By Shawn Maus
Some plays arrive at a new works festival carrying a toolbox. You can see what still needs tightening.
Sing For Me arrives carrying a live wire.
Cris Eli Blak’s play was presented as a staged reading at Cincinnati LAB Theatre, but the word “reading” hardly covers what happened in the room. The structure was tight. The conflict kept building. The characters feel real. By the end, I was wondering how soon somebody could put it on a stage.
A Voice Worth Fighting For
Amina is a Black singer-songwriter who finally gets the break artists spend years chasing. Then the people holding the contract make their real offer clear: They want her songs. They want her voice. They would simply prefer a white, AI-generated woman to stand in front of the audience.
That premise is chilling enough. Blak goes further. He makes us feel the insult, the temptation and the exhaustion inside it. Amina isn’t being offered a cartoonishly evil bargain. She is being offered success with one small condition: she can’t be seen.
One line stopped me cold: “Dreams die faster than roaches.”
That is the world of Sing For Me. Talent matters until money decides it can manufacture a cleaner, safer, more marketable version of you.
The play asks who owns an artist’s voice once lawyers, algorithms and investors enter the room. It asks whether reach is simply a business word people use when they don’t want to admit whose face they are willing to sell. And it asks whether an artist can survive the deal without losing the part of herself that made the art worth hearing.
The Play Never Loses Its Grip
The smartest thing Blak does is make this a human story instead of a debate about technology.
The characters don’t stand around explaining artificial intelligence to us. They want things, they hide things, they hurt one another while insisting they are helping. Each scene tightens the problem instead of repeating it.
The monologues are especially good. They reveal the private story beneath the public argument. They deepen the characters, then make the next choice harder.
Every business decision wounds somebody personally. Amina may be fighting a record label, but she is also fighting the fear that the industry may be right about what it takes to be heard. Silas is trying to keep her grounded in her humanity without turning his love or loyalty into another cage. Madeline brings a different kind of tension. She is comforting, almost like an old friend, yet there is something just unsettling enough beneath the surface. The performance never pushes that feeling too hard, but the actress and the audience both seemed to recognize it. What Madeline ultimately represents gives the play one of its eeriest touches.
Then there is the question hanging over every artist now: Is AI a tool, a collaborator or the new muse? A calculator can help you solve a math problem. It can also solve the problem for you. At what point does assistance become replacement?
Sing For Me doesn’t hand us a tidy answer, rather, it gives us people who have to live with the answer.
A Reading That Already Had a Pulse
Imani Derden gave Amina the force the role requires, but she never lost the weariness beneath it. Amina is ambitious, angry, frightened and tempted. She is never reduced to a symbol.
Roger Dumas Jr. made Silas the human center of the play. His performance was warm without becoming soft, and grounded without making Silas seem morally superior to everyone else.
Elliot Handkins was perfectly cast as Elliot. He was smarmy, cold and arrogant—a rich Silicon Valley SOB who has learned to describe exploitation as innovation. Handkins wisely didn’t push him into cartoon-villain territory. The calm certainty was worse.
Elizabeth Leigh Taylor also deserves special mention as Marianne. She made the character feel instantly familiar and completely trustworthy, giving the role a subtle edge that became more intriguing as the play unfolded.
Willow Diesman and Altha McNeal II completed an ensemble that seemed to understand these people before the chairs were even arranged. Director Jazz McMullen kept the reading moving and trusted the tension already built into the script.
I would gladly watch this exact cast put the play on its feet.
Sometimes the Words Between the Dialogue Matter
Some audience members questioned whether the stage directions were too narrative. In this room, they helped.
A reading has no finished blocking, lighting or design to carry the silent parts of a scene. The narration gave us emotional and visual information the actors could not yet show. McMullen made the right point during the discussion: Once the play is on its feet, much of that language will either disappear or become visible.
The Play Deserves a Bigger Audience
One line in the play argues, “It’s not about race. It’s about reach.” That sounds reasonable until you recognize how often “reach” is used to erase the people, cultures and lived experiences that created the work in the first place.
Amina’s voice is considered valuable. Her Black identity is treated as a marketing problem. The play understands that contradiction, but it never traps its characters inside a lesson. They are allowed to be selfish, loving, compromised, funny, frightened and fully human.
The play refuses to let identity become a slogan. It keeps returning to what it costs a person when the world wants the work but not the culture, history and humanity behind it.
We need more plays this specific and this alive. Not because they help fill a box on a season brochure, but because these voices are worth hearing. And because the questions in Sing For Me reach far beyond one character or one community. They belong to everyone trying to remain human in an economy built on exposure, content and manufactured identity.
At a new works festival, you hope to find one play that makes you think, “I hope this doesn’t stop here.” This year, that play is Sing For Me.
Shawn Says
Sing for Me is the strongest script I have encountered during Cincinnati LAB Theatre’s 2026 New Works Festival, so far.
AI may be able to calculate tenderness. Sing For Me understands why calculation is not the same thing as feeling it.
Cincinnati LAB Theatre once again gave Cincinnati audiences the chance to meet a play before the scenery arrives and the choices harden. That work keeps theatre alive by giving writers, directors, actors and audiences a place to discover what a new play can become.
Show Information
Presented July 19 as part of Cincinnati LAB Theatre’s 2026 New Works Festival at the Bell Tower Arts Pavilion in Evendale. For festival information and tickets: https://cincylabtheatre.com
