“Race is so scary in the United States of America,” said Sean San José, program director at the Intersection for the Arts. "It’s so cool someone can take it on like this.

San José is talking about a new play at the Intersection, “Mirrors in Every Corner” by writer Chinaka Hodge. The play, alternating between 1988 and the present, tells the story of a black family in Oakland who has a white child.

San José says the play explores what it means to be black, what a family is and what a neighborhood is, in a way that draws the audience in.

“Indictments fall way low on the list of her tactics,” he says about Hodge. “I don’t know a play I’ve worked on that has so many question marks in it.”

The 25-year-old Hodge has relationships with many of the people involved in the play. San José
 has known Hodge since she was a teenager and performed her poems in the building as a member of Youth Speaks, a literary arts organization. Marc Bamuthi Joséph, who directs the play, also knows Hodge through Youth Speaks and they wrote a play, “Scourge,” together. Hodge’s high school friend Ambrose Akinmusire composed the original jazz score for “Mirrors,” and Daveed Diggs, another high school friend, is part of the cast.

San José says what makes Hodge’s writing unique was encapsulated in a high school student’s question to her after a performance about how she made her play both so complex and so easy to understand.

“The play is both a messy talk about race, which is redundant, and it’s about a competitive game of bid whist, which is also redundant,” he says. “You could say it’s about people playing cards, which it is, or you could say they’re trying to figure out their blackness, which they are.”

Hodge isn’t just an extraordinary writer—she’s an extraordinary person as well, San José says.

“I always say to her your parents did right,” he said. “She’s so kind, and she doesn’t get lost in the intellect of it all, but she also doesn’t get lost in day to day of it all. She’s probably the prime example of why Youth Speaks and Living Word are on a whole other level of art making. They change lives. If they didn’t come into her class at Berkeley High School when she was 14 or 15, maybe she wouldn’t be here and we wouldn’t be putting on this play and have all these people seeing their stories up there.”