\u2018A poetic voice\u2019<\/p>\n
The past couple of years have been a whirlwind for payne, 28. In January 2024, Atlanta\u2019s Alliance Theater staged the premiere of their intimate and intense drama \u201cFurlough\u2019s Paradise.\u201d The critically acclaimed play about two cousins whose lives have taken very different paths has gone on to a remarkable six additional productions at theaters around the country, including the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
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Joan Marcus<\/p>\n
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Yale Repertory Theatre<\/p>\n
Actors Lauren F. Walker and Tiffany McLarty in Yale Rep\u2019s 2026 production of payne\u2019s \u201cFurlough\u2019s Paradise.\u201d<\/p>\n
A Washington Post review called the play \u201cevocative\u201d and \u201cinsightful.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201ca.k. payne’s writing is so poetic and beautiful while also being, in many ways, very raw and really cutting to the truth of things,\u201d said Chantal Rodriguez, associate director of Yale Repertory Theater, which staged \u201cFurlough\u2019s Paradise\u201d this past spring.<\/p>\n
The bond between cousins in the play, added Rodriguez, depicted \u201ca really beautiful connection about family and what are the barriers, and how our lives can go in such different directions, and what that means in particular for a.k.’s character as Black, as Black women, as Black genderqueer folks \u2014 what are the possibilities?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI think a.k. has a poetic voice that is going to become a classic in our American canon,\u201d said Shanara Gabrielle, artistic director of Washington, D.C.\u2019s Theater Alliance, which also produced the play.<\/p>\n
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Playwright a.k. payne grew up in Mount Oliver.<\/p>\n
Monteze Freeland, who chose \u201cBURNBABYBURN!\u201d for Playwrights, said payne\u2019s work gives voice to characters too seldom represented on stage.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are people who you know, but you may not have seen in the American canon of theater and onstage,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it’s so important that we have that space so that we’re looked at as full human beings, not talk pieces, or not stereotypes or anything of that nature, that people can really see where we come from.”<\/p>\n
In 2025, \u201cFurlough\u2019s Paradise\u201d earned payne the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize<\/a>, a distinguished award for women playwrights previously claimed by the likes of Lynn Nottage, Annie Baker, Paula Vogel and Caryl Churchill. And last August, Variety magazine named payne one of its top ten storytellers to watch<\/a>. <\/p>\n The national accolades complement payne\u2019s very Pittsburgh story.<\/p>\n \u2018Building community\u2019<\/p>\n The daughter of a union carpenter and a music teacher, payne grew up in Mount Oliver. Thanks largely to their mother, Tina Asu \u2014 now a music specialist at Pittsburgh Faison \u2014 they got stage experience with local choirs and even Pittsburgh Opera. They also trained with the Pittsburgh CLO Academy and Alumni Theatre Company.<\/p>\n Though payne appeared onstage in shows including the CLO\u2019s \u201cJoseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat\u201d and Pittsburgh Opera\u2019s \u201cDead Man Walking\u201d and \u201cThe Magic Flute,\u201d they discovered their avocation as a middle-school literary arts major at Pittsburgh CAPA.<\/p>\n It was then, payne said, they they \u201cjust fell in love with the ways that playwriting creates pathways for building community.\u201d<\/p>\n Their first play to reach the stage was \u201cTo Pave Her Path,\u201d a one-act drama set in the 1960s about a girl who wants to become a civil rights activist. The play was accepted into City Theatre\u2019s 2010 Young Playwrights Festival. The cast included a recent Point Park University graduate named Monteze Freeland, who played a pastor.<\/p>\n \u201cI said, \u2018Oh, this is deep,\u2019\u201d said Freeland, today artistic director of Alumni Theatre and a key presence on the local scene. \u201ca.k. has always been deep and has always looked beyond the surface to really figure out how to make the surface poetic.\u201d<\/p>\n After their undergrad years at Yale College, payne earned a master\u2019s degree from the Yale School of Drama, where they studied under celebrated playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney<\/a>.<\/p>\n Along the way, payne, who is nonbinary, adopted a lowercase spelling of their name. They were inspired by the critic and scholar bell hooks, and also sought to create \u201ca kind of inversion of this name that was probably an English name that was given by a slave owner or something like that.