Ma’at Production Association of Afrikan Centered Theatre (MPAACT) recently published "The Alibi Transcripts: Monologues of the Dark Indicted," excerpts from the company’s past 10 years of original scripts addressing the contemporary African-American experience. It’s edited by MPAACT’s co-founder/artistic director Reginald Lawrence (a.k.a. playwright Shepsu Aakhu) and published by the theatre’s literary division, Sakhu Publishing. It covers a spectrum of multi-tiered issues, from motherhood to war, and features works of noted playwrights Nambi E. Kelley, Lydia Diamond, Addae Moon, William S. Carroll and Aakhu.

The book also serves as a concrete place where artists of color can select intensely relevant monologues from the present-day canon of plays–not excerpts from vintage black classics, like A Raisin in the Sun.

"We wanted to be free of Western constraints," says Lawrence about the founding of MPAACT. "We didn’t want to be a black company emulating a white company. The joy of our work really is that it’s the voice of today’s American theatre–not of the historic American theatre."

MPAACT, therefore, is as much a style of theatre as it is a company. The original 18 co-founders come from diverse backgrounds, including engineers, writers, physiologists and musicians. They united at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the late 1980s not to dramatize their concerns but to directly confront what they experienced as a racist atmosphere.

"We were a bunch of loud-mouthed student activists radicalized by the environment," says Lawrence. "Our issue was about changing the culture of the campus; so we moved forward in the student body and within various organizations, like opening up opportunities for black students in student government.

"As a group, we discovered that what we were doing was quickly becoming a cultural struggle, not a political struggle. The main issue for us was cultural identity. And we later organized ourselves artistically."

MPAACT was officially established in 1991 at the University of Illinois as a multidisciplinary artist collective of actors, writers, vocalists, musicians and students majoring in non-theatre fields yet passionate about the arts. The founders obtained funding from the school and, in their earliest days, created performance opportunities by touring colleges. They did not, however, emerge from the university’s theatre department.

In 1992, MPAACT settled in Chicago, with its first production, Continuum, a collection of the ensemble’s personal stories, debuting at the Body Politic Theatre. After Body Politic closed and Victory Gardens expanded its own theatre in that same space, MPAACT continued to produce original shows in the downstairs studio, where the troupe recently completed its 10th anniversary season with Carla Stillwell’s relationship tragedy, Defending Myself.

Interestingly, Lawrence has observed that Victory Gardens’ patrons do not necessarily cross over to MPAACT’s productions. And, he adds, despite producing an extensive body of original and boundary-breaking plays and receiving awards (like Columbia College’s Theodore Ward Prize for Playwriting), MPAACT does not receive major media coverage.

"We didn’t do marketing right away," acknowledges Lawrence without regrets. "The first five years was about the craft and becoming consistent and secure. We were teaching each other. I think, because we’ve been so committed to creating new voices, that it’s been a challenge because we’re doing plays that no one ever heard of."

Nevertheless, MPAACT consistently produces two mainstage shows (typically incorporating music, movement and text) at Victory Gardens per year, plus one college touring production. For the 2003-04 season, Lawrence is planning to add a third mainstage show. MPAACT continues to grow as a collective of dedicated artists with the goal to keep expanding its artistic and educational reach.

At the heart of MPAACT is a desire to examine race, gender, ethnicity, class, culture, politics and faith. Its style has been termed Afrikan Centered Theatre, which is rooted in expressionism. This form of writing-performance interprets the Afrikan experience through emotive and spiritual resonance–the opposite of the realist construct of traditional western theatre. It’s based on the word, which Afrikan Centered Theatre defines as "an utterance of (subjective) truth." The word can be represented by music, movement/dance, color, texture, space, light and life force.

The name MPAACT refers to "Ma’at," the fourth sphere of the tree of life within the spiritual system of the ancient east Afrikan civilization of Kamit. Ma’at is symbolized by a single feather. This feather is weighed against the heart of an individual on judgment day. According to the Kamit faith, if the heart balances with the feather, it is recorded in the sacred scroll that this person has lived life with respect to divine law-living truth– selfless and seeking nothing in return for upright behavior. The artists chose Ma’at as part of its name "to represent…giving of ourselves, living truth, achieving harmony and balance, thus making our heart as light as a feather."

MPAACT has established a comprehensive Playwrights’ Laboratory and educational program, which brings original productions to Chicago-area schools. The publishing arm is another division, and Lawrence envisions a future MPAACT complex, which would house the theatre, Playwrights’ Lab, publishing company, bookstore and other venues for dialogue under the import/export label (a museum, for instance, highlighting the entire African continent).

"There has been poor communication between a certain constructed Africa and the Diaspora," explains Lawrence. "A lot of people restrict their visions or ideas of Africa to West Africa. I’m interested in programming around Pan-African issues and finding a way for an all-encompassing discourse."

Although MPAACT has not achieved commercial fame, Lawrence is not about to set into motion a hot-shot marketing campaign. That’s not what MPAACT is about.

"Since the beginning," he states, "MPAACT was the place for the work–where we gathered around ideas, not where we had dreams of being famous. Ours is a cultural and spiritual base, not hyper-realism. It’s transformative theatre geared toward helping you better understand the world in which you live.

"Most of the African-American work you see being produced is from over 20 years ago and about our relationship to white people. Ultimately, MPAACT exists to create material to enrich the contemporary canon of the African-American and Pan-African experience."

For more information on MPAACT, and to peruse its literary offerings, visit www.mpaact.org.

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