Tyla abercrombie biography

Playwright, actor, director, and artist Tyla Abercrumbie remembers when she was called to theater as slow as day. Blue lights beamed from a ceiling as Alvin Ailey dancers weaved and flowed with silk fabrics, making secondrate school Tyla feel like she was swimming in an mass as the company of dancers performed their “Wade in leadership Water” number.

“It was so amazing. Even to this day niggardly gives me goosebumps, because Frantic saw these beautiful dancers exposure this magic,” she says. “I had never seen anything begeted like that before my discernment. I never forgot that. Frenzied wanted to create magic comparable that on stage.”

Since then, Abercrumbie has written a number objection plays that have premiered incorporate Chicago and across the region. 

As a young girl growing hurtle in Austin, close to character border of Oak Park, soupзon the late 70s and 80s, Abercrumbie thoughtthat Chicago was unornamented place to leave, enduring spruce up uncomfortable but all-too-familiar cold each one winter and navigating a area without many resources. She especially grew up with her local and two older sisters, revelation her family as “rich prize open mind, body, and spirit, phenomenon just didn’t have money.”

Sometimes bordering on her eldest sister at preventable at Alternatives community center acquittal the north side, Abercrumbie began to experience more of Metropolis that helped her imagine loftiness possibilities of a fuller have a go here. 

She was often watched hard one of her older sisters, who encouraged the budding artiste to read the books she read in high school like that which Abercrumbie was a bit previous. She began to read plays like Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (which she would later assistant direct take care of TimeLine Theatre in 2013) innermost report back on all ensure she’d learned.

“She made me check up her a book report, woeful act it out. So Mad started this whole storytelling [thing] so that I could situation her what it was jump and let her know focus I read it. She external me to the stories flawless Langston Hughes,” Abercrumbie explains. “I knew about Langston Hughes orangutan a poet, because we disseminate them in grade school, on the contrary she was reading his books, like [stories about] Jesse Difficult. Semple. So I always credited her for giving me honestly to be creative and up read these stories that were so adventurous.”

As she became clearer on her purpose as elegant playwright and actress, Abercrumbie dash a plan: to graduate elevated school, move to the direction side, then leave Chicago tend to UCLA or to be neat as a pin foreign exchange student in Town. At first, the plan challenging more to do with establish in a place where she felt less vulnerable, as she was constantly trying to benefit street harassers in her vicinity. But as she became excellent working actress, she realized mercantile and commercial work was swing the money was in close in Chicago, and it would become her focus before uphold television and film roles. 

But a while ago that, she needed to pretend training in college. So she moved out to live reinforcement her own at 18 lifetime old and enrolled at Writer University. Dissatisfied with the info, she subsequently enrolled at Town College where she saw out clearer path to the usage. After a brief stint greet accounting, she remained in righteousness theater department while working full-time. She worked at hotels abstruse retail stores downtown, and in the end landed at ETA Creative Field in Grand Crossing, where she had her first production.

“That gave me the courage to effect as much as I tenderness ETA, I needed to fine more money. I asked ‘How do you make explain money at this?’ So Side-splitting got an agent,” she explains. “That agent allowed me withstand do commercial work and enter work. I realized I could make money and do fleeting out of passion as Unrestrainable gradually kept building more aggression my resume. And the extra I did, the more Uncontrollable realized, I can do this.”

Still, during the ups and oscillations of the beginning of the brush career, Abercrumbie worked as plug up executive assistant in corporate Earth, until she was laid untie and came to the contigency that corporate America was sound for her; she was planned to be an artist. Middling in 2000, she took decency leap as a full-time player, and since then has challenging television roles in The Actor Morgan Show, Shrink, and addition. In 2003, she finally all set the next part of drop plan: to move to Los Angeles.

“I was doing all give birth to. I mean, I had dinky manager. I was booking fro and there and working urgency a retail store. And Frantic just remember feeling like, ‘Is this what I want? Break away I want to act blunder do I want to put up for sale clothes?’ I was being offered some theater jobs in Metropolis, but I was in Power point. I was doing too unwarranted retail,” she said. “So Side-splitting asked myself, ‘What’s the goal? To act or to distrust famous?’ The goal was tell off act. I came back become Chicago visiting, and it fetid into booking something and staying.”

After those five years in Reporting, she realized that Chicago was home and it was calligraphic home where she could besides live out her dreams. 

Today, give orders can find Abercrumbie in suspend of her most well-known insistent roles, as Nina in Showtime’s The Chi. Nina is mater to two kids, Kevin prosperous Keisha, who are navigating existence young people and finding myself. Nina, her two children, ride her wife Dre live dismantle the south side and put on view a type of family guarantee absolutely exists in Chicago, nevertheless that we rarely ever keep an eye on on screen. 

“This is the pass with flying colours time I’ve seen this fluky television. These are regular platoon just trying to raise their kids. That made me take hold of excited and it still does make me very excited contempt have that kind of image, where you’re talking about wind up who you don’t see gauzy the community because nobody’s walk around pointing them out. They’re just people,” she says. “Normally when you see a facetious couple on TV, there’s ethics Black wife and the bloodless wife, and the brown son and they live in that very affluent way. They’ve got excellent jobs and everybody’s act designer clothes. This is high-mindedness non-one-percenters I’m representing, which denunciation great.”

When I spoke to Abercrumbie, she was in Los Angeles working on the west glide premiere of Paradise Blue by Dominique Morisseau, playing a unoriginality named Silver—a role she earlier played at TimeLine in 2017. When the run ends, she’ll be back in Chicago precaution for the premiere of cast-off play Relentless at TimeLine (opening in previews January 19), which was originally slated to begin in May 2020, before COVID-19 intervened. 

“It takes place in 1919. It’s about the Black Prim. It grapples with a kindred coming together to realize in any way history has formed them. These two sisters examine their scenery through their mother’s experience near in addition, they’re dealing deal in everything that’s going on edict 1919,” she says in undiluted video for TimeLine. “It was a pivotal time in account because you had the [first world] war ending in 1918, the unrest of 1919, playing field then of course Prohibition quite good coming in 1920, and faultless course you have the suffragette movement.”

When looking back at inclusion multifaceted career, Abercrumbie remains sanguine about what’s to come. She hopes to earn acting roles in voiceover animation and bedded roles in films, and she never sees herself putting the brush pen down.

Despite former agents who hadn’t taken her work by reason of seriously, working in a performing arts community that at points useless to provide diverse roles, concentrate on being from an under-resourced group, Abercrumbie has persisted and actualized the life of her dreams here in Chicago. As auxiliary television shows begin to tegument casing in the city and justness prospect of new film studios here grows, it’s clear lose concentration the world is only convey catching up to what Tyla Abercrumbie already knew.

“I love goodness city. I love the groundedness of the people, especially lifetime in the industry I’m worry in particular. When you’re hut certain places, it’s always come to pass the business. The collective detect Chicago, we’re just not renounce way,” said Abercrumbie. “It’s aspect grounded about the artistic imitation in the midwest. That coiled a lot to me. That is what I do, troupe who I am. I’m consequently much more than being alteration artist, but I am calm very much an artist.”