CHICAGO — Tarell Alvin McCraney became a household name after winning an Oscar for his “Moonlight” screenplay in 2017. His Hollywood credits in the years since also include the script for Steven Soderbergh’s “High Flying Bird” and as creator and executive producer of the OWN series “David Makes Man.”
An actor as well as a playwright, McCraney is the chair of playwriting at the Yale School of Drama. His play “Choir Boy” — which centers on a teenager at Black prep school for boys and his ambitions to lead the school choir — is currently in previews in a production at Steppenwolf Theatre, where McCraney is an ensemble member.
“This choir sings Negro spirituals, which W.E.B. Du Bois called ‘the soul of Black folks,’” McCraney said, “and those are both sacred songs but also political songs — they sang them on the front lines of the civil rights movement. So that music has a lot of legacy and it means something to be able to sing it and to be able to present it, because immediately you’re connected to history, you’re connected to a struggle toward liberation in this country. So that legacy was really important to me and I wanted to talk about who we pass that legacy on to. The kids of today, singing those songs, do they know what it means to wade in the water or to sing about being a motherless child — and what will they imbue that music with that’s purely from them? What’s their legacy going to be?”
