Hi Friends! 

Things are busy here at CAM! We’re starting to invite the community into our new 1st Avenue space even as we continue the build-out process. Thank you House of Kilig and Vanishing Seattle communities for christening the CAM Annex with our first two events there in July. Now, we’re excited to be opening our doors to the latest work from local playwright, director, and actor, Amontaine Aurore!

In The Ever Expanding Moment, Jamahl King is stuck in an afterlife with the police officer who took his life during a routine traffic stop. This multimedia play explores the events, beliefs and ideas that lead to a fatal encounter and a final cosmic reckoning. Starring Anthony Simmons, Daniel Christensen, and Zoe Wolf, The Ever Expanding Moment was written and directed by Amontaine Aurore, whose plays have been presented on stages in Seattle, Maryland, New York, and abroad. Her solo play, Free Desiree, was named by Indie Theater Now as one of the Best New Plays of the New York Fringe. Read more about her work here, and scroll for an interview about the upcoming performance. 

Tickets to the September 5 preview are FREE, and the remaining run (Sept. 6-22, Thursday through Saturday 7:30 pm, Sunday 2:00 pm matinee) are available on a sliding scale,  $5-$40. Friends, we can’t wait to share this impactful performance with you. Seating is limited so scoop up your tickets now!!

We caught up with Amontaine Aurore for a quick interview, which has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity. Follow our Instagram for more looks behind-the-scenes in the coming weeks! 

CAM: Will you tell me about where the inspiration for this play came from? 

AA: I had basically challenged myself to write about something that scared me to write about, and I knew that if there was fear involved, that it probably was something that was important. The killing of unarmed African Americans by the police was something that I had thought a lot about and about how many times the police were getting a slap on the wrist, were granted immunity for situations that were truly egregious. And it scared me, you know, to write about this because it is traumatic, and I knew it would be difficult to live with writing about something like this over an extended period of time, having to subject my mind and spirit to this kind of heartbreaking situation. But I thought it was important, so I decided to approach it from a different perspective. I wondered about what real justice might look like in these cases. 

If it was a situation where justice was truly unbiased, what would that look like? So I came up with the premise of placing these two people, a young black man and the policeman who took his life, in an afterlife together in a kind of a way station where they would be reviewing their lives and they can't get out until they look back, explore the beliefs and the circumstances that led up to this fatal encounter. So I started writing it, not really knowing where it would end up, and just having faith that I would know what the outcome should be, what justice fairly served would look like. So that was my goal. 

I also wanted to humanize the victims of these crimes, who are often maligned. Questions are always asked, like, were they in a gang? What were they doing that made the police kill them, etc. And so this particular character, Jamal King, who is the young black man in play, he's a person like anyone else who has ambitions and a family and, you know, a job and all these things that anybody else has. And so I just wanted to really humanize these victims when the assumption of wrongdoing, the evidence for that doesn't bear out.

CAM: What do you hope audience members come away with after watching the play? 

AA: Yeah, I thought about that a lot. And there's an aspect to this play about wounding, about people suffering with their own pain, their own illusions and delusions, and then projecting that kind of pathology onto others in order to kind of skate free and proclaim an innocence and a purity and make yourself believe that the problem was never you but the “other.” So one thing I would like people to come away with is the understanding and the need to become conscious of our own psychic pain, our own wounds, whether we can see them or not, and to do the work of analyzing where that comes from, how it was created, and how it can be healed, and then doing the work of actually healing it.

CAM: Is there any text or other material that you recommend audience members engage with, either before or after the show, in order to help accomplish that goal? 

AA: In terms of what the takeaway is, I would recommend this documentary called “I Am Not Your Negro.” It's a James Baldwin documentary, and it talks about his unfinished book that he was writing in 1979 that connected the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. It's kind of a retrospective of African American history, but it's told through the literary genius of James Baldwin. So it's raw and it's honest and it doesn't sugarcoat anything, and it explains the historical and contentious relationship between the police and the black community in a very poignant way.