When I asked Mirirai, who plays Zambia in The Blood Quilt, to talk about the physical demands of the role, the actor replied: “My body is certainly getting a workout every night.” That workout derives not only from being part of an intense two-and-a-half-hour drama eight times a week but from the character Zambia herself. “She’s not fully comfortable in her body,” Mirirai said. “She’s 15, and things are happening in her body and she doesn’t know how she feels about that. As a Muslim, she can cover up as she adapts to the changes.”
Mirirai is quick to point out that even with the physical demands she enjoys doing the role. “There’s something really exciting about getting to be a queer Muslim teenager who has a rebellious spirit. And that spirit doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s connected to her aunties. Zambia is a mosaic of all of them – auntie Gio smokes weed, auntie Clementine has firm principles, auntie Amber is ambitious.”
To friends who come see The Blood Quilt Mirirai mentions that “Zambia is the version of myself I would have been in high school if I wasn’t on the Amber track.” In Framingham, Massachusetts, where she grew up (she was born in Zimbabwe), Mirirai was on the school newspaper, dance team, and did sports “until theater took over the sports part.” Although her parents worried about the practical challenges of their daughter pursuing a life in acting, they were generally supportive. But in one key way they differed from Zambia’s mother and aunts: “I would not have survived in my house if I spoke back to my parents.”
Mirirai’s formation as an actor began in school plays and continued in college on Long Island and hit an early peak when she won a Lortel award for her performance in the 2017 off-Broadway hit “School Girls; or the African Mean Girls Play.” I asked Mirirai to compare that work with The Blood Quilt: they both feature all-female casts.
“Like every show I’ve done, both Schoolgirls and The Blood Quilt are gifts. I always find some Venn diagram between myself and the characters that I get to play. With Zambia it’s the relationship with older women in a family. With Mercy in Schoolgirls it was the comedy. Although Zambia also has a lot of funny lines.”
Mirirai continued her comparisons: “Until we got to the dense part at the end,” Mirirai replied, “Schoolgirls was mostly comedic. It didn’t feel as heavy as this current behemoth does. But the final moment of Schoolgirls is deflating – we look at a TV and don’t see ourselves represented. Whereas the ritual and purification we experience at the finale of The Blood Quit is a release. I end the evening feeling good.”
That Mirirai ends on that emotional high point owes a lot to her castmates. “I think we’ve done a really great job of having a healthy love and appreciation for each other as human beings and as artists,” she said. “It would be a lot harder to do such a demanding drama without that mutual appreciation.” Mirirai added: “I also think I was more prepared to play Zambia in my life right now. Since ‘Schoolgirls’ I think I’ve developed a little more technique. And I’m able to draw on that in The Blood Quilt when things get a little too real.”
Brendan Lemon is a freelance journalist in New York.
