The Coconut Grove Theatre Festival returned for its second year from April 16-19, 2026. The four-day long festival featured eight new play readings by 16 of South Florida’s playwrights and directors, including a multimedia memory play by Miami native Mysia Anderson-White.
The play, entitled Shadows and Light: The M Ensemble Story, dramatizes the history of the M Ensemble Company, the oldest continually operating African American theater company in Florida. From the M Ensemble’s origins at the University of Miami in 1971 to present day, the play is centered around the lives and collaborations of the founders and artists who shaped the company. Part history, part memory and part imagination, Shadows and Light explores how community and art sustain a cultural institution across generations.
Anderson-White is a playwright, performer and scholar who currently serves as an assistant professor in Theatre and Dance at UC San Diego. She is also the inaugural Black Miami Studies scholar at the University of Miami’s Center for Global Black Studies.
The character of T.G. was played by David H. Hepburn.
(Elisabeth Campbell for The Miami Times)
“I realized that a traditional academic treatment of the M Ensemble’s history wouldn’t actually do this story justice,” said Anderson-White. “I’m a big believer that the form should also dictate the research findings, so I decided to employ a research-to-performance methodology to bring some of my readings, my research, to life.”
The M Ensemble Company was created with a mission to give Black stories a home and to promote and preserve African American culture through the performing arts.
Anderson-White’s work as an academic helped contextualize the narrative of the play, while her experience acting with the M Ensemble gave it a unique perspective. She auditioned and received a part in Layon Gray’s The Girls of Summer, which premiered in February 2024 and focused primarily on a Black women’s baseball team in the 1940s. Over that time, Anderson-White got to know M Ensemble founders Shirley Richardson and Patricia Williams, who head the company to this day.
Sam (played by Simon Anderson) and Pat (played by Cassidy Joseph) face off in Anderson-White’s “Shadows and Light.”
(Elisabeth Campbell for The Miami Times)
Later, when she was interviewing Richardson and Williams for what would soon become Shadows and Light, she was able to piece together their story through the lens of a historian.
“As someone who also researches the history of Miami at large, I was able to pinpoint different moments in time that I knew were happening on a larger scale,” said Anderson-White. “I connected them by asking questions — how this could have impacted the company.”
The character of Betty was played by Tyquisha Ariel Braynen.
(Elisabeth Campbell for The Miami Times)
These historical connections include the racial integration of the University of Miami in 1961, the McDuffie Riots in 1980, and the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Throughout the play, Anderson-White continually addresses conflict and complex issues.
“The difficult topics and the difficult emotions are in part why I became a writer,” said Anderson-White. “I remember when I was a child or a teenager and I went through things, I knew that I had to pick up a pen and a piece of paper and write it out. I would usually process through poetry, monologues and different creative works.”
Ali Tallman, dramaturg and Shadows and Light director, points out that “storytelling is one of our oldest ways of collecting, remembering and sharing information with each other.”
Shirley, played by Marlo Rodriguez, is the lead in Anderson-White’s “Shadows and Light.”
(Elisabeth Campbell for The Miami Times)
“There’s so much to talk about at this moment in time,” said Tallman. “I think theater people are often split on whether theater is meant to challenge or to entertain. I think there’s room for both — there’s so much we could make of it. It’s really up to what we decide to value collectively.”
Anderson-White and Tallman connected immediately upon meeting through the Theatre Festival, both in search of an artistic partner who placed value on collaboration and experimentation. Tallman, an Atlanta native, is still learning the history of South Florida, and describes Shadows and Light as a “crash course, in the best way.”
“The M Ensemble Company was on my radar, but I didn’t know anything about the history and the stature they have,” said Tallman. “That was one of the things I deeply appreciated about this play, not just the opportunity to learn so much about the company but about South Florida in general.”
Leslie Cooper plays the narrator and local luminary in Anderson-White’s “Shadows and Light.”
(Elisabeth Campbell for The Miami Times)
Tallman emphasized the importance of Anderson-White’s academic background on making the play stand out by blending history and fact with the imaginative and the emotional.
With the Coconut Grove Theatre Festival behind her, Anderson-White aims to go beyond a reading to fully staging the play in the future.
“I want to get another version of Shadows and Light done and written,” said Anderson-White. “I would love to do another development workshop similar to this, or even go through the process of staging it with a local company in the Miami area. I would love to find that first home for Shadows and Light.”
In addition to pursuing further opportunities for the play, Anderson-White is following another trail of Black Miami’s cultural history.
“My first book is going to be about ideas of sustainability with our present climate crisis and how cultural works tell those stories but also preserve community properties and histories and inheritances,” said Anderson-White. “I explore the notion of what Black sustainability can mean.”
The forthcoming manuscript, entitled Black Miami in the Eye of the Storm: Performing Black Sustainability, theorizes performances of Black survival in the midst of environmental disaster.
Find out more about Mysia Anderson-White at her website, www.mysia.art, or follow her newsletter at https://mysia.substack.com.