Guanahani is an imaginative retelling of a hero(ine)’s journey inspired by folktales from the African diaspora.

Birthday blues can be hard to beat. Every year of my twenties, the tears would flow on schedule a few hours before the big day. It felt like there was a haunted cuckoo clock jutting out of the walls of my mind to mock me with unanswerable questions, Who are you? What have you accomplished? Is it all downhill from here? Turning 25 was the hardest birthday in the decade. Sometime around 24 1/2 I read about a scientific study that found that men consider women to be their most attractive at age 23, which meant my heyday had already come and gone without me even knowing it. I fully believed this dubious science and spent my day wailing on the phone with friends and checking my face in the mirror. It’s easy then, to empathize with Guanahani’s Ophelia. All I had to do was make peace with the process of incremental aging, Ophelia’s big day was significantly more arduous. 

Guanahani, which is a play written and directed by Neka Cecilia Knowles — an MFA candidate at The New School — is about Ophelia’s epic journey. She’s a 20-something (and a March Pisces!) who’s been raised by her grandma in Jamestown, VA and most importantly, she’s deeply unhappy. Like Belle from Beauty and the Beast, she’d much rather go in to town to find books but her grandmother is planning for courtship and marriage. Ophelia’s sure that there’s much to learn about life and her own identity before she weds a gentleman caller and her recurring nightmare of her mother running through the woods with a baby is becoming harder to ignore. No one knows what happened to her mother after she gave birth to Ophelia and the fact that everyone around is so tight-lipped about the truth drives Ophelia to draw her own controversial conclusions.

When a dark spidery creature appears in her dream to deliver a mysterious book, Olivia’s suspicions are confirmed. The birth certificate tucked into the pages reveal that Olivia’s father is Black. When confronted, her grandmother retorts that Ophelia’s mother “laid with a demon”— it’s unclear if her grandma means this individually or if she believes all Black people are the devil. Just before Ophelia can announce her dramatic departure, she’s sternly kicked out and coldly informed that she never should’ve existed in the first place. 

Thus, Ophelia’s quest begins by force. In place of a yellow brick road winding its way to Oz, she and her former maid, Sandy, follow a path of deep blue indigo flowers to find a Gullah Geechee village. They’re stopped in the forest by Tawana who’s used magic to contort the path into a circle, intentionally obscuring the location of the priestess who lives there. The priestess issues a warning and sends the trio off on their journey. Each location seems to reveal another clue and add yet another leg to the trip. They journey from the forest, to the sea, to the ocean floor, to a mystical alternate reality and the stakes only get higher. It is revealed that Ophelia is the fruition of a thousand year old prophecy that will determine the balance of darkness and light. One of two demi-god children born on the same day has to die — it’s either her or Tawana. While the three make an unlikely team, Ophelia, Sandy, and Tawana move “forward, upward, and onward together” to determine the fate of their universe.

As director, Knowles is able to do ‘a lot with a little’, using august projections, well-timed sound effects, and the bare bones props of a white box theater space to transport Ophelia between the real world and the depths of her own dreams. There’s even a choreographed fight scene! Sandy, played by Wallis Meghan Rolle, balances Ophelia’s frequent emotional outbursts and drives the story forward while Ophelia, played by Azureé Marcano, mostly whines. Molly McInturff, who plays both Ophelia’s grandmother and mother, is fully believable as a hardened elite and a power-hungry misanthrope who saw her daughter as a means to an end. 

Epics are demanding, on the page, and even more so on stage. The genre requires that the hero overcome many hurdles and winding roads, but successful execution relies on capturing and keeping the audience’s attention until the very end. Ophelia’s journey is long and arduous and the clues we need to piece together the story drip out, at times, too slowly. Still, it’s a lot to take in. Knowles has woven a family tree that’s interracial and inter-divine. Ophelia’s father is Eshu, the trickster God in the Yoruba tradition. Yemayá and the Kracken are her aunt and uncle. Anansi, who is also the spider from her dreams, is her cousin. While the show may have been overly ambitious in its intention, it delivers on theme: part of knowing who you are starts with knowing where you come from and in the face of any circumstance, you can go further with friends. 

Luckily for Ophelia, her friends were able to look past her dramatics. It’s not ideal to spend your birthday sailing the Middle Passage and it’s not fair that she has a hole in her heart in the shape of her mother’s love. It’s her party, she can cry if she wants to. Let her blow out her candles and make a wish. From the other side of 30, I can assure Ophelia that the control and self-knowledge she’s looking for may only be a couple more birthdays away. For Ophelia and for Neka, as she celebrates the completion of her MFA, things are just starting to get good.      

blacklove 🖤 and starlight 🌟 

Guanahani was written and directed by Neka Cecilia Knowles and performed by Qetsiya Babineaux, Wallis Meghan Rolle, Eden Jing Rolle, Noah Murray, Harper Jones, Molly McInturff, and Azuree Marcano. The play was presented by BellyLaugh Ent. at TheaterLab from May 8-11, 2025. I received a comp ticket for this performance.