Most Popular Stories

• Miami Dolphins trade McCown for seventh-round pick
• Armando Salguero: Miami Dolphins finally have a game that matters
• UM football turns focus to UF
• Dave Barry: Whatever, it's a field goal
• Miami Dolphins tackle Long ready to face challenges
• Hurricane Gustav roars toward Cuba at Cat 3 strength
• Hurricane Gustav gaining strength, heading toward Cuba
• Miami Dolphins' Brown, Henne shine against Saints
• McCain's veep choice has Florida rewards, risks
• Labor Day in South Florida: heat, humidity, hurricanes

News On The Go

• News by Mobile
• News by Email
• RSS feeds
• Podcasts

THEATER

Channeling Tupac: Miami actor-playwright portrays human side of slain rapper

BY CHRISTINE DOLEN

cdolen@MiamiHerald.com

n the surface, slain rapper Tupac Shakur and the deeply alive actor Meshaun Labrone Arnold would seem to have little in common.

Shakur's mother was a member of the Black Panthers when he was born in 1971, later becoming a crack addict and welfare mom as she struggled to raise her son. Arnold's father, Elder Frazier Arnold Jr., is pastor of Miami's Mt. Olive Primitive Baptist Church; his mother Ruby is the former director of a Head Start center.

The polarizing Shakur had his essential philosophy -- THUG LIFE -- tattooed on his chest, later claiming that the letters were a ''backronym'' for ''The Hate U Give Little Infants F**ks Everybody.'' When he died on a Friday the 13th after being shot multiple times in Las Vegas, the 25-year-old Shakur was a multimillionaire rap artist, a successful movie actor, a former inmate and a hugely influential gangsta rapper, a man both admired and reviled.

Arnold, who has just ended his first year as an inspiring drama teacher at Hialeah-Miami Lakes Senior High School, finished his theater degree at Florida International University two years ago. At 34, he has already started his company, The Mahogany Road Theatre, dreams of teaching absurdist theater to kids and teens, hopes one day to live and work in Europe.

The eclectic artist has a band (The Walk), is self-publishing his first poetry collection (Grasping at Needles) and is about to open in the professional Ground Up & Rising theater company premiere of the play he wrote for his FIU senior thesis.

It is that play -- The Hate U Gave: The Tupac Shakur Story -- that has brought the seemingly disparate actor and his subject together.

MAKING CONNECTIONS

Spend some time talking to Arnold and delving into Shakur's life, however, and you soon realize that these two intelligent, driven, frustrated men have deeper connections.

Arnold's own research has lead him to this point of view: ``Tupac was one of the most misunderstood artists of the 20th century.''

The Shakur he is trying to capture in The Hate U Gave, Arnold says, is ``a young black male, lost and frustrated, who only wants equality. He wants you to live up to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. He doesn't want to enslave you or kill you. All he wants is for you to see him as a human being.''

Shakur's numerous critics would argue that he exemplified the worst aspects of rap culture: urging violence against police, carrying guns, ratcheting up the war between East Coast and West Coast rappers, doing prison time after being convicted of sexually molesting a woman in his hotel room. But the well-read Shakur, who appeared in a Harlem production of A Raisin in the Sun at 13 and who attended Baltimore's School for the Arts, also saw his work as a political and social tool, angry and disturbing as that work became.

At the time Shakur was shot, Arnold says, 'I didn't care, because of the image that was put out there of him being this crazy, cursing, uncouth black man . . . But you have the good and the bad. And he was brave enough to tell stories without judgment . . . Most rappers were like, `Here's the beat, and I'm gonna say my verse.' But this guy added emotion to what he was talking about. You really felt his anger.''

SHAKUR'S CELL

The Hate U Gave, which is being staged by Ground Up & Rising artistic director Arturo Fernandez, presents a reflective Shakur in his jail cell at the Clinton Correctional Facility in 1995. The play has a few other characters with minimal lines, but mostly it is Shakur talking women, cops, drugs, sex, politics, violence. It is, like Shakur's later work, deliberately disturbing, provocative and shocking.

In flashback, Shakur says this: ``Y'all come to this conference dressed up in your double-breasted suits, $300 alligator shoes, trying to speak properly when you ain't saying nothing. I don't care if you call yourself a black man, Afro-American, African American -- them motherf - - -ers don't care nothing about your ass. And they never will.''

Fernandez says of Arnold, ``He did his homework. He's a consummate actor, detailed and nuanced. What's most surprising is how physically expressive he is . . . He doesn't judge the character. He's in Tupac's head, and everything he says is from that point of view.''

Arnold has no illusions about how The Hate U Gave will go over with some in the audience.

''I know I'm gonna have people walk out,'' he says.

That is perfectly OK with him. Arnold is telling the truth as he sees it, as Shakur saw it. He is creating work for himself. And he's channeling his own version of the frustration -- some would call it fury -- Shakur felt.

''We as black artists and actors cannot continue to go around and beg people for jobs,'' says Arnold, who is a member of the Nation of Islam. ``When you build your own thing, that man will respect you . . . You can write and create. You're not just a beast of burden, my little monkey with a fez.''

Phillip Church, an associate professor of theater at FIU and Arnold's mentor there, calls his former student an ''actor's actor, very theatrical'' and feels Arnold is more driven to achieve than angry.

''Meshaun's whole message, in life as well, is that violence and negativity have no place,'' Church says. ``His mission is, through his work on stage, to bring people to this place of peace and tranquility. I think he takes that volatile character [Shakur] and really uses it . . . which is ironic.''

PlayGround Theatre founder and artistic director Stephanie Ansin directed Arnold and acted with him during her company's first three seasons. As an acting company member, she says, he was both creative and honest.

''He's an extremely talented actor. He's very passionate about bringing positive messages to kids. He's very funny and very dramatic,'' she says, adding, ``he tells you what he thinks and doesn't hold back.''

Verdona Burnett, one of Arnold's recently graduated Hialeah-Miami Lakes students, is appearing with him in The Hate U Gave. Bound for Alabama State University as a theater major in the fall, Burnett is finding it both exhilarating and weird to work on such an intense piece with the man who was her teacher.

''His Tupac is real and so strong. You think, wow, that's a totally different person,'' she says.

At the same time, speaking some of the raw words she has to use in the play hasn't been easy.

''I go, `Aaah, Mr. Arnold. I don't want to say that!'' Burnett says with a laugh.

Arnold plans to perform The Hate U Gave again in Los Angeles, under the auspices of Ground Up & Rising's new West Coast branch. But before that, he'll lead his high school students on a trip to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August, where they'll perform his set-in-Iraq Waiting for Godot as part of the American High School Theatre Festival there.

That trip, he says, is part of his philosophy of creating opportunities and giving back.

''I went to England when I was at FIU, and it blew me away. It opened me up to the rest of the world and showed me you don't need to go to Hollywood to be an actor,'' he says. ``I would love to share that with these young people.''