By Ariel Worthy
The Birmingham Times
Kyra Faith stands at 6 feet 3 inches and loves to wear heels, but due to an injury while performing on tour for the stage play “If/Then” in New York in 2016, she can only wear the shoes for an hour at a time.
“I’ve been wearing heels since I was two and they are my most comfortable shoe, but since I’ve been hurt I can’t wear heels for more than hour,” she said showing off her boots during a recent interview. “Our director is super cool, he is chill, and we don’t have to be in this formal costume. We have to wear black, but being around a bunch of creative people, we can wear our black, which can be so different for everyone.”
Faith, 24, is a stage actress and will star in the stage show The Ballad of Klook and Vinette in Red Mountain Theater’s Human Rights New Works Festival on March 16.
Faith, who is from Hoover, is also a festival associate, and hearing RMTC executive director Keith Cromwell talk about his vision for the festival made her excited to be part of the planning process, she said.
Getting Into Acting
It all began when Faith would give Easter speeches at her church, Bethel Baptist Church in Collegeville.
“We all had the Easter speech where they just give you the paper and shove the mic to you and say ‘do this,’ and we’re terrified,” she said. “But I actually loved it and I would take on other people’s Easter speech if they didn’t want to do it. I loved it.”
It was a small, but meaningful, step in the direction that would lead her to her passion that she would later turn into a career. At the time, she only associated performance with church. Her love at the time was music.
“I did show choir in [Bumpus Middle School] and choir in [Hoover High School] but probably my seventh grade year the pastor’s youngest daughter, Kendra, was doing Summer Fest then, it’s Red Mountain now, but that was their summer camp, and she said I should come,” Faith remembered. “That was my first real introduction to musical theater, where the two things I love, music and performing all in one. It changed my life because I was like ‘this is this really awesome hobby that could be my life, but I’m still going to be a gynecologist.’ For some reason that was my big dream, until I met musical theater and figured out that became my bigger dream.”
After a while musical theater took over. Faith comes from a family of doctors, lawyers and accountants, but her dream of being a musical theater actor was later well-accepted.
“I was like, ‘I know I’m in engineering academy and I know we talked about gynecology, but I really feel like I need to do musical theater.’ My parents were like, ‘Ok, no. Go do your engineering homework.’” She said. “But over time as they were praying and we were praying and figuring it out, we all felt that theater was it.”
Faith became a member of RMTC’s year-round ensemble while she attended Hoover High School’s International Baccalaureate program.
“Trying to do IB at Hoover and performance ensemble nearly killed me but I just had so much passion for both of them; the Lord’s grace got me through,” she said. “Once you go full into IB no one sees you except the people in the program because then you have classes with all the same people. I remember [a classmate] made a yearbook for our class so it was like we had our own IB yearbook. It was really special.”
Faith attended the IB program with Briana Kinsey who would represent Washington D.C. in the Miss America pageant. Being two black girls in the program, they encouraged each other.
“She was such a rock to lean on,” Faith said of Kinsey. “She’s a cool girl in general but being IB together was great.”
Oklahoma
Faith attended the University of Oklahoma and fell in love with the school.
“I got accepted to a lot of places for college,” she said. “Keith [Cromwell] actually suggested University of Oklahoma. I wasn’t even going to audition there. He said ‘University of Oklahoma,’ and I was like ‘no. I’m not going to school where they have corn everywhere and wind sweeping down the plain.’”
She remembers rain during her visit and “all the elements of a bad day” but it “just felt like home,” she said.
“My entire family was like ‘you should go here.’ it was my first college visit and every other one I went to didn’t feel the same. We prayed about it and we all came together and said ‘this is the move.’”
“It was hard being 12 hours away from my family, but I know I grew having to start over like that,” she said.
Faith studied musical theater and Chinese.
Oklahoma and Alabama are similar in their love for football, she said. In fact, she would often find herself explaining the love of football in the South to her classmates.
“A lot of people would say ‘well, why didn’t you just go to Bama?’ and I would say ‘because this is where I need to be,’ and I didn’t fully understand that until later.”
During her senior year at Oklahoma, a video surfaced of the fraternity Sigma Alpha Epsilon singing a racist chant using the n-word referring to lynching. The fraternity was UO’s chapter.
“It was the week before spring break,” she said. “It was that Saturday, March 7, 2015 when it happened. The boys were drunk and got on the bus, and they kept saying they were drunk, but racism is not a side effect of alcohol. They get on the bus and say those words.
“Watching the video the first time was rough but it wasn’t shocking or surprising in any way,” she said. “It was interesting to hear all of the black people on campus in the middle of this predominantly white institute, we’re all doing different things – musical theater, engineering, broadcast journalism – we’re all in different places but none of us were surprised. All of us had experiences where we felt how deep the institutional racism is here.”
It inspired her to write, she said.
“I was like what would it be like if you put a bunch of people in a room with their words [online],” she said. “Because I’m going home at night not getting my work done my senior year because people are having these discussions in these [online] threads and expressing vehemently and passionately how they feel. And they fully believe that the way Mike Brown died was right and Eric Garner deserved to die exactly the way he did . . . I was talking to my mom about this she was like ‘you should write a play.’”
She is calling it Unheard, she said.
“I still don’t know who made the video [of the racist incident at Oklahoma] and who forwarded it to (an on-campus organization) Unheard. I’m still working on that in my research, but so much of what I’m working on is the conversations that happened on social media as part of this,” she said. “There’s so much upheaval on social media and then you go to class and it’s like another day of bridge. (In reference to a line in the movie, “The Help.”)
Faith, who graduated from Oklahoma in 2015, said she stopped writing once she went on tour, but in November 2016, she began writing it again.
It fit perfectly with the plan for the Human Right New Works Festival, she said.
Playing Vinette
Faith said she didn’t get to play romantic interests often in plays, so playing Vinette is special to her.
“Whenever it comes to a romantic, lead female role African American women aren’t considered, let alone really tall women, so a lot of people aren’t able to envision me in this kind of space,” she said.
The Ballad of Klook and Vinette is about drifter Klook who’s “tired of drifting.” Vinette is on the run but she doesn’t know what’s chasing her. The two begin a romantic relationship, until their past catches up to them.
Because of her experience as a tall woman, Faith said she knows what it is like to struggle to open up to people. That’s how she can understand Vinette, she said.
“It’s like I want to help you and I want to give you this space, but all the people I’ve given this space have abused it and I might not survive if you do it too,” she said. “But I know what that’s like. Keith said I had to do this role, and I was like ‘Okay.’”
Faith said she was nervous, but that helped with her character.
“Since I haven’t had this experience I didn’t want to ruin this, Keith and I were talking and he said maybe my uncertainty can play into Vinette.”
“It was so beautiful being in the room and feeling part of it. I’m so excited to bring this woman to life.”
For more information visit: http://redmountaintheatre.org/buyrmtchumanrights/
