Her parents taught her to ‘honor those who came before you,’ and an upcoming performance lets this actor do that

Monique Gaffney’s father always told her that “theater is in your blood,” and it makes sense. Her childhood home was filled with creative people and conversations, icons in the Black arts movement (like a visit from James Baldwin), and her own entry into performing through dance and, later, theater.

“My first introduction to theater was definitely my father. I remember that my father was often busy working, and I always sort of wondered, as a child, ‘What’s going on?’” she says of her dad, Floyd Gaffney, co-founder of the theater and dance department at UC San Diego and an artistic director at Common Ground Theatre, one of the oldest Black theater organizations in the country. “I didn’t really ask those questions until I was, probably, about 6 or 7, so my first sort of memory of theater was my own experience that my daddy was a professor.”

The theater bug sunk its teeth into her and she’s spent her career as a professional actor and teaching artist, including artist residencies, as a lecturer and adjunct professor, leading training programs, and as an associate artist with Write Out Loud, an organization providing education and programming to promote literacy and a love of literature by reading it aloud to audiences. Gaffney is one of t...