns is the sense of authenticity like Yolanda, you feel that you’ve been transported to someplace real and welcomed there. Mother Shaw is a “hat queen” in her circle, that means she owns more than 100 hats. Taylor’s play explores the complex culture of churchgoing African American women in the southern United States through music – spirituals and gospel – and a loose narrative about a troubled 17-year-old New York girl, Yolanda, who’s sent south to visit her grandmother in South Carolina. “These women in their Sunday hats, that whole culture, the history of it, the ritual of it.”Ĭrowns opens Thursday in the Jaeb Theatre, inside Tampa’s Straz Center complex. “I’m looking at this book and going, ‘Oh my god, I recognize these women, even though I’ve never met them before!’” Taylor told an interviewer. Actress and playwright Regina Taylor wrote Crowns after getting lost in the photography book Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats by Michael Cunningham and Craig Marberry.

Crowns by Michael Cunningham