“The greatest privilege of an Onlooker is to look upon their own face.”
Queer playwright Sof Delgado brought their musical “You Are Not Your Face” back to Atlanta with a sold-out run of performances on Feb. 27 and 28. The show, originally premiering during the 2024 Lavender Festival, brought an entirely new cast to the stage at Onward Theatre, a small venue committed to uplifting underrepresented voices in comedy and theater.
“You Are Not Your Face” follows the world of the Onlookers, the elites of Delgado’s fictional world who are the only people allowed to own mirrors and see their own faces. The story follows Mira, a non-Onlooker villager, and Reign, the daughter of the Onlooker Head of State Amos, as they navigate their relationship from opposite sides of an exploitative society.
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It is immediately clear that Delgado’s Onlooker world is an allegory for the rise of fascism in the U.S., with the Onlookers acting as a slate that any person of power – the wealthy, the white, the police, the non-immigrant – can be projected onto.
In the beginning of the story, the villagers fear being arrested by the Onlookers. Mira and her family discuss a family member who was arrested and never heard from again, while Amos discusses a fight that breaks out between Onlookers. When Reign questions if the Onlooker who started the fight was arrested, Amos answers that they were an Onlooker; there’s no reason for them to be arrested, the conflict was simply mediated. It is clear: villagers are being arrested simply for existing.
This becomes more obvious when Amos announces a new policy that villagers suspected of harboring anti-Onlooker sentiments would be arrested – a clear allegory for the criminalization of protestors.
“You Are Not Your Face” was not perfect. Some of the performances were unnatural; the unnamed group of Onlookers felt more like caricatures of mean girls you would see in a Disney Channel show than actual reflections of how power and privilege manifest in the everyday person. But the things that worked, worked perfectly – especially the music. Delgado’s lyrical writing is phenomenal, made even better by K’lah, the actress portraying Mira. A singer-songwriter whose second R&B single dropped on Feb. 28, K’lah has a voice that takes your breath away, a voice so perfect for the power behind Delgado’s lyrics that I was shocked the part wasn’t written specifically for her.
The other shining star of the show was Imari Hardon, who played Amos. As the main villain, Hardon’s portrayal of evil was stern and fierce while also being hilarious and charming. I suspect the latter characteristics are features of Hardon’s real-world personality, but it resulted in a reminder that the most powerfully harmful of us, whether politicians or celebrities or billionaires, often are magnetic and likeable. Whether this was an intentional choice by Hardon and Delgado or a happy accident, the result was hugely effective.
While future renditions of “You Are Not Your Face” may not have the same cast, the choices that Delgado makes as both writer and director will persist. The greatest of Delgado’s choices is to incorporate the audience into the show. When Amos announces that villagers will be arrested for anti-Onlooker sentiment, she directly addresses the audience as if we were a group of Onlookers at some kind of press conference. Suddenly, we are the Onlookers. We are the privileged, looking on as the villagers of the world – those in the Global South, in countries like Palestine and Iran, homeless on America’s streets – are punished simply for existing. Nobody in the audience was a member of America’s elite, and yet Delgado invited us to see ourselves not as the victims of the system – which those of us who are Black and brown, queer, women, and working class most certainly are – but as the perpetrators of it.
The play doesn’t exactly have a happy ending, but it ends on a powerful note with a protest song performed directly to the audience by K’lah and Jewell Brooks as Reign. Instead of fixing the world, undoing the Onlooker system, Delgado instead asks us, Onlookers with the privilege to reflect on our place in the world: “What will you do with this privilege?”
To keep up with Sof Delgado and future shows, follow them on Instagram, @sofgado.
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