Season Select: Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea

Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea

By Nathan Alan Davis

Directed by Tyrone Phillips

Fast Facts

Playing: Touchstone Theatre | August 1 - September 25
Featuring: Dee Dee Batteast, Jacob Alexander Craig, Kayla Mariah Fifer, Jamie Herb, Rasell Holt, Byron Johnson, Gavin Lawrence, Derrick Moore, Samantha Newcomb, and Jazzma Pryor
Genre: Contemporary Dramatic Comedy
Last Seen at APT: First time!
Go if You Liked: The Barber and The Unnamed Prince (2025), Nat Turner in Jerusalem (2024), Proof (2023)

About Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea

Captain’s Log: Welcome to the journey of Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea.

During an early conversation between protagonist Dontrell Jones III and his best friend Robby, Robby mentions taking a course in marine psychology while attending Baltimore’s Morgan State University.

A brief, comedic moment between friends, this mention of marine psychology, sometimes also dubbed “blue humanities,” helps to establish the importance and symbolism of water throughout the rest of the play. The study of the emotional and biological connection between living organisms and the sea has existed for time immemorial, and continues to tether modern life to ancestral generations.

In a note included at the beginning of his script, playwright Nathan Alan Davis mentions incorporating “the dance of Yemayá (Yemoja)” into performances of his play. Yemayá — one of many spellings and pronunciations across cultures — is one of the most widely known elemental deities, or Orishas, of West African religions. From her original Yorùbá language, Yemayá translates to “the mother of fish,” though her dominion stretches far beyond only aquatic life. Yemayá controls all the world’s water and organic lifeforms, and is worshiped as the universal mother spirit.

When millions of Africans were kidnapped and sold into slavery during the brutal and inhumane atrocities of The Middle Passage, they carried elements of the Yorùbá religion and culture with them to the Americas. Over time and colonial cultural suppression, these religious beliefs morphed to reflect regional differences throughout North and South America as well as the Caribbean Islands, sometimes including elements of Indigenous religions or Catholicism.

Today, Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American spiritual-religious traditions, like Cuba’s La Regla de Ocha-Ifa and Lukumi, or Brazil’s Candomble religions, continue to include and worship orishas (oricha in Spanish). Feasts, prayers, and dances devoted to the Orisha Yemaya, The Mother of All, remain prominent in Afro-Latin and West-African religions.

Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea offers a simultaneously jocular and spiritually moving hero’s journey about reclaiming cultural and familiar heritage. The Jones Family’s inescapable connection to water is a part of an inheritance of generational trauma but also a spiritual legacy of creation and strength.

As Dontrell sets out to find a long lost ancestor at sea, he joins many other Black marine scientists, oceanographers, adventurers and historians who have set a course for discovery and healing.