Coming to Footscray Community Arts next month is the world premiere season of I Met An Angel Named Jacques. It is the latest work by renowned multidisciplinary artist Gideon D. Wilonja and explore how love, ambition, and ego collide, especially in queer Black lives where identity and desire are always under some kind of scrutiny.
For Wilonja, the play really came from a place of restlessness. “I was thinking a lot about grief, about the silences between Black mothers and their queer sons, and about the complicated dynamics of love when shame and power are in the room,” he says. “I felt compelled to write it because these stories don’t often make it onto the stage Black queer lives that are messy, contradictory, brilliant, and bruised. I wanted to create a space where those contradictions could exist unapologetically.”
At its heart the play is about grief, power, and the stories we inherit. It looks at how visibility can feel violent, how whiteness becomes destructive when it can’t control, and how intimacy can be both salvation and danger. “What I want to say is that survival is not clean, it’s tangled, it’s layered, and it’s deeply human.”
The work is deeply personal for Wilonja because it is rooted in the queer Black experience. It’s also about anyone who’s ever been caught between wanting to love and needing to survive.
Wilonja would love for audiences to leave questioning the stories we tell about power, who gets to hold it, who gets to narrate it, and who gets erased in the process. “I want conversations about the cost of silence, about what it means to inherit trauma, and about how love can exist in the most fractured spaces,” he says. “For me, these conversations are important because they make space for voices that are too often left out of the cultural canon.”
The idea for the work had been with Wilonja for years in fragments, images and voices. He admits that it wasn’t until the last year that it really crystallised into a play. “The biggest challenge was holding the balance between the real life and the mythic, making sure the story felt intimate but also larger than life. A discovery along the way was how much the structure of the play, its flashbacks, its voicemails, its dreamlike flow could mirror the way trauma actually works, looping back on itself.”
When asked what about the piece makes him most happy, Wilonja says simply, the fact that it exists. “That these Black characters, complicated, flawed, beautiful, are stepping onto a stage and taking up space. There’s joy in knowing the play holds both pain and love, and that audiences will get to experience the fullness of that.”
Wilonja is both the writer and an actor in the piece, and he admits that wearing dual hats is definitely a challenge. “Writing is where I wrestle with the ideas, and acting is where I surrender to them. I ultimately chose to act in it because the character felt so deeply familiar, I wanted to embody that vulnerability and power that he carries. But I also surround myself with incredible collaborators I trust, so I can let go of the writer’s voice when I’m on stage.”
Wilonja took inspiration for the work from many sources. Basquiat – his way of making beauty out of chaos, of turning wounds into colour and energy. Tennessee Williams for his poetic intensity and August Wilson for the way he captures community, memory, and history in such a visceral way. James Baldwin and Toni Morrison are always there in the background too. Musically, the play carries the rhythm of jazz, disco, soul and gospel.
When pushed to choose one overall inspiration, Wilonja hesitates and says, it’s hard to choose one. “The poetic fire of Tennessee Williams, the grounded truth of August Wilson, the visual frenzy of Jean-Michel Basquiat all of them seep into this play. And Nina Simone, always, her voice threads through the work like a prayer. Each of these artists taught me that beauty and pain can live side by side, and that’s very much the spirit of this piece.”
A poetic, bruising dive into the ways we love, I Met An Angel Named Jacques is a tale about the ache for validation, facing your demons, and the dangerous comfort of familiar pain. Exploring the incessant human need for validation and the lengths we go to find it; it’s an electric love story that hates romance.
Says Wilonja, “I’d say come ready to feel. This isn’t a play that keeps you at a distance, it pulls you into the mess of love, grief, and power. It’s theatre that dares to be vulnerable, daring, and unapologetically queer. And honestly, it’s a story that will stay with you long after the lights go out.”
October 1 – 4
Bookings: www.footscrayarts.com/event/i-met-an-angel-named-jacques
