Tarell Alvin McCraney's unpublished semi-autobiographical play, In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue

Tarell Alvin McCraney’s In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue is the unpublished semi-autobiographical play that supplied the narrative foundation for Barry Jenkins’s 2016 film Moonlight. Set in Miami’s Liberty City, it follows Chiron across three stages of life: childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. The play’s tripartite design gave the film its corresponding “Little,” “Chiron,” and “Black” sections; those labels identify the protagonist at different ages rather than three separate people. As a boy, Chiron is pursued by bullies and finds temporary refuge with Juan, a local drug dealer, and Juan’s partner, Teresa. Juan offers the withdrawn child food, shelter, and a measure of paternal attention, while Teresa provides a home Chiron can enter when his mother, Paula, is unable to care for him. The material does not romanticize that protection: Juan’s trade is directly connected to the crack addiction destabilizing Paula’s life. The central bond is between Chiron and Kevin. In their teenage years, they share an intimate encounter on a beach. Soon afterward, school violence fractures their connection when Kevin, under pressure from other boys, beats Chiron. The adult Chiron, now called Black, has adopted the outward markers of Juan’s former role as a drug dealer. Yet the story returns him to Kevin, making their reunion the emotional destination of the work. McCraney grew up in Miami’s Liberty City, and his own experience of a mother living with crack addiction informs the play’s family circumstances. He wrote In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue in 2003. It was still unpublished when Jenkins adapted it into a screenplay. Producer Adele Romanski gave Jenkins the play, and Jenkins and McCraney had not met when the filmmaker began writing. Jenkins completed his first draft in about ten days and retained the three-part structure and Miami setting. Moonlight premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in 2016 before its theatrical release that year. At the 89th Academy Awards, McCraney and Jenkins won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, and Moonlight won Best Picture. The screenplay does not simply reproduce every element of McCraney’s text. Jenkins made a film adaptation rather than a filmed stage play, but its plot remains centered on Chiron’s changing names, his fraught relationship with Paula, Juan and Teresa’s care, and the consequences of his relationship with Kevin. In both works, the adult reunion refuses to treat Chiron’s vulnerability as a closed chapter, connecting the boy Little to the man known as Black.