Script Spotlight: The Harlem Renaissance by Lashonda Beauregard

In recent decades, time travel stories have become their own sub-genre of science fiction for movies, TV series, and books. Playwright Lashonda Beauregard has brought time travel from a book she wrote to the stage with her script “The Harlem Renaissance Time Traveler's Diary.”

Instead of taking modern characters back in time, though, Lashonda’s inventive story brings a young jazz pianist forward in time from 1927 to 2016. The Harlem Renaissance was a real time and place in American history. From the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression, the Harlem neighborhood in New York City became the center of black culture, featuring great new works of poetry, painting, sculpture, and dance, along with jazz and swing music.

“I was fascinated by this movement in the 1920s by African Americans,” Lashonda told us. “I always loved the jazz and glamor of the 1920s, and I wanted the main character to be a musician.”

Featuring fun roles for as many as 18 characters, Lashonda’s 30-minute plays follows West Barrington from a sticky situation on New Year’s Eve 1926 to the astonishment of waking up in a Harlem he does not recognize in 2016. With a little help from a friend, West must figure out what happened in his own time and what he can do to fix it if he ever gets back.

Lashonda would love to time travel to the Harlem Renaissance herself, but she also wouldn’t mind stopping by the 1980s for a day to check out the music and style she loves from that decade with her own eyes.