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At Mosaic Theater, a playwright asks: How do you mourn a man you barely knew?

October 21, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. EDT
Writer-performer Psalmayene 24 at a rehearsal of the play “Dear Mapel” at Baby Wale. (Mosaic Theater Company)

On Oct. 26, when audiences get a first look at “Dear Mapel,” Psalmayene 24’s new one-man show about his relationship with his deceased father — currently in development at Mosaic Theater — the occasion will be no typical workshop.

For one, the familiar workshopping process — in which a scaled-down version of a play is staged and critiqued — has been set aside by Mosaic in favor of a virtual, multimedia-enhanced presentation because of the pandemic.

But Psalmayene 24 also says that this play is a particularly flexible work in progress because he’s still processing its inciting event: the 2014 death of his estranged father, Mapel. As writing the script has bred catharsis, that catharsis has engendered rewrites — with the cycle repeating indefinitely.

“There was just incredible grief, as you can imagine,” the 47-year-old writer-performer says of his father’s death, which he didn’t learn about until 2017. “So this play was created with the spirit of trying to get some sort of closure in that relationship. How can we alter and heal those relationships, even when a parent is deceased? I mean, that’s fascinating to me. I’m still in that process, and I’ve experienced a transformation of my relationship with my father through the making of this piece.”

Earlier this year, Mosaic Theater appointed Psalmayene 24 to a three-year position as playwright in residence, supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Emerson College’s HowlRound Theatre Commons.

Psalmayene 24 promptly identified “Dear Mapel” as the first project of that collaboration. When the pandemic brought on the widespread closing of theaters, he found that the sense of isolation only heightened his desire to complete a project about the thirst for human connection.

“The play is really funny, and really heartbreaking,” says Natsu Onoda Power, the workshop production’s director. “It’s so much about loss and longing for intimacy and never getting it, which, at this moment of the pandemic, we can especially relate [to].”

Psalmayene 24, whose recent writing credits include Solas Nua’s “The Frederick Douglass Project” and Mosaic’s “Les Deux Noirs: Notes on Notes of a Native Son,” has structured “Dear Mapel” as a series of letters — some real, but mostly fictionalized — between himself and his father.

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Growing up in Brooklyn, Psalmayene 24 didn’t meet his father until he was 12 years old. Although they briefly bonded, the pair had a falling out and didn’t cross paths for another 17 years, after which they reconnected, then again lost touch. Each letter in “Dear Mapel” reflects on an episode from Psalmayene 24’s life — an incident of racial abuse in his youth, his first sexual experience and the meeting of his wife, among them — and how not having his father around affected him.

“This is not a unique story in terms of dealing with an absentee father,” Psalmayene 24 says. “But I think what makes it unique are the specific events in my life and really looking at the events in my life through this lens of how his absence has shaped me.”

The virtual workshop will feature excerpts of Psalmayene 24 performing the play at Baby Wale, the Shaw bar owned by Power and her husband, Tom. The performance will be complemented by various elements, including footage from a recent research trip to Brooklyn and music from percussionist Jabari Exum, a D.C. native who was a movement coach for “Black Panther.” Monday’s streaming event will include a virtual, post-performance reception with the artists.

“Most importantly, the star of the workshop is [Psalmayene 24’s] writing and his presence and his performance,” Power says. “So what we’re doing is to try to lift it by not letting this Zoom environment — or streaming environment — get in the way.”

The Mosaic event will feature only the first half of “Dear Mapel,” with Psalmayene 24 planning to workshop the second half next spring at Emerson, safety conditions permitting. From there, he hopes to eventually mount a full production of the play at Mosaic.

Although Psalmayene 24 expects that will come once the theater community has largely returned to its pre-pandemic ways, he can’t now imagine a production that doesn’t incorporate some of the multimedia flourishes created for the virtual workshop.

“The times that we’re living in are sort of co-authoring what the piece is going to be, and even what the form is going to be,” Psalmayene 24 says. “Right now, I feel like there’s this sort of creative cocktail that we’re in right now, which has made for not only an interesting process, but I think it’s going to make for a really original and exciting product as well.”

Dear Mapel

Mosaic Theater. mosaictheater.org.

Dates: Oct. 26 at 7:30 p.m., with video of the performance available through Oct. 31.

Price: Free.