My Dying City is a character-driven full-length drama exploring the struggles of an activist couple and ex co-hosts of a Left-wing radio show - as they confront the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S.  and grapple with the personal and political failure felt after their son's suicide The play examines the collapse of imagination necessary for societal change and liberation.

Echoing the spirit of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", "Talk Radio," and the early ritual dramas of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones ("Dutchman," The Slave," etc)  this is a dark night of the soul drama, a play that expresses the collision of generations, the horror of guilt, the terror of genocide, and the violence of betrayal,  and asks more questions than it proposes answering.

Actors must be comfortable with both naturalism and expressionism, heightened language, improvisation, poetry, liberation politics, and frank discussions about modern America, race, sex, misogyny, drugs, mental health, suicide, and war and above all - love.

Paul Safiro

50, Black American, native New Yorker, ex - host of radio show "The Social Justice Suicide Hour," now an organizer for Service Employees International Union (SEIU). A jack of all trades, master of none.  A thief for many years, he found himself in the world of revolutionary activism during the rise of police brutality in the 1990s through the aftermath of 9/11.

Paul is the Apollo to Nya's Dionysiac energy. Articulate, handsome, rugged but poised.   He is more clinical & reserved than Nya -- he keeps a great deal of his emotions inside.  Nya has her guitar, but Paul is a song waiting to be sung.

Since the death of Edmund he is almost uniformly detached as if he is observing himself from the outside and has no opinion about it.  He's a "Nowhere Man" and unable to be emotionally intimate or engaging. The voice and persona of the Social Justice Suicide Hour has all but disappeared -- he was once known for his compelling political arguments, his righteous anger, and his overwhelming courage to help others and stand alone.  The days of playing Dead Prez songs and instigating uprisings on a microphone are long gone. Neither he nor anyone else would even recognize that person anymore. Paul prefers to leave the past behind, he cannot manage to deal with anything prior to his son's suicide.  History to him is both a shame and a sham. He exists now like some repressed priest going about his day in quiet desperation.  He acts as if part of that life never existed at all, much to Nya's chagrin and outrage. And while their bond is strong, they exist on separate island. Like a shark, Paul MUST move forward...or he will die. Activism made an honest man out of Paul, gave him direction...but it also became the sand which he used to cover up a multitude of sins.

JESSICA NYA (“NYA”)

40-50s, Black/Latina, native New Yorker, a journalist and former classical pianist. She traded in her musical dreams for revolutionary activism in the 1990s when she met Paul, her husband - a man she is now estranged from. Although she never gave up her love of music (Imagine if Lauryn Hill and Neil Young had a child) - she did somehow cut off her artistic modes of expression.  She co-hosted a radio program for activists called "The Social Justice Suicide Hour" up until around 2005 when their son Edmund was born.  A sensual, witty, and deeply passionate woman who is bewildered and feels betrayed by the Left's inability to "change the world for the good" - she suffers with guilt in the aftermath of their son's suicide.

Nya desperately tries to right the wrongs of her & Paul's failed parenting via a more revolutionary activism - shunning the ‘twee’ activism on social media and electoral politics for more immediate and direct action.  She rationalizes her rabid commitment to militant resistance as if fulfilling her dead son Edmund's duty somehow; she even believes that he sends her messages at night telling her what to do, how to fight the right-wing takeover of America. NYA is the most challenging character in the play.

She embodies the collapse of language in the face of moral failure and personal grief. Nya is a dramatization of the mother figure, fractured by unspeakable loss, regressing to a space of rhythm and pre-language.  The grief is not explained, it is embodied.  A cousin to Mabel in Cassavetes' "A Woman Under the Influence" or Pinter's Rebecca in "Ashes to Ashes,” she is also like a character Frantz Fanon and Adrienne Kennedy might have written together. And specifically, as she pertains to the Black diaspora, Nya is the past, present, and future in one. A golden opportunity for an actress deftly able to shift between realism and high expressionism at the drop of a hat.

At home with both "Sex and The City" and the poetry of June Jordan.  She drinks, smokes, self-medicates however she can...but always tries to look good doing it. A woman who's beauty and brains might be intimidating but one would come away after meeting her once - wishing they simply held her in their arms.  She completely unravels by the end of the play as she discovers something so atrocious it completely transforms her. Must be comfortable with copious amounts of dialogue, strategic pauses and dynamic use of body.

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Hedia

This is a character that has evolved throughout the entire workshop of My Dying City and the only character from the first inception of the play.  In this final version of the play, she is a highly passionate 22-year-old College graduate, any race. If Moose is Nick from "Virginia Woolf?"  she is most definitely Honey -- however just like Moose, there is something deeper to her. She appears fragile on the surface, like a glass doll. Her optimism may seem naïve, and she might even appear rather conservative to some or “on the spectrum.”  Hedia simply doesn't wear her erudition, empathy or revolutionary zeal on her sleeve. In other words, she might be the most honest person you have ever met! 

She was Edmund's first love, yet he never introduced her to Paul and Nya.  Grieving his suicide, as they still are, she insists on introducing herself to share beautiful things about Edmund they never knew. A former actress-turned social worker -- and fervent admirer of revolutionary women like Angela Davis and Leila Khaled -- she represents the future Edmund will never see and one Paul and Nya have problems envisioning. Nya feels SHE may be the hope the Left needs, Paul feels she is a sweet but deluded person and just another reminder of their failure as revolutionaries…and parents.

 Mustapha (“Moose”)

A 28-year-old Arab/East Asian man with a vague past. The victim of a brutal crime in his youth, he is an orphan and has been a wanderer most of his life.  He appears a bit younger than he is, extremely charming -- and dead set on getting to the root of who killed his father in the aftermath of 9/11.  He enters the vulnerable cobweb of Paul and Nya's life insisting the archived recordings of the Social Justice Suicide Hour on the web impacted him greatly. 

He credits them with introducing the work of Tariq Ali to him.  And while he insists that his father was “a huge admirer” of theirs, something is off with his story. And though he exudes a great connection to Paul and Nya - as if they are surrogate parents - he is so amorous of Nya that a line is being crossed...although it is not clear what that line is until the end of the play. Like Hedia, he represents aspects of Gen Z that previous generations must take responsibility for. (There is a bit of Morris Townsend from "The Heiress" in him as well as Nick from "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?")

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