\u201d<\/p>\n With scripts typically rendered in the form of lowercase blank verse with minimal punctuation, payne tells stories in which the walls between time periods are fluid or nonexistent. \u201c[I]n this play past is present and present is future,\u201d read stage directions for \u201cBURNBABYBURN!\u201d<\/p>\n Their influences range from August Wilson and Ntozake Shange (\u201cFor Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide \/ When the Rainbow is Enough\u201d) to McCraney (\u201cThe Brothers Size\u201d<\/a>) and Amy West, whose \u201c4000 Miles\u201d sparked the structure of \u201cFurlough\u2019s Paradise,\u201d as payne noted in an interview with West<\/a> in American Theatre magazine.<\/p>\n \u2018How can I imagine love?\u2019<\/p>\n Today, payne lives on the South Side, not far from their grade school, Pittsburgh Phillips K-5, and has other strong professional ties locally as inaugural artist in residence at nearby City Theatre and a 2026 Playwright Fellow at the August Wilson House, where \u201cBURNBABYBURN!\u201d will be staged. It will be the first play so honored not written by Wilson himself.<\/p>\n Director Karla C. Payne gives notes in rehearsal for “BURNBABYBURN!”<\/p>\n \u201cBURNBABYBURN!\u201d has six characters, born between 1928 and 1997, and slides between the Hill District, Homewood and Los Angeles, with scenes set in time frames mostly ranging from the 1960s through the 2010s.<\/p>\n The play was inspired by payne’s namesake late grandmother, Alexis, they said. The grandmother in the play is named Sky; payne\u2019s stand-in is Sky II, who attempts to build a connection through old photos, letters and imagined meetings with her forebear.<\/p>\n \u201cGrandma, how can I imagine love when all my mothers have borne bruises, when there\u2019s no model for being alive in this body, for living well in this body, just a very long line of angry men?\u201d Sky II pleads in one scene.<\/p>\n Other characters include Sky II\u2019s great-grandmother, Myrna, a jazz singer; her grandfather, Will, who was Sky\u2019s abusive husband; and her father, Joyner. The sixth character is Char, Sky\u2019s childhood friend; the two were in love, but as adults become separated by society and circumstance.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s like a time-traveling, time morphing story of reclamation of family lineage and the things we left behind,\u201d said Karla Payne, who\u2019s directing the show for Playwrights. (Payne is unrelated to payne, though in familiar two-degrees-of-separation Pittsburgh fashion, she attended college with payne\u2019s mother.)<\/p>\n \u2018The hills are really critical\u2019<\/p>\n The cast includes Hope Anthony, as Sky; Aisha Jordan Gunter, as Myrna; Destiny Nwafor, as Char; Anthony Grace as Sky\u2019s husband, Will; and DeVaughn Robinson, as Sky II\u2019s father, Joyner. (Most of the cast also participated in a Pittsburgh Playwrights workshop that helped develop the play this year.)<\/p>\n Sky II is played by Kat Bruce, who says the script resonated with her strongly.<\/p>\n Hope Anthony and Destiny Nwafor rehearse “BURNBABYBURN!”<\/p>\n \u201cPittsburgh was where I was born and raised,\u201d Bruce said, \u201cand also the idea of being able to manipulate time in a way with my character and talk to these people that you have so many questions for, who you wish you had more time for.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe city means so much to me and really informs so much of my practice,\u201d said payne. \u201cAnd I think I realized when I went away for school, for sure, that the land itself is very, very special and the hills are really critical to how I think about storytelling.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI think so often about August Wilson’s characters and the ways that they have these epic, expansive dreams and such clear wants. And I think part of that is like from being in the Hill District and being able to see the world just like everywhere,\u201d they added. \u201cI think that growing up in the South Side Slopes, I had a similar experience.\u201d<\/p>\n In most cities, payne said, a hilltop view is unusual for working-class people. But those vistas give their characters \u201ctheir inherent sense of power, despite what the world might say or judge them as or put them in whatever box, like their power sort of emanates from their humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pittsburgh-born a.k. payne is among the nation\u2019s most acclaimed young playwrights. And in some ways, this week\u2019s world…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":271824,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[73,75,74],"class_list":["post-271823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271823\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/271824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Director](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/1787650831_491_.jpeg\"\/)
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