by Emma Fiona Jones

he scene opens in a city on the banks of the Hudson. The protagonist is a professor at a liberal arts school called Waverly College, who’s long been her family’s self-appointed historian. One day, she makes a life-altering discovery that sends her world spiraling. That’s the premise of the pilot that Shona Tucker, Chair of the Drama Department, wrote in a six-week workshop with playwright Chisa Hutchinson ’02.

Tucker—who’s an accomplished actor (of both stage and screen), director, and writer—entered the Catwalk Art Residency program this past March, intending to flesh out the screenplay, accompanied by friend and collaborator James Michael Marshall, a writer and filmmaker. Marshall was there to work on his own project as well as offer feedback on Tucker’s along the way.

“I’m calling it What Had Happened Was—that’s the working title, anyway,” explained Tucker. “Waverly College is similar to, but not the same as, Vassar. The protagonist is a fifty-something African-American woman professor, like me, and her discovery is not unlike a recent one of my own.”

Stylistically, Tucker’s vision for the saga is “a cross between The Chair (starring Sandra Oh) and Greenleaf, the HBO show centered around a prominent Black family in the South,” she said.

This wasn’t Tucker’s first Catwalk experience. She first attended in summer 2023.“Catwalk has been very good to me,” she said. “I came back because it gave me the space to write [the first time].”

During her 2023 residency, she spent most of her time working in the long back room of the house; this time, Tucker and Marshall mainly sat at the kitchen table or in the living room. “Dynamics are different with different people,” Tucker reflected. “But you knew you had a limited amount of time in this beautiful setting; you knew that [the people who run Catwalk] understand artists and that they enjoyed having artists there.”

Tucker has been telling pieces of her family’s story ever since Alex Haley’s Roots first aired. “It shook America,” she recalled. “That series gave me both mission and permission. I grew up attending a predominantly Black church and living in a Black neighborhood, but going to an 87 percent White public school in suburban Louisville, Kentucky.” Most television shows centered on White characters, as well. “I had no idea that my family, my little life, held stories anyone else would care about. But [Roots] ignited something in me,” said Tucker.

From there, she began interviewing her great-grandmother, then her younger family members. Those interviews became vignettes in a one-person show, then evolved into the trilogy Mississippi Mud and the screenplay Growing Wild. What Had Happened Was is the most recent facet of her intergenerational memory.

Though Tucker is often immersed in multiple projects at once, the pieces all fit together. “They’re all very much connected, and they make me joyful,” she said.

Sometimes her academic and cinematic worlds collide in unexpected ways. She just wrapped up work on a movie that’s currently shooting at Vassar. The writer/director and many of the actors are alums. In the movie, Tucker plays a Vassar professor—almost. “They don’t say the name ‘Vassar,’” said Tucker. “But being a small college professor playing a small college professor was really cool.”

She says teaching itself is as important to her as acting or directing. “I want to be a teacher that students are proud to say they had as a professor,” said Tucker. “There are a couple of people working on this film that were my students at one point, and they don’t seem to be like, ‘Oh my God, here she comes.’ So, I feel like, maybe I’m okay in that regard!” she laughed.

Next up? “I wrote my trilogy, Mississippi Mud, and then haven’t touched it for years, because I’ve been working on other things,” she said. “I’d like to finish it and get it published.”

She would love to return to Catwalk, but she also feels a responsibility to give other artists a chance to experience it. “Catwalk is a wonderful resource,” said Tucker. “I pray it continues to be around for artists for a long time.”