Today we’d like to introduce you to Marla Lou.
Hi Marla, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I am a Haitian-born, NYC-raised luminary, award-winning actor, singer, internationally published muse, creative producer, and community organizer. My credits include: 2015 Jimmy Award Winner; Beautiful: The Carole King Musical; Seven Seconds (Netflix); Flatbush Misdemeanors (Showtime); producer (Theatre Producers of Color ’23); model (Vogue Italia, Oprah Magazine, Savage x Fenty); and community mutual aid organizer as the Founder and CEO of Claim Our Space NOW. As a lifelong liberator and artist, I harness my energy to define the future of Black history. I open portals to heal and conspire toward revolutions that all can embody. All power to the people.
I grew up in the Jehovah’s Witness cult and, after escaping at 21, had to build a home inside myself. This led to a years-long, ritualized healing journey toward liberation. I turn eight in July. Discovering my autonomy made me want to help other people do it for themselves. Through my art, I encourage the Afrikan-Indigenous diaspora to reclaim sovereignty of self and build beyond the limited realities offered by late-stage capitalism. I grew up attending after-school art programs offered by NYC public schools and dance academies made possible through scholarships. It wasn’t until I won the 2015 Best Actress Jimmy Award for my portrayal of Caroline in Caroline, or Change that my professional career as a creative exploded. Since then, I have toured North America with Beautiful: The Carole King Musical and Hadestown, where I performed at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts in Fort Lauderdale.
When the police killing of George Floyd radicalized social media platforms and led to national actions in 2020, I saw a supersaturation of information siloing. This created a mass removal of nuance surrounding abolition politics and practices. Unable to physically participate in New York City based actions, the ancestors helped me dream up a centralized online space that would build and sustain movements dedicated to the design, consolidation, and execution of accessible survival practices.
Claim Our Space NOW was born to elevate individual action into communal practices structured around the dismantling of white supremacy. Today, the organization operates as an intersectional movement and activation hub invested in the community action necessary to save all Afrikan and otherwise oppressed lives. My revolutionary baby is as dynamic as I am and acts as a one-stop shop for deliberate change beyond hashtags and cyclical internet outcry.
My role as Steward (old world language: CEO) makes me the first and only Broadway performer to act as a grassroots community organizer and lead a nonprofit space invested in the global Land Back movement. Theystory!
People describe me as a modern-day griot who breathes life into all rebel spirits circling my orbit. Sovereignty, transformation, and the unapologetic exploration of pleasure are running currents in my creative river. I am a producer of community-oriented performances and events designed to make revolution irresistible outside of commercial theater’s limited parameters. I welcome you with love and gratitude into my homemaking practice to embody liberation, free myself, and free the world.
You’re going to love what you see. Give what you can and take what you need. Share my offerings with someone craving a pleasure revolution today.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Chile, nothing in this life is smooth for a Haitian trans Orpheus like me. My struggle, like every Afrikan-Indigenous body, started in 1642, got worse in 1697, and has been compounding every day since my people finally said enough and fought back. Revolution and rebellion run through my blood, and I am proud to embody this Haitian legacy.
I even had to fight to be born. Trapped in the amniotic fluid of my mother’s womb, I entered this world not breathing. Dr. Janvye, a Jehovah’s Witness, tapped me back to life after an emergency C-section when my mother’s amniotic ocean dried up in Haiti. My spirit is strong, and my ancestors are stronger. They knew I came to this realm to free myself and the world.
Growing up a Jehovah’s Witness in NYC was a struggle in itself. Surveillance. Anti-Blackness. Patriarchy. Think of every system we are resisting today, but refracted through the doctrine of a Christian sect. Yet even through that struggle, my healing since leaving “the faith” has helped me recognize something complicated and true: if it were not for the Witnesses, my education, my political line, and my ability to smell propaganda would not have formed the way they did.
One moment that shaped my life happened when I was four years old. My mother was preached to on the bus by a sister who lived across the street from my future elementary school on the Upper West Side. Otherwise, I would have been zoned to a school in Washington Heights. My family had moved to the States to give us a better life, and that sister confirmed my mother’s participation in the Kingdom Hall while dangling the carrot of a better education for me.
That schooling, powered by the Richard Rodgers School of Arts and Technology, placed me at a powerful intersection. It became the foundation that led to my big break at the Jimmy Awards and, years later, to earning my Computer Science degree. Challenges become blessings when you let ’em.
