This September, Austin’s poet laureate Zell Miller III is presenting the inaugural production from his brand new theater company. Miller named the new company Black Rose Theater ATX, a name inspired by his late mother, Vernell Miller. “[She] had a black rose tattoo on her right ankle,” Miller says.

The first work from Black Rose, a one act play called And She Was Loved, is a tribute to both Miller’s literal mother and his “theatrical mom” and mentor Laurie Carlos. “And so what better way to introduce our amazing company [than with] this production that is inspired by these two icons who helped me be the person that I am,” Miller says.

The play is about Miller’s journey in dealing with his grief, but, as is usually the case with his work, he wanted to infuse the story with some hope and optimism despite the heavy themes.

“So I… use some of the ethos of Peter Pan,” he says. “So there is the land called the Land of Never. I am Peter Pan. My daughter is Shadow. Siobhan Alexis is my Tinkerbell. And so it’s kind of a reverse and a more street, hip hop version of the Peter Pan story.”

Miller and his daughter Marley both play fictionalized versions of themselves in And She Was Loved, and Marley says that her father’s direction doesn’t end when they leave rehearsal. “We live in the same house,” she says, “so he is telling me a lot about memorizing my lines, and telling me, like, hey, come here, we have to rehearse, and stuff like that.”

Alexis, an award-winning a tap dancer, has collaborated with Miller before, but always as a dancer, her obvious comfort zone. For And She Was Loved, she’s also an actor, which is new territory for her. “Yeah, Zell has a lot more confidence in myself than I do when it comes to acting,” she says with a laugh.

With her director’s full confidence, Alexis is playing ‘G,’ this play’s equivalent of Tinkerbell. Her transition from dancer to dancer/actor is eased a bit by the way her character is written – she communicates not with words but with movement. “I see my character as the hope that flitters through the darkness,” she says, “regardless of where we’re at on the journey of grief. The joy that we find in those dark moments. We get to still groove to nostalgic music, we still get to play children’s games together. We still get to laugh about not funny things. There’s a jovial playfulness in the Land of Never that G tries to remind Shadow and Pan of.”

“It’s dealing with some very heavy issues,” Miller says, “but it is a celebration at the end of the journey that you go through, and how… healing is possible.”

‘And She Was Loved’ is onstage September 3 – 12 at Hyde Park Theatre.