‘Moonlight’ Becomes Him

THE FIRST TIME TARELL ALVIN MCCRANEY, WHOSE LARGELY AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WORK inspired this year’s Best Picture Academy Award winner, realized he could provoke the senses through theater, he was just 14, acting in plays about substance abuse at Miami rehab centers. Audience reactions ranged from gratitude for “helping us understand what our children go through while we’re on drugs” to a demand that the show be stopped because of its emotional intensity. Then there was the deep regret expressed by the man who used to sell drugs to McCraney’s mother.

From age 9 through his high school years at Miami’s New World School of the Arts, McCraney turned to theater as an after-school guardian, a shelter from his turbulent Liberty City neighborhood, and a place where the kid who always felt like an outsider discovered a sense of belonging. Now McCraney, 36, is a globally acclaimed playwright and recent professor of theater and civic engagement at UM who still finds comfort under the stage lights, their protective glow shielding him from the intimacy of meeting new people who have not yet revealed whether they are “friend or foe.”

Identity, intimacy, and trust are topics McCraney was wrestling with in the summer of 2003, when he wrote In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, the gritty but tender coming-of-age story about a bullied gay black boy in the projects whose mother is a drug addict, whose unlikely father figure is a notorious drug dealer, and who struggles to understand his sexuality and his place in the world. It is McCraney’s story.

A recent graduate of DePaul University in Chicago at the time, McCraney was headed to grad school at Yale when he got the news his mother had died from AIDS-related complications. The play was an outlet to “figure out my life now that I was missing the one person who could tell me who I was, beyond my memory,” he recalls.

Subsequent works—The Brother/Sister Plays, Head of Passes, Choir Boy, and Wig Out!—plus two years in London as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s International Playwright in Residence catapulted McCraney into the theatrical limelight, but lately the MacArthur Fellow is captivating moviegoers with Moonlight, the film adaptation of his never-produced autobiographical script. After landing the Golden Globe for Best Picture in 2017, Moonlight went on to earn eight Oscar nominations. It took home three wins—Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, and, in a Hollywood-worthy showstopper after La La Land was incorrectly announced, Best Picture.

But McCraney’s story might never have been so widely known. During a screening and Q&A at UM’s Cosford Cinema in January, McCraney credited School of Communication lecturer Rafael Lima, who had been McCraney’s high school playwriting teacher, with planting seeds of advice that ultimately helped this poignant and intimate piece take root in a way that had previously eluded him. “He said, ‘If a story keeps coming to you visually, then it’s a film. If you hear it, then it’s a play,’” recalled McCraney.

Almost a decade after he finished the work, a mutual connection forwarded it to 30-something filmmaker Barry Jenkins, who had grown up three blocks from McCraney and whose mother also struggled with crack cocaine addiction, though the two had never met as boys. Moonlight captures Jenkins and McCraney’s collective experience of survival in a reality that left them bruised yet aching to make sense of it through art.

The character of Juan, played in an Oscar-winning turn by Mahershala Ali, was based on Blue, a boyfriend of McCraney’s mother. “He was a drug dealer, and he was every bit of a hero to me,” said McCraney. “He taught me how to ride a bike. He taught me how to swim. He told me that I was good enough. He often stemmed my mother’s abuse from affecting me in many ways. I was the best-dressed kid in Liberty City for a long time. I always wanted to honor that memory—but not expunge it of any of the things that, actually, he did.”

Moonlight, which The New York Times describes as “so richly evocative of South Florida that it raises the humidity in the theatre,” places its lens on Liberty City in a way few films have. For McCraney, who has “story by” and “executive producer” credits on the film, that authentic exposure is key to preserving the neighborhood and nourishing the voices that emerge from it.

The chance to help cultivate Miami’s “homegrown talent” drew him back from arts epicenters like New York and London. In 2015 McCraney joined UM’s College of Arts and Sciences as a professor of theater and civic engagement, and launched a unique educational initiative at Liberty City’s African Heritage Cultural Arts Center (AHCAC), his childhood safe haven.

Last summer, he led the inaugural Youth Artist Leadership Summer Program at the AHCAC, a partnership that united the center, the University of Miami, Miami-Dade County Cultural Affairs, and Arts for Learning.

McCraney guided 14 young black women, ages 13 to 17, as they wrote and performed an adaptation of Antigone, the Greek tragedy by Sophocles about the daughter/sister of Oedipus. Though the story is nearly 1,600 years old, the teens made it their own, infusing the final burial scene with music and lyrics that were a catharsis for the burdens they carry: “Let the rain from these tears wash these seeds of hate and malice and watch them grow into something new, something better. I’m going to cry my last for my sister, for Antigone, for all the sisters. I’m going to cry my last tears for government violence visited on my body, on her body, on our bodies.” The chorus follows with a litany of modern-day evils they pledge to bury: hate, rage, homophobia, wickedness, body shaming, misogyny, addiction.

“Black women understand, perhaps more than anyone, what it means to try to make their way in a place that is constantly saying ‘no way,’” McCraney says. “That’s what this program is about—getting young citizens to feel they have a voice.”

He maintains that nurturing young voices through the arts awakens imagination, which then leads to empathy.

“If you can’t imagine what other people’s lives are like, and if you can’t walk in someone else’s shoes, even in your own mind for a second, how are you a good doctor, a good lawyer, a good scientist?” asks McCraney. “We often think of the arts as something we can do in our spare time. But if they don’t have access to it early, no matter what life they were born into, all students suffer in some way.”

A shining example of the potential for homegrown talent to give back, McCraney insists communities also benefit from investing in arts education for youth.

“It goes right back to empathy,” he continues. “If you have people who can say, ‘I was raised, nurtured, and educated by my community,’ then they will do better by the community.”

Though McCraney will bring his considerable talents to Yale School of Drama full-time in July as chair of the playwriting department and playwright in residence, his legacy will continue to impact his hometown.

“This is a stunning example of how artists can move us to new understandings of our world,” UM President Julio Frenk said after watching Moonlight. “Tarell is a son of Miami. He is an artist of Miami. And he is an advocate for Miami. The film we just saw is such a beautiful, poetic, loving portrait of our incredible city in all its dimensions.”