‘Who is the victim, the shooter or the shot?’ Jamaica playwright asks

Yogi “Y?” Guyadin recently debuted his new play, “Shooter,” at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning. Photos by Rae Maxwell, courtesy of Y? Guyadin.

By Victoria Merlino

The Jamaica, Queens artist Yogi “Y?” Guyadin speaks with the sort of frantic, tightly coiled energy usually reserved for impassioned preachers.

“I'm kind of speeding through it, but you know, catch what you can and I know you're recording so you could go back to it,” he says at one point during an interview with the Eagle. He emphasizes the word back, as if he’s almost pressing the rewind button himself. His thoughts zoom up and around themselves, doubling backward and forward and digressing before looping themselves in a neat bow, with his conversation partner thoroughly ensnared in the middle. 

This same ever-pressing sense of rhythm and forward direction comes through in Guyadin’s new play “Shooter,” made in part through a $10,000 grant from the Queens Council on the Arts. “Shooter” draws upon Guyadin’s experiences growing up in Jamaica, Queens and the violence that has swirled around his life since he was a child, to explore the dynamics between victims and perpetrators through the lens of gun violence. It premiered in the Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning earlier this August. 

Though the play, he asks: Who is the victim, the shooter or the shot?

Guyadin said he was the first person in his family to be interested in music, and excelled at writing and poetry in school. Growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, he soon fused poetic devices like meter with hip hop, influenced by Queens rap legends like Nas and Mobb Deep. 

“They were talking about things I really, really connected to,” Guyadin says. 

As a teen, he wanted to go to a specialized art school, like LaGuardia High School, but his parents refused, telling him there was no job or career in making art. He picked up music theory instead through working at a Sam Ash music store on Queens Boulevard. Soon, he was spending “five, 10 hours a day” practicing, learning what different instruments did, how they sounded and how to play them. 

Yogi “Y?” Guyadin.

Guyadin went to audio engineering school and snagged an internship at Jimi Hendrix’s famous Electric Lady Studios, which has seen the likes of Lorde, Frank Ocean, Daft Punk and David Bowie grace its doors.

He spent years as an audio engineer and producer, eventually opening his own business and teaching kids about music in schools. Eventually, between the kids he taught pushing him to make art, and a need to differentiate himself in a competitive market, he became a playwright. And then came “Shooter.”

“Shooter” is an extremely personal and often uncomfortable piece. The star of the show is Guyadin, who spends most of his time on stage, alone, under a harsh spotlight, talking to the audience, and sometimes himself. He describes a childhood drenched in violence, from the games of cops and robbers he used to play on the street, to the omnipresent sound of sirens. He ticks off his friends and family killed by guns, his experiences as a weed dealer, how he himself almost died in a brutal attack that put him in the hospital. 

The audience is forced to participate. Security — who Guyadin reveals as actors later — force theatergoers to enter the theater and then leave again before the show starts. Other actors flank the audience at odd intervals, coming up from behind or in a doorway, and the audience is forced to stop and listen to them in the hallways, outside and then through a side door. 

The actors testify, whisper, rasp and cry out at how guns impact their stories and characters, often feet or inches away from an audience member’s face.

Part of this staging came from Guyadin’s need to transfer the play to a larger audience. In earlier, smaller shows, he was able to conduct an exercise where audience members would point a realistic fake gun at each other and hold it, and then reflect on how they felt about it. To create a similar feeling of unease for a larger group, Guyadin instead chose to give the audience a taste of what it's like being in a jail’s central booking, or an ICE detention facility. 

“I need [the audience] to sit down. I need them to get up, I need them to be moved, I need them to be confused, because I wanted to be subtle,” Guyadin said of his reasoning behind the staging. “If I had security, like tending [audience members] up and searching [them], that's too fake, it needed to be more internal and subtle.”

The piece, Guyadin says, is meant to make other people — including those whose communities don’t typically experience violence in the way that his did and does — understand themselves and their own biases better. 

“That's why I ask that question, who is the victim?” he says. “We're all victims when it comes to it, ‘cause I was a victim of my mindset being robbed from me. I was a victim of thinking that the only way for me to get money was to do this [sell marijuana].”

Though Guyadin doesn’t know where “Shooter” will go next, he wants to be a part of a movement to affect change in society, both in his community and beyond. 

“I’m just impressed by how long term the systematic structure of oppression is,” he says. “I want to make a long term systematic structure of healing and freedom. You know? So this is what my life is dedicated to.”