Actor's Express in Atlanta is producing Tarell Alvin McCraney's Choir Boy, running August 8-30, 2026. Actors Brandon L. Smith and Clinton Harris speak to how the play's music and story of a young queer choir leader mirror their own journeys as Black queer men. Director Amanda Washington, the theater's associate artistic director, says the production speaks to the time we’re living in, amid ongoing attacks on queer and civil rights, offering both comfort and a call to confront uncomfortable truths within Black families and communities.

To say that 2016 was a whirlwind for Academy-Award-winning screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney would be an understatement. Five years after the film release of “Moonlight,” based on McCraney’s play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue,” and four years since taking home the top prize of Best Picture during an unprecedented live television mix-up—McCraney’s ascension from Liberty City, Florida, to Chair of Playwriting at The David Geffen Yale School of Drama, to creating the OWN series “David Makes Man”—now in its second season — has made the MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient a creative force of stage and screen. In his first interview with The Reckoning, McCraney opens up about his queer identity, collaborating with director Barry Jenkins to create a masterpiece, being awkward and reveling in going unnoticed on the street, and reactions to the last 20 minutes of “Moonlight,” and why much of it, for him, was troubling.