Little Shop of Horrors turns 40 this year, and its genius hasn’t dimmed for a single moment. On the surface, it’s a gleefully absurd horror comedy featuring a carnivorous plant, a hapless florist, a sadistic dentist, and a hip, street savvy Greek chorus with mini fros. But underneath all that camp and spectacle is something sharper and more honest. And I am thrilled to be a part of this show for the third time! 

I first voiced Audrey II in 2005, a Black queer kid in a rural high school who had stumbled into something extraordinary: the stage. I hadn’t expected it to change my life. I’d signed up for theatre the way teenagers sign up for things, half-curious and looking for somewhere to belong. What I found was the one place I could be fully, unapologetically myself. Theatre didn’t ask me to shrink. It didn’t ask me to explain my identity or justify my presence. It handed me a script and said “become.” 

I returned to the plant in graduate school. A different city, a different chapter, a different version of myself, more certain of who I was, less interested in doing anything other than what was on the page. But the gift was the same. The rehearsal room still felt like permission. Audrey II, that magnificent, manipulative, blood-drinking, flesh-devouring creature from outer space, still felt like freedom. 

Now I’m back. A third time. Voicing Audrey II for High Tide, and the feeling that has settled over these rehearsals is difficult to name but impossible to ignore. It isn’t nostalgia exactly, though there is plenty of that. It’s something closer to recognition. Every time I step into that role, I bring a different self to it, and somehow the character is large enough to hold all of them. The high schooler who needed a place to belong. The graduate student who was learning to stand in his own truth. And now this version of me, a professor, a community member, a person who has spent years thinking carefully about identity and belonging and what it costs to be fully seen. Audrey II doesn’t care about any of that pedigree, of course. The plant just wants to be fed. But I find that returning to this role at this point in my life has given me something I didn’t expect: perspective. I can feel the distance between who I was and who I am, and I can feel, just as clearly, everything that stayed the same. The joy of a rehearsal room. The electricity of a live audience. The strange, specific freedom of disappearing into a character so completely that for a moment, nothing outside the story exists. If that’s not a homecoming, I don’t know what is. 

Little Shop will always have a place near and dear to my heart. Not only because it was my entry into the world of theatre, but also because at its core, Little Shop  is a story about what we are willing to give to get what we want. It forces the audience (and the cast) to engage with the questions: What are you willing to sacrifice? Who are you willing to become? And at what point does the thing you’re feeding start feeding on you? For me, there is something quietly radical about the most honest character in the room being a man-eating plant from outer space. But I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about what that says about the rest of us.