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Photograph of TCU theatre professor Ayvaunn Penn directing a 2024 rehearsal of her play For Bo in Fort Worth’s Jerita Foley Buschman Theatre.

Ayvaunn Penn directs the rehearsal of her work “For Bo: A Play Inspired by the Murder of Botham Jean by Officer Amber Guyger” at the Jerita Foley Buschman Theatre.

From Penn To Paper

Playwright Ayvaunn Penn finds love and humanity in Texas tragedies.

AYVAUNN PENN first took the stage at age 2 when her Dallas-area church was putting on a Christmas play.

Penn, dressed in a black velvet dress with a dark green sash, entered on cue. She glanced to the left, to the right. “When it was my time, I walked up. And I looked at everybody,” Penn said.

“I said, ‘Jesus wept,’ and kicked up my little leg to the back and grinned because I had done my little thing. So, generally, I’ve been involved in the performing arts in some way for a long time.”

Penn, now an assistant professor of theatre at TCU, “loves to say she’s a native-born Texan,” said her mother, Janet Byrd.

Born in Dallas and raised mostly in nearby Plano, Penn returned to the area after postgraduate endeavors took her to New York City. Mentored at Columbia University by Lynn Nottage, the only woman to twice win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, and David Henry Hwang, who won a Tony Award for writing M. Butterfly, Penn saw professors working in the industry while also teaching. She said she wanted the same for herself and her future students.

Photograph of professor Ayvaunn Penn speaking to a person during a 2024 rehearsal of her play, "For Bo."

Ayvaunn Penn was not only admitted into the Columbia University Master of Fine Arts playwriting program but named her class’s Dean’s Fellow.

“It’s one thing to hear your professor talk about things,” Penn said. “It’s another thing to see your professor working live in action.”

As a poetic dramatist, Penn incorporates poetry, rhythm and dance to craft award-winning works that focus on social justice. Her play For the Love of Uvalde, which held its first public staged reading on TCU’s campus, was one of 10 selected out of more than 2,000 submissions for the 2024 Yale Drama Series short list.

The play pays homage to victims and survivors of the Robb Elementary School shooting. Penn said the work gives voice to people impacted by the tragedy and sparks conversation about how to end gun violence.

Mendell Morgan participated in the community discussion that followed the play’s debut reading in January 2023. Morgan was director of Uvalde’s El Progreso Memorial Library when the shooting occurred. He decided to keep the library open the morning after the atrocity.

“I didn’t want to show disrespect for those who had died or those who were injured or grieving. Yet I didn’t feel that just closing and shutting it down was the right answer,” Morgan said. “I wanted the library to be a refuge, a place where people could come.”

The longtime Uvaldean said Penn’s play calls audiences to action. “It just makes us all feel back in that time, back in the immediacy of it. And the reality of the horror of what happened is that we don’t want it to ever happen ever again, here or anywhere else, to anyone’s child.”

REMEMBERING BOTHAM

The first full-length play Penn wrote after graduate school centered on another Texas tragedy, the murder of Botham Jean.

In September 2018, off-duty Dallas police officer Amber Guyger shot and killed Jean, who had been sitting in the living room of his Dallas apartment, eating a bowl of ice cream.

“If you can’t be safe in your home, on your couch eating ice cream?” Penn said. “For African Americans, that’s the last place that was left.”

After the trial began, Judge Tammy Kemp turned her attention to the rear of the courtroom before saying, “And why are the people locked out? This is the people’s courtroom. Let the people come inside.”

That moment was the impetus for Penn’s For Bo: A Play Inspired by the Murder of Botham Jean by Officer Amber Guyger.

“If you can’t be safe in your home, on your couch eating ice cream? For African Americans, that’s the last place that was left.”
Ayvaunn Penn

The judge “wasn’t talking to me,” Penn said. “But it almost felt like a call to action.”

For Bo took a winding path to the stage. In February 2020, the play debuted as a staged reading with a cast composed of Theatre TCU students.

