What “Hell’s Kitchen” Reveals About Black Women in Theater

Editor’s Note: This story includes spoilers about the Broadway play Hell’s Kitchen.
When the curtains rise, the lights brighten on the Broadway stage—transporting the audience to an elevator emitting vibrant colors. Rich piano music pulses as Hell’s Kitchen’s cast of radiant characters stride onstage.

Hell’s Kitchen, the loosely based on Alicia Keys’ upbringing, follows 17-year-old Ali (Maleah Joi Moon) as she searches for purpose and freedom in ’90s Manhattan. Ali’s being raised by Jersey (Shoshana Bean), her overprotective single mother who Ali believes is “suffocating” her.

As a Black woman, who’s also biracial, grew up in the ’90s, and navigated early adulthood in New York City, I was enthralled by the show’s colors and effervescent characters, some of whom have curly hair like mine. Within the musical, Keys’ familiar, soulful songs reverberate and shatter spaces that diminish women while making space for vulnerability to become the loudest melody.

While Hell’s Kitchen’s premise is promising, the perspective of Black women slowly withers away as other characters’ development and traumas are prioritized. When Ali meets Knuck (Chris Lee), a man who drums a bucket near her apartment, she develops a crush on him, though it is unclear why they’ve fallen for each other. “What y’all even got in common?” Ali’s friends ask her, before saying, “Don’t waste energy on this.”

Their relationship quickly becomes unhealthy: Ali follows him to his job at a construction site, while he lurks outside her apartment. Though Jersey says they are “babies in grown-up bodies,” the reality is Knuck is in his 20s, while Ali has just barely passed the. Their relationship reaches a boiling point when Ali sneaks Knuck into her apartment when her mother’s not home. Though Knuck knows he shouldn’t be there, the musical portrays Ali as the sexual instigator: “[Jersey’s] at work, we got plenty of time,” she tells Knuck. “Let’s do it, baby.”

When Jersey walks in on them, she calls the police, who arrest Knuck without explicitly charging him with a crime. Since Ali supposedly didn’t tell Knuck her actual age and Black men, including Knuck, are overpoliced, Jersey’s actions are framed as a betrayal. “Every time she [Jersey] tries to speak to me, I remember what she did to Knuck,” Ali says.

In her angst, Ali turns to her piano teacher, Miss Liza Jane (Kecia Lewis), who belts a heart-wrenching tribute to her son and all the Black people who have been murdered by the police. However, juxtaposing Jane’s son’s murder with Knuck’s arrest feels manipulative, especially considering that .

Both realities can be true: Knuck’s history with the police is dehumanizing, and Ali’s unspoken trauma in her problematic affair with him (and within systems) also matters. By prioritizing one struggle over another, Black women’s traumas, triumphs, and stories are silenced. In essence, Ali becomes an audience member—a vessel for the people and systems around her rather than a stand-alone character. I left the theater asking, “Who’s Ali? Why was she portrayed that way?”

Theater’s Minstrel Show Roots

Theater’s depiction of Black women has deep roots in that reinforced Jim Crow segregation and reduced Black people to stereotypes. In a 2011 paper, historian , Ph.D., writes that these shows fueled negative characterizations of Black women in theater and broader culture, including perpetuating stereotypes such as the oversexualized, aggressive “jezebel” and the “mammy,” who’s a “natural caretaker.”

In the 1960s and ’70s, Black women playwrights began producing plays that resisted these dehumanizing characteristics and offered a more layered worldview. “Women playwrights of the Black Arts Movement followed a tradition of Black women intellectuals who actively resisted controlling images of Black womanhood,” writes La Donna L. Forsgren, Ph.D., in her 2018 book, . Rather than reinforcing “distorted images of Black womanhood,” these playwrights, including Pearl Cleage and Ntozake Shange, used art to challenge and complicate the portrayal of Black women as “scapegoats for the ills within Black communities.”

Forsgren argues that through plays such as For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1976) and Mad at Miles: A Blackwoman’s Guide to Truth (1990), playwrights began focusing more on Black families rather than solely Black men while also revealing hidden truths about Black women’s traumas and joys.

