“Where You’ll From?” a one person play written and performed by Yelba Zoe McCourt. Directed by Jessica Lynn Johnson
In this 70-minute solo play, Yelba Zoe McCourt embodies the characters of the people she meets, growing up and into adulthood, who ask her where she is from. Zoe, the daughter of two Latinx immigrants, navigates what it means to assimilate and become American. From meeting the real-life Big Bird and thinking that her “Sesame Street” worldview is possible in the real world, to growing up to live in a world where brown children at the border are in cages, Zoe attempts to reconcile the dissonance of her childhood dreams and her reality of being an American woman. When a viral video of a baby girl being separated from her mother at the southern border moves her, Zoe is inspired to find out how exactly it was that her own brown family was able to immigrate to America. Zoe re-visits events in her own, and her parents’ life at the intersection of race, identity, and the American Dream. Does identity end at the border? She is more Latina or American, as one fellow student pushes her to answer. She wrestles with racism, colorism, and being seen as “other”. With grit and cast of supportive characters she may be able to reframe what it means to be Ms. America.
“Where Y’All From?” was featured, as a staged reading of a new one person play, at the Joshua Tree Solo Festival 2023.