Keiyaa Can Do Anything, Including Experimental Theater

How many alarms do you need to set to wake up in the morning? If Keiyaa’s first-ever stage play Milk Thot is to be believed, she needs at least four. Staged in a limited run at New York’s Abrons Arts Center last week, the show opens with the Brooklyn-via-Chicago singer, songwriter, and producer asleep in an approximation of her bedroom. Her house band—a bassist, drummer, and keyboardist set up on platforms around the auditorium—plays a tune to wake her up. Every time, the music comes back louder and more aggressive than before until a saxophonist appears and blares in her ears, causing her to rocket out of bed. As she gets her bearings, she stares directly into the audience, perplexed: “The fuck are y’all doing in my house?”

By descending from the stage, Keiyaa immediately and permanently breaks the fourth wall. She wanders the aisles, questioning audience members and making sudden moves to see if anyone flinches. A few attendees play along, smiling and waving as she stares them down, before leaving to make herself a bowl of cereal. As she invites the crowd’s reactions, the theatrical environment slowly expands to include them, the live equivalent of a movie transitioning to widescreen. 

It’s a bold opening move, setting a playful tone that Keiyaa and company run with vigorously. There are no set changes or explicit act breaks, and scenes regularly melt into each other like samples in a muddy beat. It made me think of her 2020 debut album Forever, Ya Girl and how it pulled from soul, electronic, jazz, and rap in songs that sounded like they were molting and regenerating track-by-track, sometimes measure-by-measure. The way her vocals flutter around muffled horns and drum breaks gives the album a living, breathing quality. Milk Thot channels that restless creativity and dry wit into a 70-minute bout of ego death, self-reflection, and new music from her upcoming sophomore album.         

The world of Milk Thot isn’t confined to just the stage, and its story isn’t limited to just one person—not exactly, at least. One of the show’s influences is anime director Satoshi Kon’s 1997 psychological thriller Perfect Blue, whose dreamlike blurring of fantasy and reality informed the abstract turn Milk Thot eventually takes. Keiyaa is joined by a character named Shadow, draped in a thin white gown, meant to represent the karmic energy and discipline of Saturn, the singer’s astrological planet. Shadow also seems like Keiyaa’s id, a reflection of herself that flits from flattering to uncomfortable and back. 

Keiyaa and Shadow’s relationship shines in Milk Thot’s choreography, created in tandem with show co-director Ava Elizabeth Novak and choreographer Lambkin. They start out cautiously friendly, mimicking each other’s movements and play-fighting on the bedroom floor, before things get antagonistic. Shadow sabotages an increasingly frustrated Keiyaa’s attempts to do her makeup in the mirror, then goads her into going off on her microaggression-spewing boss with a fiery sing-rap that gets her fired. 

The most arresting combination of music and theatrical performance comes near the show’s end. After a fight with Shadow, Keiyaa approaches the hollowed-out center of the stage, now revealed as a grave. She starts digging and preparing herself for burial while repeating a four-bar song, first laughing then crying as it grows more intense and becomes a sort of incantation. There’s a hoodoo ritual vibe to this sequence, especially as Shadow reappears shortly after and helps Keiyaa out of the grave. By summoning Shadow, who’s just an extension of herself, Keiyaa is confronting—and pulling herself back from—the darkest corners of her mind.

On its own terms, Milk Thot is an ambitious and challenging work, finding the middle ground between performance art, music video, and live therapy session. But as I watched it spool out, I couldn’t help but make connections between it and Forever, Ya Girl. The insecurities and conflicts on display in the show prove Keiyaa wasn’t playing when she said “I prefer to spend time alone with my pain” on “Hvnli.” 

But her creative evolution since then is still striking. She has had stage design in mind for a while, dating back at least to a more modestly conceptual live performance recorded at Brooklyn’s Refuge Arts Center in 2021. The ideas she first formed on her SP-404 sampler, used to create many of Forever, Ya Girl’s beats, have grown to striking live-band arrangements that sometimes sound like noise godfather Merzbow by way of the great 1990s-R&B trio SWV. By the time Keiyaa and Shadow roll back into bed, and the band gets ready to play their wake-up jingle again in the show’s final seconds, it dawned on me that we’ve seen them undergo an entire metamorphosis in 24 hours. For each of us, it seems to say, any given day might bring wins, losses, and discoveries that can change you forever. But first, you have to get up.