“It was wonderful for them to have an opportunity to engage, to put to work what they’re learning in class. To listen to them talk about how meaningful it was to employ their craft toward examining a real-life current event and portray someone not far from their age” was extremely gratifying as their professor and collaborator, Penn said.

With its initial live performance canceled due to the pandemic, For Bo was also developed into a short film featuring nearly 300 images from volunteer artists. The film adaptation was selected for a Lone Star Film Festival special screening at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. It also screened at the Silicon Valley African Film Festival in 2021, earning an honorable mention.

Nijel Smith, who played Bo in the staged reading and virtual production, said he still gets chills when thinking about what happened to Jean. “Coming from a very small town in Tennessee, any kind of raising your voice, that just doesn’t happen,” he said. “To be able to have a vehicle in which I could then feel like I was producing my own change, my own voice, my own screaming as loud as I can … it was challenging, it was rewarding, and it was honoring in all of the senses.”

In 2024, Penn received a $20,000 TCU Invests in Scholarship grant to help stage For Bo at Dallas’ Lyric Stage. The award helped fund everything from assistant stage managers to costumes. Remaining expenses — including light and sound design — were covered by the nonprofit SheDFW, which hosted the play’s full production debut in September. The organization advocates for gender equity by uplifting women, transgender and nonbinary voices in the theater industry.

“There’s poetry, there’s dance in this show. There’s music,” said Sarah Powell, executive producer of SheDFW. Penn “has so many facets that she is capable of expressing as an artist.”

Powell also performed in a staged reading of For the Love of Uvalde at Fort Worth’s Stage West Theatre in May.

“I was just floored by the fact that she had taken all of these things and melded them together symphonically to create her play,” Powell said.

While For Bo incorporates fictional elements, it illuminates a traumatic experience for the Dallas-Fort Worth community.

A photograph of a TCU theatre professor standing on stage in Fort Worth's Jerita Foley Buschman Theatre, directing a rehearsal for her play, "For Bo."

Ayvaunn Penn refers to poetry, rhythm and dance as her “triad of storytelling.” All three are woven into her award-winning work, “For Bo.”

“This show is not about bashing police officers,” Penn wrote in an August Instagram post. “For Bo is, however, an inspired-by glimpse into a very real and very tragic moment in time.”

The timing of the play’s Dallas debut was meaningful. September is not only the month Jean died but also the month he was born. Guyger, who received a 10-year murder sentence, came up for parole last September. Her release was denied.

Smith, now working as an actor in New York, said For Bo should be shared with more audiences. “It needs to be done. I’m glad there is buzz, that there are eyes, because that’s one thing that we especially talked about was that there needs to be conversation.”

SEE MENTOR, BE MENTOR

Much as Nottage and Hwang influenced Penn at Columbia, Penn has inspired her pupils.

Smith said he was surprised when Penn asked about his future aspirations, only to suggest several nonprofit and professional opportunities to him that same day. “I still had two years left to graduate.”

On stage, Penn said, she gives actors the space to make imprints on her work.

“She allowed us room as artists to continue to find the nuances in it and to find the love and humanity in something so tragic,” said TCU alumna Jaden Dominique, who played Jean’s mother in For Bo. “There was a song she had written for the show, and she was like, ‘Hey, Jaden. What is your interpretation of it?’ Then I was able to come up with my version, and we ended up using that.”

The professor has also had a hand in developing the culture around campus at large, serving as the sponsor of the student organization Theatre TCU Black Excellence. Founded in 2019, the organization “envisioned a safe space to educate and showcase prolific works written for and about Black artists’ historical impact and experience,” according to its website.

TCU graduate Ashley Parks, co-director of For Bo, was among the 11 founding members. First-year students “who came in later years would be like, ‘Oh, yeah. Part of why I chose TCU is because I saw that Theatre TCU Black Excellence was a thing. So I knew I had somewhere to go, somewhere to be, somewhere I would feel accepted and safe if I chose TCU.’ ”