On actress/playwright Nambi Kelley

Nambi Kelley’s love of theatre has taken her around the world. She has spearheaded an international coalition of artists for a World AIDS Day event in Tanzania and has written children’s plays for a theatre in Seoul, where she spent two years singing and performing.

But lately, Kelley’s projects have kept her closer to Chicago. In March, she appears in The Lost Boys of Sudan at Victory Gardens Theater and begins rehearsals for Tracey Scott Wilson’s The Good Negro at the Goodman. Across town, at Lifeline Theatre, her new children’s play, The Blue Shadow, based loosely on myths from Russia, Malawi, China, Mexico, and Native American folklore, debuts March 18th.

“I tried to pick stories that had a clear lesson that was easily translated to children,” she explains. Joyful as the process is, the inspiration for The Blue Shadow is touched by sadness.

“The story is based on someone I went to high school with who was Native American, had an identity crisis, and dropped out of school,” says Kelley of her Von Steuben Metropolitan Science Center classmate, nicknamed Shadow, to whom she dedicates her play. “She became affiliated with gangs and was murdered in our junior year.”

Born in New York City, Kelley moved to Chicago with her mother (now deceased) and two older brothers when she was three. Growing up, she was surrounded by artists. Her father, a professor emeritus of history at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn and a filmmaker/documentarian, is working on a film about the DanceAfrica founder Chuck Davis, a close friend of the family and a mentor to Kelley’s stepmother, who chairs the dance department at Williams College in Massachusetts.

Kelley earned a bachelor’s degree from The Theatre School at DePaul University, and ever since, she has alternated playwriting with acting (while in Steppenwolf’s The Glass Menagerie in 2008, a blog post in which she criticized Tennessee Williams set off a small furor). She hit upon the idea for The Blue Shadow while researching myths at Goddard College in Vermont, where she holds a residency. She chose five myths that were easily translatable and wove them together with a central character, Shadow. “The lessons are just lessons you need to know, but they’re knit together by Shadow and her search for identity,” says Kelley. “As a young person I understood that she gave up on herself. That’s one of the lessons of the play—to never give up on yourself.”

GO: The Blue Shadow runs March 18th through May 2nd at Lifeline Theatre, 6912 N. Glenwood Ave.; 773-761-4477, lifelinetheatre.com.

Photograph: Katrina Wittkamp

Photographed on location at Lifeline Theatre

This article appears in the March 2010 issue of Chicago Magazine.

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