Actor-playwright Biko Eisen-Martin takes on legacies of Tupac and Biggie
Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. (aka Biggie Smalls) are hip hop legends, but actor and playwright Biko Eisen-Martin recognized their tragic ends as a take on Shakespearean tragedy.
His play about the pair, "Pac & Biggie Are Dead," opened at BAM House in Oakland this past weekend and runs throughout June.
"I wouldn't call it an existential romp, but more of an existential quest," he says.
He was inspired to write the play while he was acting in a production of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" at the Folger Shakespeare Library theater in Washington D.C.
"It was ripe for an update," he said of Tom Stoppard's 1966 absurdist spin-off of Hamlet. "I started thinking about history, Black history, hip hop history..."
Landing on the intersecting stories of Shakur and Smalls, their lives and deaths were undeniably connected--by situation and circumstance, from a friendship and a rivalry to their respective violent demises.
"Black history nerds know these scenes and their coming to be," says Eisen-Martin. "Also, there's a history of beefs in the culture," pointing to the legendary debate between W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington who famously argued over civil rights or economic independence as the way forward for African Americans.
"Theater nerds know Hamlet," he says, adding a spoiler alert, though suffice it to say, there is a ghost in his play and the mothers of the deceased, Afeni Shakur and Voletta Wallace, also play roles.
"The mother of Hamlet often makes it into Western theater classics," explains Eisen-Martin.
"Pac & Biggie Are Dead" was first produced in 2022 at Philadelphia's Theater in the X and it caught the attention of Oakland's Ayodele Nzinga, director of the Lower Bottom Playaz.
"She got it," says Eisen-Martin. The company comprises the show's cast, which also features actors new to the craft alongside local luminaries, rapper BossLife Big Spence and artist and activist Cat Brooks.
"Pac & Biggie" is one of two Eisen-Martin plays based on real people and events being staged this month in the Bay Area. Eisen-Martin is also directing a June 19 staged reading of his "3rd and Palou," rooted in stories his godmother Ida McCray told him about the Hunters Point Riots of 1966 in San Francisco.
"It's a play I've had in my head for some time," he says. Workshopping the project at the Bayview Opera House, which is near the location of the three-day uprising, sparked by a police shooting of teenager Matthew Johnson, was undeniably synchronistic. As the play developed, Eisen-Martin offered free acting classes at the location and hopes to return with more free classes, readings, and productions.
"It's about creating a foundational space for developing a new generation of artists," he says. "Pumping lifeblood into the scene. The kismet and beauty of having the two plays on at once means more people can be a part of theater of color in the Bay Area."
Eisen-Martin was inclined to draw and paint as a child but first found his artistic expression as a performance poet with Youth Speaks. He was also moved by live theater.
"One of the earliest memories I have is going to a production of 'Native Son' at a community college in the East Bay or Sacramento," he says. "The brother who played Bigger Thomas dedicated his performance to his brother who passed away. The actor was someone I could identify with."
A San Francisco native, Eisen-Martin left the Bay for Brown University for a degree in African studies and a master's in teaching. He returned to teach history at Berkeley High School and act on the stage with California Shakespeare Theater. Encouraged by actor and director L. Peter Callender to study further at the National Theatre Conservatory in Denver, Eisen-Martin has since been cast in film, television and Off Broadway.
"In the course of doing all these plays, I was also a poet, all through my school days," he says. "Writer is one of the characters inside of me: Reading plays, memorizing characters, seeing shows, I started visualizing my own."
Eisen-Martin is also a visual artist who paints when he can.
"Once rehearsal is over, I have open days to paint," he says, though performing typically precludes painting, with one exception.
"It's funny, though, when I do Chekov, I can paint," he says. He's developing a piece in which he plays a painter onstage.
Recently he painted an homage to poet Q.R. Hand on Clarion Alley in San Francisco. His paintings have also been commissioned as book covers, including his brother Tongo Eisen-Martin's award-winning volumes of poetry.
"It's all storytelling as resistance, education, survival, as safe space, as a haven for expressing singular moments and ideas," he says.
"It's an interesting time to keep pushing people's stories, radical stories, revolutionary stories," he says. "People can ask hard questions, about what's going on in the city, what's going on in the country. All great art is like another form of a newspaper or a religious text. It's there to transform you for the better.
"The theater is a place to hold up the mirror for sure," he says. "It's a place to guide the light of the reflections."
The Lower Bottom Playaz's "Pac & Biggie Are Dead" continues through June 30 at BAM House, 1540 Broadway, Oakland. Tickets are $30-$150 at lowerbottomplayaz.com.
"3rd and Palou" is onstage at 7 p.m. June 19 at Ruth Williams Bayview Opera House, 4705 Third St., San Francisco. Admission is free. Visit rwoh.org.