 Lucid Stage will be presenting three original full-length plays about Lala, an African-American girl in 1890s Kansas. This one woman show follows Lala on her journey toward enlightenment. Brian Knoblock talked with writer, performer, Rivera Sun Cook about this tour de force performance. Rivera, you're doing a one woman show coming up at Lucid Stage at the end of the month. Tell me a little bit about it. It's a lot of characters and they're all you. It's true. I shape shift between 30 different characters of all ages, genders and ethnicities going from old women to the old black women to little girls to 14-year-old boys. They're kind of my favorite. What's the story? The story is about an African-American girl called Lala who is growing up in 1890s Kansas in an all-black town. And there's actually three separate stories because it's a trilogy. The first story, Lala is 10 years old and a Chinese man blows in on the wind. And the town has to deal with the fact that they've never seen a Chinese man before. In the second play, The Education of Lala Girls, she is 14 and fallen in love the first time. That's a real heartwarming play. In the third play, The Emancipation of Lala, she's 18 and she's embarking on a huge epic spiritual quest across 1890s America with train robbers and parades that she jumps into and all sorts of crazy adventures. So you are none of those kind of people and in none of those locations, where does that story come from? The story comes from a listening for the stories that need to be told right now in our country. Stories that bring people together, that bring cultures and communities together, that unite them and setting it in 1890s gives us a way of looking at ourselves and the issues that we are dealing with now through a lens that lets us take it in a little bit. You've got, you have 30 characters here. Did you, did you start out to write 30 characters and did you start out saying that you were going to perform with them all yourself? I sort of did. I wanted to make a show to perform in my living room because I was a little tired of, you know, doing interviews and getting all the stage production stuff ready to go. But when I did the show in my living room as all the characters, because I also didn't want to coordinate performer schedules, I found that everyone was actually begging me to get them on the road, which was a beautiful experience to start small and have it grow organically by popular demand and now we're touring all over the nation with these shows. Again, because people ask us to go places. Is it important for everybody to see all three plays that you're playing them in several series at the end of the month? Can they watch one individually or I know they should watch all three, but can you watch one? They can watch just one. They can also catch them in other places of the state like L.A. Arts and Auburn Lewiston and over at Skudik Arts in Winter Harbor. They can also see them out of order. Each play stands alone as a totally satisfying experience. And sometimes when I'm talking with the audiences after the show, they argue with each other about what is the best way to see them. And there's a lot of different opinions. When you're performing it, are these 30 distinct characters for you in your head and in your mind or is it one sort of continuum or are they 30 distinct people? They are 30 very distinct people like each and every one of us. We can be put into statistics. We can be people that make generalizations about us, but every one of us is an individual. And for me, every one of my characters, it's like if I got to step into you and be you for a moment. Do you do costume changes, that sort of thing? Is it all left to the imagination of the audience? It's all a picture that's completely painted in the imagination of the audience. I use two boxes, my body and my voice to do the switching. It's pretty phenomenal. Is it a bit scary going out there the first time to do it? No, I was so excited and ready to go. I was just like, come on, people, get in the theater. You're not going to believe what you're going to see. We call what we do in our work transformational theater because we're seeing people come into the theater one way and go out different and keep on changing. These are stories that stay with you over time. And you can mole on them, reflect on them, ruminate on them. So end of the month, what are the dates? We're going to start with the imagination of Lala Child on May 30th. And then we do the education on May 31st. And then we do the education again on the 1st of June, the emancipation of Lala on the 2nd of June, and then a matinee of the imagination just to bookend the series on the 3rd of June. All at Lucid Stage here in Portland. All at Lucid Stage. Great, well, thanks for joining us. Thank you so much, Brian. This is wonderful.