Can a white woman and a Black woman have an honest conversation about race?

Is art still able to bridge cultural divides in our increasingly divided culture? Does a difference in perceptions justify jettisoning personal relationships? And can a heartfelt two-character drama find its audience amid the din of disposable distractions? 

I recently interviewed Marci J. Duncan and Kerry Sandell, the co-authors and stars of Dissonance (dissonanceplay.com), a play which dares to ask all of the above, as well as the most provocative question of all: “Can a white woman and a Black woman have an honest conversation about race?”

Dissonance follows Duncan and Sandell as Angela and Lauren, two longtime friends who are excitedly opening a coffeehouse together, before the topic of interracial dating exposes unseen fault lines in their supposedly secure relationship. “They never talk about these things, because they don’t have to; they dance around these topics,” explains Duncan. “But it eventually comes to a point where they can’t avoid it anymore, [and] because they’ve been friends for 20 years and they do love each other, they’ve got to figure this thing out.”

Although Duncan and Sandell are both based in Pensacola, having met at the University of West Florida, neither were strangers to Central Florida prior to this Saturday’s performances of Dissonance at Sanford’s Wayne Densch Performing Arts Center. Duncan studied at Orlando’s Art Sake Acting Studio under the late Yvonne Suhor, an experience she still regards as “transformative,” saying, “I felt affirmed, I felt seen, I felt supported, and I felt set up in a way that launched me [and it] became the foundation of how I teach my students.” Likewise, Sandell grew up in Eustis, and says “a lot of my worldview and basis — some of which comes into the play — comes from my experiences growing up in Central Florida.”

While the play is fiction, it draws heavily on the authors’ own relationship and life experiences. It was conceived in the wake of George Floyd’s death, when Sandell approached Duncan following a performance at Destin’s Emerald Coast Theatre Company, to ask her former teacher how she was doing. That simple gesture, when contrasted with the “very loud silence” from most of her other white friends, swiftly planted the seed for the show. “I immediately went home,” Duncan recalls. “My husband was sleeping beside me, and I was on my phone in the Notes section, writing and writing and writing. Words were just coming out of me, and I ended up writing one of the monologues that’s in the play right now that night, with my thumbs.”

Although Duncan and Sandell were not intimate acquaintances before beginning work on this show, Kerry says the writing process took their relationship “from zero to 60 … when you get into these very transparent conversations and these very vulnerable situations.” So while they may not have been friends for 20 years like their characters, Sandell says “we did go from acquaintances to family pretty quickly” by sharing their fundamental beliefs and experiences during writing sessions over Zoom during the COVID pandemic. 

Since Dissonance’s first reading in 2022, the show has toured across northern Florida and has been staged as far away as New York City and Washington, D.C. 

“One of the things that I noticed was, the D.C. and the New York audiences were very introspective. They were thinking a lot in their heads, because some of the audiences were a little quieter than our audiences down south,” says Duncan, evoking the then-recent Black Lives Matters protests in those cities. “It was still so raw for them, and this play really allowed them to have this cathartic moment and to express these beautiful stories that they told us after the shows were over.”

Those post-show conversations are a key component of Dissonance’s mission, and this Saturday afternoon’s show will be followed by a talkback discussion with the performers and director James Webb. “In the talkback, we don’t get into race conversations because you can’t guarantee that all the elements that need to be necessary for community engagement are in this group of strangers,” explains Sandell, “but we do encourage people that if you’re leading in love, if the goal is unity … then that’s where you start.”

As fledgling independent producers shopping their show to venues around the state, the Dissonance team has discovered “there are so many places you can go and do a show, and anybody could do it, but it’s expensive as hell,” says Duncan. “That is the bottom line: Theater is an expensive little mistress.” 

But despite the challenges reaching their target demographic, the pair are passionate about bringing their story to as many patrons as possible. 

“I want to invest my time and my energy and my creativity in creating something edifying, and something that has value beyond just entertainment, because we’ve all got entertainment at our fingertips at every moment,” says Sandell. “But to be able to create, and be a part of something that is life-giving, is a far different animal.”

Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | or sign up for our RSS Feed

This article appears in Best of Orlando© 2023.