The Charles R Drew Prep School for Boys, the setting for Tarell Alvin McCraney’s production Choir Boy, doesn’t resemble a typical American boarding school, usually full of children of Wasp families. Rather, the school is an all-Black, all-male academy where the main character, Pharus, a young Black queer singer, hopes to excel as his school’s choir lead, before being thwarted by the politics of conformity. To become a “Drew man” requires relinquishing any kind of individuality; the school demands its students contort themselves to fit its moral ideal of what a Black man should be.
McCraney, co-writer of the Oscar-winning film Moonlight, first wrote the script for Choir Boy in 2012, following the murder of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin. The play had its premiere at the Royal Court theatre in London, before being performed in New York and across the US. It is now being staged in a major new revival at the Bristol Old Vic that the Guardian describes as “fluid and expressive”.
As a child of Miami’s Liberty City projects, McCraney was swept up by a persistent question. “What is the legacy of young Black men?” he says over Zoom from New Haven, Connecticut, where he is a professor at Yale University. “I wanted to really talk about the ways in which we are failing them in our institutions, to give them space to be their full selves.” Like Moonlight, which tracked the emotional and physical torment of young Black boys as they move through stages of life, Choir Boy is a coming-of-age narrative that muses on the beauty of being your full self, but also how keenly this can be disrupted by others.
Moonlight was more reflective of McCraney’s experiences in middle school, where he recalls facing homophobic bullying and harassment. These experiences informed the film’s second act. “I was being targeted for being different and queer, mostly,” he says. “And that sort of hothouse environment where there were boys of older grades who would have a ‘gay day’ and pick on all the kids who they thought were gay.” Choir Boy, however, is drawn from a different period of his life: his time at New World School of the Arts, a performing arts high school in downtown Miami, which he attended in the 90s.
“I went to an ‘elite’ high school and, while not necessarily siloed by race, you start to see things like class disparity pretty swiftly,” he says. It became very clear to him that students from different backgrounds and with different skills were expected “to achieve the same goal, which was graduating school”. The writer started to notice “the way in which institutions are set up to do a one size-fits-all when, in truth, there needs to be a bespoke or at least a widening, so that folks who are different can still achieve somehow.”
In late September, I attended rehearsals for Choir Boy. The cast were performing the opening scene of the play, in which Pharus, played by Terique Jarrett, leads a refrain of the hymn Trust and Obey, only for the harmonies to be disturbed by a series of homophobic and racial slurs from other choirboys. It’s an example of the constant power struggles between the Drew boys, who compete to become the school’s most exemplary student, and lays bare the extent to which this kind of competition can be emotionally cruel for young Black queer boys.
Although McCraney is clear that the structure and core of the show remain consistent after a decade, this new production with director Nancy Medina has offered an opportunity to interrogate the smaller details. “Medina as a director is really penetrating,” he says. “We’ve had conversations about anything from word choice to character moves.” For Medina, Choir Boy allowed her to use “a feminine lens and a lens as a mom of two boys as well. Which is why I love to unpack the relationships that the boys have with their mothers, to try and understand what femininity is, and what perceived queerness is in comparison to that. I think I’m coming from that point of view.”
When Choir Boy premiered, McCraney had envisioned the play being received as a historical document, with the constraints of the school system gradually looking more dated and further from reality as time progressed. But he says that things have deteriorated compared with both 2012 and when he was in high school. “Right now in Florida, in the Dade County public school system, you can’t say ‘gay’,” he says. “That was not the case when I was in school. There were groups for LGBTQIA+ students. And now there are folks on the school board in Miami-Dade who don’t even want there to be Black student unions.”
At high school, McCraney remembers being immersed in Black and queer literature; he recalls reading Reinaldo Arenas’s Before Night Falls, “an incredible book about a queer Cuban artist who was placed into a work camp for homosexuals by the Castro regime and escapes to Miami during the Mariel boatlift”. The book made McCraney realise that the fruits of freedom and revolution are often not extended to minorities – he would not be able to glean such insights from literature if he were in the Florida school system now. “I always thought Choir Boy would be more like a cautionary tale, but sadly we have moved closer to where it’s even more relevant,” he says.
Choir Boy presents the bullies not as irredeemable monsters but as Black boys with specific vulnerabilities, fears and disadvantages, which can manifest as destruction. Witnessing the differences in resourcing between his underfunded middle school and his elite, selective high school made McCraney cognisant that both he and his bullies were failed by the education system: “Those experiences shaped the way I thought about the people who committed violence towards me, to understand what we were all enduring at that time.”
With the success and prominence of Moonlight and Choir Boy, does McCraney ever feels that Blackness and queerness are too often the only frames of analysis for his works despite their complexity? “Oh sure,” he says. “I wonder if anybody looks at the structure of Choir Boy and sees it’s in conversation with Shakespeare’s Richard II? I’m sort of obsessed with this idea of a king who at once was siloed from the place he thought he belonged. I do that for most of my plays. There’s always some sort of cool or mythic story that I’m riffing on, be it The Brothers Size and the Yoruba tradition or this play. And I think because everyone goes ‘queer, Black’ they don’t do deeper dives into the theatrical connectivity.”
That said, he is not troubled by Blackness and queerness being the primary lenses for audiences. “I’ve got to acknowledge that the cultural slide we’re in is making it more relevant for me talk about these things,” he says. Communicating the importance of embracing your full self is also still deeply relevant to McCraney: moving from a boyhood in the Miami projects to being a Yale professor, he’s aware of the “bifurcation” of his identity. But nevertheless, he tries to hold space for all parts of himself. “I am curious and intellectually stimulated, I like learning new things. I’m also an introvert, and I also really am hood,” he says. “There’s certain things about me that will always be ‘305 till I die’, Liberty City.”
He smiles, before citing two Miami rap greats always able to get to the root of his psyche: “You can turn on a Trick Daddy or Trina song and I’m gonna go loose!”
Choir Boy is at Bristol Old Vic to 11 November.
• This article was amended on 23 October 2023. An earlier version quoted Tarell Alvin McCraney as saying “there are folks on the school board in Miami-Dade who don’t even want there to be Black students”; to clarify, McCraney was referring to Black student unions specifically.
