MEMPHIS, Tenn. – A two-hour stage play depicting the life of a once troubled woman conjured up memories that seemed all too real to Wanda Faye Taylor-Wilson, who watched herself being played by actors with grit and emotional fervor. Written and directed by Taylor-Wilson, the play, titled “Lord! Heal My Brokenness,” premiered Oct. 5 at Scheidt Family Performing Arts Center on the University of Memphis campus.
The stage play is a kind of biopic or an honest interpretation of Taylor-Wilson’s life — from dysfunction to topsy-turvy to a drug-laden world of dope pushing and promiscuity. Some scenes invoked painful memories, she said, particularly the one where her stepfather, played by Paul Vance, violently assaulted her mother, Linda Thomas, whom Angela Rogers was able to play with relative ease. “I was about seven years old,” recalled Taylor-Wilson, now 50. “I begged him not to hurt my mom. He started fighting her in the living room and then dragged her to the bathroom. He broke her arm after slamming the toilet seat down on it.”
Helpless to do anything other than watch in fear, the young Wanda Faye couldn’t protect her mother from her stepfather’s violent rage. “That’s when I really cried,” said Taylor-Wilson while watching the scene unfold. “I was very emotional.” Thomas sat in the audience watching Rogers play her as a battered wife. “It didn’t bother me at all,” she said. “That was a long time ago, and I put it in the back of my mind.” But then while Thomas’ ex-husband was rampaging through the house in the scene and inflicting pain on her, she said, “I did all I could to protect my daughter.” Now she’s proud that Taylor-Wilson was able to let it go. “She didn’t let it affect her life,” Thomas said. “She turned it all around.”
But not before Wanda Faye found herself heading down a meandering path of destruction at gallop speed. Sequoia Watson appeared in latter scenes playing Wanda Faye, the young adult, who grew up in both LeMoyne Gardens and Cleaborn Homes public housing, returned to the ‘hood, and grappled with homelessness. Then she started selling drugs, night clubbing, drinking, battling addiction, running afoul of the police, and got pregnant. “I smoked dope up until the ninth month with both of my daughters,” she said.
Wanda Faye’s life was topsy-turvy, had gone completely off the rail. Then she found God at 21. That scene was called “Hope Changes Everything.” Watson said she had one month to remember her lines. “I got the script a month before the play,” she said. “It was challenging. I’d never played a huge role, but I pushed my way through it.” She’d had roles in several plays before Taylor-Wilson had asked her to join the cast. “Wanda said I was the perfect person to play her as an adult,” said Watson, 37, an educator, author, coach, professional model, dancer, and businesswoman. “I felt honored,” she said. “I just wanted to deliver the message.”
A total of 35 cast members delivered the message — each one playing their part in telling the whole story of young Wanda Faye’s struggle to survive and succeed against the odds. Kenisha James, her oldest daughter, will never forget the bathtub scene. She’d heard her mother speak candidly about it many times before watching it play out in front of her eyes. James was five when her mother, hearing a voice within, demanded she drown her baby. Whatever stupor had her bound surrendered to a superior spirit that led her to remove her daughter from the tub and out of harm’s way.
“I think about it often,” said James, now 35. “There’s a sense of sadness and there’s a sense of relief. Anybody would feel sad knowing that a parent had thoughts of killing them.” She continued, “But then I’m relieved that she didn’t throw away her life. If she had, she wouldn’t be able to continue impacting lives like she’s doing at the shelter. Her legacy would have ended earlier.”
Taylor-Wilson is the president/CEO of Ladies in Need Can Survive, Inc., a 501(c)3 transitional home for troubled women who, like her former self, struggled with drugs, homelessness, and trauma. Proceeds from the play benefited LINCS. “You don’t have to stay in your trauma,” said James, a licensed esthetician and owner of a spa and wax studio in Clarksville, Tenn. “If my mom didn’t have a desire to be better, my sister and I wouldn’t be our best selves.”
Both James and her sister, Charmecia James, 30, had bit parts earlier in the play and watched it from the audience once they’d finished. Taylor-Wilson, who is married to Derrick Wilson, said there is a way out of trauma. “I feel that sharing my story will provide hope to individuals who may be going through what I went through.”
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