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“The Black Clown,” [Co-creator and performer] Mr. Tines said in a recent interview, “is our most earnest attempt to realize Hughes’s project for making the larger humanity understand a single person, and thus understand itself.”

There is a question at the end of the play: how can we make change where we are. A lot of people might say, ‘I’m just one person, how can I make change.’ There are many tables of power that we sit within…if my play can get someone to say, ‘Where am I, and how can I make change?,” I’d love for that to happen.

The characters talk about moving forward, but instead go backward, a contradiction Greenidge compares to the 2016 election and the pundits basically Monday morning quarterbacking, asking, “How did we get here?”…Around the same time, Greenidge “began to really get interested in democracy and the different spaces we occupy, in our homes, but also at work and the spaces we choose to occupy that keep our lives running—local governments, church groups,” she says.

“The play is really a microcosm of how oftentimes those of us in the progressive corner of the world may think we’re always doing the right thing,” [Playwright Kirsten] Greenidge says, “but we tend to live our lives without a lot of deep introspection about how we can make choices geared towards the greater good of those around us.” Issues of race, class, and gender play out in sometimes surprising ways in the play. “The people who have money and influence and power are perhaps not the people you expect.”

The new musical tells how one person, then another, word of mouth ignited the 2011 uprising that deposed Mubarak. The play blends real news footage [such as] the sounds of cheering protesters in Tahrir Square with musical recreations onstage.

“At first, I wanted to figure out how accurate is this play about Egypt. Then I figured out we’re still trying to figure out what happened in Egypt. There is no truth, there is no consensus. If this play becomes even half as popular as Hamilton or Rent, it could have a considerable influence on the way people think about what happened during the Arab Spring, and then, why it went so wrong.”