by Mell P
At CSP New Works Fest on December 6, playwright Petron Brown unveiled a raw, unsettling, and deeply promising work-in-progress: Stand Right There and Perish, or (May I Never Lose You). Directed by Aixa Kendrick, the piece explores the psychic wreckage of a family fractured by abandonment, grief, and the relentless hauntings of the past.
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From the moment the lights dim, the audience is thrust into a landscape stripped bare, literally. A son, Ali, returns after 15 years to find his childhood home reduced to a concrete foundation. What remains is a father with a goat being tended like a household pet, and the corrosive silence of years left unexplained. Torrekke Evan (Ali), Equiano Mosieri (Charlie), and the playwright himself, Petron Dee Brown, deliver performances that feel lived-in, textured, and emotionally dangerous.
Brown’s script navigates a layered emotional terrain: the son’s urgency to reclaim pieces of the life he fled; the father’s refusal, born of trauma, pride, and fear, to reopen old wounds; and the unexpected intimacy simmering between Ali and Charlie, a Rastafarian understudy-like presence who knows more than he says and feels more than he’s allowed to express.
The introduction of Rastafarian history, Haile Selassie lore, and the philosophical tug-of-war between faith and fatalism enriches the work, though still in ways that feel incomplete, ripe for deeper exploration as the script evolves. What is clear, even in its current form, is Brown’s commitment to interrogating the mythologies Black men inherit and the emotional vocabularies they’re denied.
One of the play’s most searing moments lands quietly: Ali asks his father, “Do you see me in you too?” It is a line weighted with the need to be acknowledged, not just as a son but as a reflection of a man who refused to raise him. When the truth finally emerges that the father sent him away out of terror of the storms that took the lives of his mother and siblings, believing death was stalking his family, the emotional architecture of the play snaps into focus. Love, in this family, is indistinguishable from fear.
As storms gather both above and within the characters, the play escalates into revelations of violence. Ali confesses to being the wanted “Sea Career Killer” by authorities in the U.S. It feels like the culmination of a life shaped by exile. Charlie’s long-suppressed love for Ali surfaces in a stolen kiss, only to end in tragedy. By the final scene, when the father walks away, the title’s plea “may I never lose you”, lands as both incantation and curse.
What Brown has created is a story about broken inheritance: emotional, spiritual, and physical. A story about men who do not know how to hold each other without hurting each other. A story about grief so unprocessed it mutates into superstition, violence, and self-erasure.
Though still in development, Stand Right There and Perish already carries the bones of something potent, an excavation of Caribbean masculinity, migration, and mourning that refuses to offer easy redemption. If this early staging is any indication, the finished work may well become one of the most haunting new plays to emerge from the diaspora.