There might be no better example of this approach than The Color Purple, an award-winning play adapted from Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1982 book that explores three Black women’s experiences with sexism, racism, and intimate-partner violence. While the book’s film adaptation in 1985 for its portrayal of Black men, remains a touchstone for Black women seeking understanding of themselves and their experiences.

“When it was first released in 1985, The Color Purple was a cinematic outlier,” NPR host Aisha Harris notes in a . “For the first time, many Black women saw a movie that reflected their own experiences at home. Characters like Celie and the free-spirited Shug, who’s played by Margaret Avery, or Sofia, the self-assured force of nature who’s played by Oprah Winfrey. They were women who had seen or experienced abuse firsthand and pushed to seek happiness in spite of it all.”

Yet even plays that don’t feature explicit stereotypes about Black women can be harmful. In the musical Hamilton, Sally Hemings, the woman Thomas Jefferson enslaved, was only portrayed briefly caring for Jefferson. Also, the young Maria Reynolds (white in real life, but not in Hamilton) seduces the older Hamilton—before trapping him in a scandal, the very epitome of the “jezebel.”

While not all theater characters require tragic backstories, plays should depict Black women as layered—not foil characters.

Trauma-Informed Theater Practices

Though musicals purvey joy, there’s also a responsibility to be trauma-informed. Theater productions should consult mental health professionals, scholars, and even members of the production itself. In May, , Hell’s Kitchen’s lead actor, publicly revealed her battles with depression. “I wasn’t getting out of bed,” she told The New York Times. “I was missing class … it got really bad.” Imagine if Moon, with this lived experience, helped write Ali’s journey.

Broadway plays haven’t often done this work, though the jukebox musical Jagged Little Pill is an exception. In 2021, after the play’s producers , they and revisited the script. They also with mental health organizations, recognizing the impact that theater has on trauma. “We are very proud of the show we made and its transformative power,” the lead producers said in a statement. “It is precisely because we have made this show about these charged and nuanced issues—a show about radical empathy and truth-telling, about protest and vulnerability—we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard.”

Even if Hell’s Kitchen’s writer, Kristoffer Díaz, isn’t solely responsible for Ali’s character arc, playwrights should be trained to understand trauma responses so they can better be conveyed onstage. Perhaps Ali made these choices because women often blame themselves for trauma—because it gives them control when the world feels out of control.

Imagine if Miss Liza Jane told Ali that she wasn’t responsible for Knuck’s trauma and suggested support beyond the piano? What if playwrights held characters like Knuck accountable and showed how systems and environments inform a character’s choices?

There are some organizations, coalitions, and producers attempting to address these issues, including , , , and

In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, more than 300 theatermakers of color released “,” a statement demanding “a more equitable and safe space for BIPOC communities in our nation and inside of the American Theater.” The statement—which holds the theater industry accountable for actions such as dangling “opportunities like carrots before emerging BIPOC artists … at the expense of [their] art and integrity”—offers a number of demands. One such demand is for productions to “provide therapists or counselors on site for the duration of a rehearsal process and production run when producing/programming content that deals with racialized experiences, and most especially racialized trauma.” Another demand asks for theater companies to diversify the plays they offer by not having the BIPOC plays in any given season centered solely on “trauma and pain.”

If Hell’s Kitchen is any indication, theater is still struggling to meet these proposed standards more than four years later. While more than 100 theater organizations have —making changes that lessen the harm BIPOC performers, producers, and directors experience—there is still more work to do to create a more equitable theater industry.

Theater professionals don’t just imitate life—they shape it. Keys said she crafted Hell’s Kitchen , so its writing should remind audiences that women’s inner “” of bright colors shouldn’t dim because people around them are struggling to find theirs.

Dominique Mann is a writer, former NBC journalist, and Obama White House alum. She has also been a producer for CBS and BET News. Her work has been featured in publications such as Glamour magazine, and she has been recognized in Essence magazine and The Boston Globe, among other outlets. Dominique recently founded a production company, As Any Mann Productions, which empowers women of color in film and other storytelling mediums. For most of her life, Dominique has also focused on community work, from volunteering translations for the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, to grassroots organizing, to youth mentorship. Dominique grew up in Massachusetts and graduated from Columbia University.

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