This framing is what allowed me to alchemize an even harder obstacle, one I would not wish on my worst enemy: being estranged from your mother simply for becoming who you are. This is a reality many queer and trans people experience when they begin living in their truth. For me, it was not only about my sex or gender. It was all of me. I refused alignment with the colonial cult despite its very effective brainwashing – which is the foundation of my collective liberation journey,
As is tradition among Jehovah’s Witnesses, those who are excommunicated are treated as if they no longer exist. Family members and others in the congregation are encouraged to treat you as though you are dead. DEAD and LOST in the secular world.
But my life in the world has been very ALIVE. Vibrant. FOUND in the true meaning of community.
I found home in the collective, in the people who showed me care through mutual aid, skill shares, and intentional time spent helping me liberate myself from my past life. Choosing the hard thing comes with consequences, but knowing it is the right thing is what keeps me going.
My homes may have been taken from me, but they still belong to me.
My struggles have given me the opportunity to build homes big enough to nourish and protect me and those who exist across my many intersections: Haitian, trans, disabled, nonbinary, femme. The list goes on.
This is the alchemy I practice through Claim Our Space NOW and my second revolutionary vessel, Lakay Productions.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Lakay (“lah-kai”) means home in Kreyol Ayisyen.
After spending 10 years building out my commercial portfolio, (Theater, modeling, TV/film, Voiceover), I realized my liberationist values to empower the people were met with accolades and praise until my praxis threatened power structures cemented in the foundation of the master’s house.
LAKAY PRODUCTIONS IS A Reclamation of rituals, self-determination, belonging, and Mother Earth.
Who We Serve:
Lakay Productions is a refuge for creatives who have been cast out of mainstream spaces for their commitment to ANTI-EMPIRE movements like #BLACKLIVESMATTER and the BDS Movement, which is designed to end forced occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the Palestinian people by Israel and the United States.
It serves storytellers without a creative home; the global majority who exist at the margins and fight for liberation; and audiences in need of educational radical media that inspires self-determination and Solidarity building through collective action.
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
My luck is my fate, and I have always been aware of the cosmic golden thread running through everything I do.
When I first got injured on Broadway, my fate was telling me to rest my body and reserve my energy for the revolution. I did not listen. I went back to finish my contract in what I believed was a better body, only to get benched again, even worse than before. Some people would call that bad luck. I see it differently. I see my fate putting me back in my place so I could do the shadow work I had been glossing over during what I call the eight-war week. There is very little time for grounding in the theatre. There certainly is no Broadway survival guide for world builders like me.
And yet, through luck made accessible to me by my team of doctors, comrades, holistic healers, community members, and folks beyond The Great White Way, Broadway’s lesser-known name, I have been able to recover myself for the world stage of Revolution.
Being on Broadway, and the ten years in the industry before ascending to the so-called big leagues of theater, sharpened my craft. They pushed me deeper into my performance and closer to the core of who I am as an artist. Those technical skills are invaluable. To act as a conduit of love, to channel something larger than myself through my body and voice, has been thrilling.
But Broadway also revealed a hard truth.
The message I am carrying is not always the one the audience receives.
So many people do not recognize Hadestown for what it truly is: a radical eco-terrorist, anti-capitalist work of art. Even more troubling, many fail to see that I, the performer, am speaking directly to the role each of us plays in maintaining these hells. Night after night, I stand on that stage calling toward liberation, and still so many walk away entertained instead of transformed.
I want my real message to be heard.
So I will spend my nine final days on Hadestown traveling through Dante’s circles of inferno. Each performance will bring me closer to my fate as I close this chapter with intention, clarity, and grace.
My body is ready again. Stronger than ever.
But Broadway is no longer the stage I am meant to give it to.
The stage I belong on is more radical.
My role in making the revolution irresistible is the performance itself. I am the gorgeous creature flitting here and there, the siren calling you toward the sea of change. Through my voice, my music, and my art, we will dance our way free together.
What I have learned this past year on Broadway, including six months of recovery, is expansive. Far too expansive to hold in one sitting with you here.
But I will share it.
I will speak on all of this and more in Fated Journey.
Stay tuned for updates from my team and me in the Marla Louniverse at MARLALOU.com.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://marlalou.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/marlalou_
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marlalouissaint
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@marlalou_
Image Credits
Andy Henderson
Gracie Meier
