When Zindzi Okenyo takes the Sydney Theatre Company (STC) stage in June for John Patrick Shanley’s Tony award-winning play Doubt – the role played by Viola Davis in the film – it will be a particularly special moment: her fourth main-stage role playing a black woman in a 20-year theatre career. “I’m really excited about it, I haven’t had a black role for so long,” she says.
For the last five years, Okenyo has been working behind the scenes to create more opportunities and safer spaces for black performers, not as an actor but as a director. When we meet in mid-January, she’s in rehearsals for her production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Pulitzer and Tony award-winning dysfunctional family dramedy Purpose, opening at STC next week – with an entirely black cast.
It’s a career milestone for Okenyo, but bittersweet. Born in Adelaide to a white mother and Kenyan father, she’s spent much of her life and career as the “only brown person” in majority white spaces. “I haven’t had the opportunity, as an actor, to be in the [rehearsal] rooms that I create,” she says. “But for now, as a director, it’s about … creating a dream space for these actors.”
Purpose unfolds around the dinner table of a “Famous Black” family, as secrets are revealed and tensions combust. It’s a gift for actors, and a true ensemble piece: “Everybody has their powerhouse moment,” says Okenyo. “I wanted the [Australian] industry to see the multitude of skill and presence and artistry from black artists.”
In the last five years in Australia, African diaspora theatre has spread from the fringes to main stages like wildfire – fanned by a new wave of African diaspora and First Nations theatre-makers. Rarely if ever has change happened so quickly or powerfully in the industry. Okenyo has been one of the key pyromancers.
In 2021, she and Shari Sebbens co-directed a scrappy low-budget production of British playwright Jasmine Lee-Jones’s anarchic comedy seven methods of killing kylie jenner. It was staged in a small Sydney theatre, with a women-of-colour team – and it went off. The season sold out, Taika Waititi and the cast of Thor turned up, and the show was remounted in Sydney and Brisbane the following year, and Melbourne in 2023. “[It] was extraordinary,” says Okenyo.
It wasn’t just a matter of tickets sold – it was the ebullient atmosphere in the theatre, among a mostly young and Bipoc audience. “It just was, like, loose,” Okenyo recalls.
African diaspora theatre has happened before in Australia, but nothing quite like this. The difference? “We didn’t make it for a white audience,” she says. “We were like, we’re gonna just make this for us, for our community … And everybody’s welcome.”
There was also the matter of timing: a confluence of “Covid, Black Lives Matter and people really focusing on and understanding how racism affects everybody”, Okenyo says. In the US and the UK, there was a surge of work by black playwrights responding to the moment, programmed on Broadway and the main stages.
The ripples of this reached Australia as the country wrestled with its own racist, colonial history, on stage and off. Hamilton made its Australian premiere in 2021, spotlighting an almost entirely Bipoc cast, and STC and Melbourne Theatre Company started programming African diaspora plays from the likes of Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks and August Wilson. This year, MTC will stage British playwright Ryan Calais Cameron’s riveting Hollywood period drama Retrograde, directed by actor turned director Bert LaBonté.
For Okenyo, things have moved quickly: within two years of making her lo-fi director debut, she was working on the main stage, co-directing (with Sebbens) Aleshea Harris’s explosive, Tarantinoesque tragedy Is God Is for MTC and STC. “Historically, we haven’t been able to do stories like this on main stages,” she told Guardian at the time. She has directed a main-stage work every year since.
Meanwhile, smaller stages were pulsing with international hits by the likes of Emmy winner Michaela Coel and Academy Award winner Tarell Alvin McCraney. Green Door Theatre Company, which produced seven methods of killing kylie jenner, has been a key player in this space. Producer Leila Enright says the company’s community engagement strategy, developed and led by creatives from the diaspora, has been crucial in turning a moment into a movement.
“Because of the African diaspora community, [seven methods] took off. We leaned into that,” she says.
These smaller stages have also been key launchpads for Australian playwrights from the diaspora, including seven methods star Iolanthe, whose debut play Sistren was produced by Green Door in 2025, sold out, and returns this year; and actor turned playwright Kirsty Marillier, whose debut, Orange Thrower, premiered at Sydney’s Griffin theatre in 2022, and follow-up Destiny, inspired by her family’s South African history, premiered at MTC last year – both directed by Okenyo.
Marillier graduated from drama school at a time when there was usually only ever “one person of colour in the room”. She says seeing Okenyo on stage almost a decade ago was pivotal – “to see another black woman doing her thing”.
Now she has a seat at the table, she wants to help create more. “I met a young woman recently who is half South African – she reached out to me and said she’d used a monologue from Orange Thrower as her VCA audition piece,” Marillier says. “We went for coffee, and I was like, ‘So what are you gonna do when you graduate? I’ll help you make the plan.’”
Purpose runs from 2 February-22 March at Sydney Theatre Company. Retrograde runs from 16 May-27 June at Melbourne Theatre Company. Sistren runs from 9 April-3 May at Belvoir Downstairs, Sydney
