Aigner Mizzelle Steps into the Ring
In preparation for the role of Lil, an aspiring fighter in Ngozi Anyanwu’s new play The Monsters, Aigner Mizzelle trained with an MMA fighter and called upon her years of experience in ballet, jazz, modern dance, and hip-hop. Photo: T. Charles Erickson.
Aigner Mizzelle has seen a lot of fight movies lately.
“I went down a rabbit hole,” she says, as research for her current role as Lil in The Monsters, a two-hander written and directed by Ngozi Anyanwu, now playing at Manhattan Theatre Club in a co-production with Two River Theater. Her favorite of the fight movies is Warrior, starring Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton as two estranged brothers who find their way back to each other through a momentous Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) tournament. “I watched [fight movies] for good choreography and bad choreography,” says Mizzelle. “But Warrior gave me a lot to pull from, and it’s a sibling story, too.”
The Monsters follows estranged half siblings Lil and Big (Okieriete Onaodowan) who reconnect after sixteen years and begin to heal old wounds through MMA training and fighting. Lil has been keeping tabs on her big brother, a successful if aging MMA fighter who goes by “The Monster.” Tough and standoffish at first glance, Big is crushed by the weight of expectations and presuppositions that are put upon him as a Black man in America.
Originally from New Jersey, Mizzelle studied drama at NYU Tisch’s Playwrights Horizons Theater School and, after graduating, originated the role of La’Trice in Chicken & Biscuits, first off and then on Broadway. In recent years she’s also starred in Forrest Malloy’s Nina at Theaterlab, and the music- and movement-heavy production (pray) by nicHi douglas.
Though she says her first ever role was in her church’s Nativity play, Mizzelle credits her middle-school theater teacher, Mr. Romano, with instilling in her a love of the craft and a confidence in her capabilities. “He was like girl, you speak well, you’re expressive, come hang out in the theater department! And after that invitation I didn’t really look back,” she says. “He put me in Dancing at Lughnasa in middle school. That is such an advanced play but he was so smart and he stretched us so much at such a young age.”
In The Monsters, we first meet Lil after one of Big’s fights, as she starts talking about his career with a familiar confidence that disarms him. He doesn’t recognize her at first—it has been 16 years, after all. She chides him: “You might have remembered me from such places as your childhood and shit.”
The play also takes us via flashback to their tense childhood home, when Lil is just six and Big around sixteen. The thundering boom of their father is deftly manufactured by sound designer Mikaal Sulaiman. One monster is at the door, but another is nearby: the disease the two protagonists also grapple with in their adulthood—alcoholism and addiction.
“It was a gift to shed light on how sometimes little Black girls have to grow up really quickly. The only person that really allows her to be a kid is Big, so when he leaves that’s the end of her childhood.”
Mizzelle, who possesses an irresistibly kind smile, plays Lil with sweet mischief and humor. She’s bursting with energy, asks too many questions, and is quick with a comeback. Six-year-old Lil is perceptive, too. “Kids are really smart and they can see and observe the same things that adults do,” says Mizzelle. “It was a gift to shed light on how sometimes little Black girls have to grow up really quickly. The only person that really allows her to be a kid is Big, so when he leaves that’s the end of her childhood.”
Big and Lil slowly work their way toward one another through beautifully choreographed training sequences engineered by choreographer Rickey Tripp. Every kick, punch, and duck is precise and rhythmic. Mizzelle began preparing for this role four months ago under the guidance of the show’s MMA consultant Sijara Eubanks, a professional mixed martial artist who has competed at the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Mizzelle got a gym membership and started a daily training regimen. “I’m hungry in a way I’ve never been hungry before,” she says, “and I’m actually meal prepping as a result of this process.”
Okieriete Onaodowan and Aigner Mizzelle portray estranged siblings Big and Lil in The Monsters, written and directed by Ngozi Anyanwu. Photo: T. Charles Erickson.
The theater turns into a bona fide gym as two punching bags are brought out from the wings and the actors don boxing gloves, squaring up with the bags and with one another. The audience feels like they’re at a real fight. “Every night one of the main reflections that we get is, ‘I was tired watching y’all,’” says Mizzelle.
While she doesn’t possess a martial arts background, Mizzelle brings decades of experience with her dancing foundations. She’s been dancing ballet, jazz, modern, and hip-hop since the third grade and credits Tripp for parsing out the choreography in a language she recognizes. “Rickey is a dancer, so he was able to speak to me in a way that I could really understand to execute the art of fighting. I had to work on things like, you know, not making my kick look like a développé,” Mizzelle says with a laugh.“You have to make a small adjustment with flexing versus pointing the foot. It was fun to explore the nuances and similarities of dancing and fighting.”
The role of Lil has been not only a physical undertaking, but an emotional one for Mizzelle. It involves putting a lot of trust in her co-star, Okieriete Onaodowan. “In a two-hander like this it is important that we protect each other quite literally. We have to make sure that we have each other’s backs in the middle of portraying conflict or reunion or emotional release,” she says. This also involved fully stepping into her character. “Like I won’t understand this person until they’re in my body, until I’m on my feet, until I’m like how do they walk? How do they smell? Do they get their nails done? What does their queerness look like?”
Meeting as adults, Lil and Big reckon with their past while they both look toward the future. Photo: T. Charles Erickson.
Every performance night brings an amalgamation of intense physical exertion and catharsis, and Mizzelle agrees with her character’s observation that “adrenaline is a bitch,” explaining that it takes a while to come down from that high: “After the show I have to find my body parts again.”
Throughout the run, Mizzelle says she’s been reminded of another bit of culture far from her intimate Off-Broadway confines: the animated film Monsters, Inc. The movie “makes us look at monsters differently,” she says. “Some of them are just teddy bears that want to be loved and they don’t want to scare people. They just want a friend and I feel like [the play] is a reclamation of the monster, and what it means for other people to put something on you that you don’t identify with.”
Maybe that’s a clue about where she’s headed next. Mizzelle looks forward to the day she is cast as a villain, “like Angelina Jolie when she plays Maleficent,” she explains with a smile. “I love that type of story where you get to learn where their deep-seated evil comes from, and it always seems to be like they wanted to be loved or they wanted to be chosen—and now they’re burning the world down because they never got that.”
It’s hard to picture someone with such a cheerful demeanor ever embodying a nefarious character, but it’s understandable that when she does, Mizelle will approach it with the same tools she brings to all her roles: empathy and deep understanding.