Utah Playwright Jenifer Nii’s Final Farewell with Fire!
Performance & Theatre
Fire!
Plan B Theatre
April 13–23
Jenifer Nii’s Fire!, a 2010 play that Plan-B Theatre is restaging this month in honor of Nii, opens with a telling of the long trek the Mormons took, lugging their wagons across the United States in search of a spot where they would be free of religious persecution. Their journey ended in Salt Lake City with four words uttered by Brigham Young: “This is the place.” This phrase would become a focal point of Utah identity and history. However, history can be selective—and even overlooked—as Nii demonstrates in Fire!, which follows the journey of one of the most noteworthy and undersung Black men from Utah, Wallace Henry Thurman.
Nii’s play details Thurman’s journey through life, ruminating on the power of place and exploring the meaning of home. Thurman was born in Salt Lake City in 1902 and attended West High School and the University of Utah before heading to Los Angeles to attend the University of Southern California to pursue a career as a writer. Told from a first-person perspective, Thurman’s character speaks to the audience intimately about how he never finished his degree at USC, choosing instead to travel east where he landed in Harlem at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. He eventually became the contributing editor of a political and literary journal called The Messenger and co-founded a magazine called Fire! alongside other Black intellectual greats such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Lewis Alexander and Countee Culle. Notably, he was also gay.
“Being an African American growing up in Utah defined me for a long time, specifically because I didn’t know what I was.”
Jerry Rapier is the Artistic Director at Plan-B Theatre, a company that develops socially conscious theater from works by Utah playwrights. He stumbled upon an article about Thurman more than a decade ago and immediately called his friend, Nii, a former reporter for the Deseret News.
“[Nii] was transitioning as a writer away from reporting to more creative writing,” Rapier says. “It’s really hard to write a solo play [a play featuring one person], but the newfound interest, coupled with her skills, helped her find a way in.” The play premiered in 2010 featuring North Ogden native Carleton Bluford playing the role of Thurman. Like Nii, it was also his first production with Plan-B Theatre.
“It was one of the most challenging parts I’ve ever played, because it’s just me,” Bluford says. “Being an African American growing up in Utah defined me for a long time, specifically because I didn’t know what I was. I felt like Thurman and I were speaking the same language, and I had never experienced anything like that before,” he says. After the production closed, Nii continued to write for Plan-B and amassed an award-winning body of diverse work including The Audacity, The Weird Play, Kingdom of Heaven, Ruff!, Suffrage and The Scarlet Letter.
“It’s really hard to write a solo play [a play featuring one person], but the newfound interest, coupled with her skills, helped her find a way in.”
Nii received life-altering news in the fall of 2021 when she was diagnosed with hippocampal atrophy, an early characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease. The degeneration resulted in difficulty in conversing. Knowing her memory was increasingly limited, Nii, Rapier and Carlton decided to come together one last time and reprise Fire! “It was a more complete way to say goodbye to Jenifer as a playwright,” Rapier says.
Now, Rapier will also direct this staging. “There’s this really beautiful—a little sad, but beautiful—connection between Jenifer and Wallace Thurman as writers, and both of their careers are being cut short by something out of their control,” Rapier says, referring to Thurman passing from tuberculosis at age 32.
“There’s this really beautiful—a little sad, but beautiful—connection between Jenifer and Wallace Thurman as writers, and both of their careers are being cut short by something out of their control.”
Nii’s health will continue to decline, but her legacy will remain in the stories she penned with truth and respect. In Fire!, she gives an honest account of Thurman’s life in a way many people of color in Utah can relate to, akin to the way Thurman wrote for Black audiences in the 1920s and ’30s. “Her legacy is breathing life into things,” says Bluford. Rapier describes Fire! as, “speaking to one person at a time, as if it was written just for them.” There are a lot of plays, he says, “but most of them are just for that moment, and then they disappear. And Jenifer’s plays … stick with you.”
Nii has chosen to spend her remaining time in an RV exploring the West’s most rural corners. On April 13, she’ll return to Salt Lake for this staging. “I see my lights dimming,” Nii said in her last public reading in 2021. “It’s sometimes tempting to think that’s who I am. To know that there’s possibly something left that I’ll be able to leave that says, ‘Oh, she wasn’t always quite so … dying. She didn’t always struggle so much; for someone that recognizes that the light is dimming, to have the knowledge that I might be able to leave something of hope, I can’t believe how blessed I am. I can’t believe what a time I’ve been able to have and I’m so grateful.”
Fire! will run at Plan-B Theatre April 13–23 before heading on the road to perform for high schools throughout Utah. A free Utah Black History Museum exhibit will be featured on the mezzanine where people can learn more about Wallace Thurman.