Kirsten Childs pays tribute to Micki Grant, the trailblazing dramatist and performer who passed away on August 22, 2021.
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![Kirsten Childs (right) talking with Micki Grant (left) on stage talking about writing and composing for musical theatre, after the July 28, 2018 matinee of Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope, the third production of the Encores! Off-Center season at New York City Center. Photo by Lia Chang.]()
Kirsten Childs (right) talking with Micki Grant (left) on stage talking about writing and composing for musical theatre, after the July 28, 2018 matinee of Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope, the third production of the Encores! Off-Center season at New York City Center. Photo by Lia Chang. -
![Kirsten Childs (right) talking with Micki Grant (left) on stage talking about writing and composing for musical theatre, after the July 28, 2018 matinee of Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope, the third production of the Encores! Off-Center season at New York City Center. Photo by Lia Chang.]()
Kirsten Childs (right) talking with Micki Grant (left) on stage talking about writing and composing for musical theatre, after the July 28, 2018 matinee of Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope, the third production of the Encores! Off-Center season at New York City Center. Photo by Lia Chang.
When I first met Micki Grant, I had just become a member of the Dramatists Guild Council. I went up to her excitedly and said, “Ms. Grant, I want you to know that you have been an inspiration of mine.” She smiled a big bright smile; she was so pleased to hear that. And any time she introduced me to her friends and colleagues, she would say, with a mischievous grin and a twinkle in her eye, “This is the writer Kirsten Childs. I inspired her.”
My first encounter with Micki’s work was a production of Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, California. My parents had bought tickets for the whole family to see the show. My mother was a first-grade teacher, my father, a junior high school math teacher. They were part of a generation of Black American professionals who were themselves just a couple of generations removed from that shameful American enterprise euphemistically known as “the peculiar institution.” Their parents – my grandparents – were hard-working cooks and railroad employees and laundresses and such, who had made sure all of their children were college-educated at historically Black institutions like Shaw University and Fayetteville Teacher’s College. As a result, my parents were just a tad picky about what they considered suitable entertainment, especially for their children. They constantly juggled what stories mainstream America found entertaining against what stories instilled positive messages about Blackness to me, my sister and brother. For example, they could watch Amos ‘n’ Andy, but only after sending us off to bed.
Micki Grant came from a generation of Black writers who wrote of the Black experience, not for the comfort and reassurance of White audiences, but for the enjoyment and edification of Black people yearning to see their lives truly reflected on stage. Many of her fellow writers’ works were provocative, confrontational, and filled with a righteous anger that was often exhilarating to watch but equally often hard to sit through – especially when you’d come to the theatre to get away from that lived experience.
That was not the case for Micki’s work.
With her cheeky title Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope, Micki Grant let her Black audience know, “Okay people, tonight we’re going to talk about the same social issues these serious playwrights are exploring, but you will not be leaving this theater depressed and pissed off, oh hell no. Now sit back, relax and let me provide some fun for your weary souls.”
And when we sat back and relaxed in our seats at the Mark Taper Forum…
And when Paula Kelly, after citing a laundry list of racial injustices, wryly drew out the phrase “Don’t bawwwtha meeee… I – can’t – cope”…
And when the audience howled with laughter…
And when the light of happiness shone in my mother’s and father’s faces as they watched a show about themselves and their world, a show they could wholeheartedly share with their children…
I was forever changed by the wicked, joyful genius of Micki Grant.
She inspired me.
