‘Kudzu: A Story of Belonging’ Explores the Impact of Gentrification

The housing crisis is a topic that almost every demographic can relate to in some context. Whether directly or indirectly, most people have been affected by it and have much to say about it. 

And while that remains the case, it’s people of color and other vulnerable communities who are most impacted by this wide-reaching and ever-growing issue. 

With its new production, Kudzu: A Story of Belonging, local Black-led artist collective Mixed Metaphors Productions explores what it means to call Charlotte home, combining theatre, music and art to inspect the intersection of housing justice and home. 

Mixed Metaphors Productions (MMP) is the same company that brought FixaPlate and SwimCap to Charlotte’s introspective theatre patrons, constantly experimenting with nontraditional, immersive ways to better draw the audience in and engage with a subject rather than allow themselves to be passive observers. 

Partnering with QC Family Tree (QCFT), a neighborhood-based community development organization located in Enderly Park, where members and allies strive for social justice, Kudzu takes just 10 attendees per showing through and around the QCFT house on Parkway Avenue, exploring the many sides of the housing justice issue.

“They will encounter characters that represent the different facets and realities of ‘Charlotte’s housing crisis,’ which we always air quote because the term crisis makes it sound like it’s this thing that came out of nowhere, and we didn’t know, and we don’t know what’s happening, and it’s like, it doesn’t come out of nowhere,” MMP co-founder Kat Martin explained to Queen City Nerve. 

“It comes out of historical realities. It comes out of policy. It comes out of choices,” Martin continued. “We can actually trace how we got here. We hope that by exploring this Enderly Park home, immersing themselves in each of the rooms is like its own installation because the home was built in 1930, so it’s just a big loop.”

Attendees will move through the house encountering characters like The Person Packing, who has been given 90 days to vacate their home, or The Flipper, who knows how to spot “good bones.”

The choice to host the production at the Enderly Park home offers more than just symbolism, placed in a historically Black neighborhood that has recently become a hot spot for real estate agents and house flippers like those portrayed in the play. 

According to Martin, it also provides a certain closeness that helps audience members engage. 

“For our work, intimacy is key,” she said. “Because of the immersive nature where we really are dropping you into the story, the immediacy that happens in hyper-intimate settings is really key to activating people.”

Putting on the production in an actual home offers a more profound adventure for attendees. 

The fact that the home is part of QC Family Tree, an organization that helps challenge the housing crisis here in Charlotte, adds another layer to the production, Martin said. 

“You are going to see an actor that is performing a piece, but they’re going to be in a room that’s giving Jumanji vibes,” she said. “The ability to tie together performance and full installation, that’s what we are always trying to do. We feel like this is maybe one of the best examples of our work and of our community partnerships.”

The plant that ate the South

True to their name, Mixed Metaphors Productions drew the title for the production from the history of the kudzu vine, an invasive plant that was introduced to the US from Asia in the 1930s. 

“It became the vine that was going to save the South,” Martin said. “The government actually paid people to plant kudzu to help to fight against soil erosion. Everybody thought that cows and everybody’s going to just eat it up. They’re going to love it. People were using almost religious terms that the South was going to be saved and borne from this kudzu plant.

“Then it grows about a foot a day, and cows and things don’t really want to eat it,” she continued. “And it had this shift going from the vine that’s going to save to the South to the vine that ate the South.”

As with any invasive species, there’s a push to eradicate it, then a shift in narrative. What was once lauded becomes shunned. This was true for the kudzu vine, however, it recently has experienced another shift: People are starting to use it as an authenticator.

“Bakeries, print shops, boutiques — there are so many things that are called ‘kudzu,’ and the proprietors, the people, use that to guarantee its authenticity and its Southernness,” she said. “So for us, that’s the metaphor for the 113 people that move [to Charlotte] every day at the same time that eviction rates are up by 36%.”

The kudzu vine simultaneously belongs, due to its ubiquitousness in the South, and doesn’t belong, since it has become labeled an invasive species. Martin felt that this metaphor was an effective way to tell the story they wanted to tell while simultaneously asking the question of what it means to call Charlotte home.

The production aims to force people to wonder how much one can truly belong if they weren’t born somewhere, but ousted the residents who had been there all along. 

A message that goes home with you

The topic of inflation, wage theft, and affordable housing has been discussed to death, to the point where it’s so normalized it’s become the punchline of a joke for some, but for many, it’s a harsh reality. In recent years, more than 50% of millennials became homeowners, according to an Apartment List report, but it took them much longer than previous generations to achieve that milestone. 

Many people know this, but few talk about it. That’s why MMP is bringing front and center.

“People are talking about displacement,” Martin said. “I just saw 12 memes this morning about how millennials and Gen Z is never going to own a home. We know this, but there’s a difference between knowing this and knowing it in your gut, experiencing it. And we think that that’s the key.

“So we always want to be taking these Charlotte-based issues,” she continued. “We want to explore them. We want to pull a whole onion apart. We want to deconstruct how we’re talking about these things because we talk about these things, language creates reality.”

By bringing the audience face-to-face with the reality of the situation, Martin expects attendees to have a more visceral experience as opposed to if they just read about it somewhere or attended an run-of-the-mill stage play. 

She felt the act of moving through a space, as opposed to sitting down, would be more impactful. There is no reason to be constantly checking your phone when your actively engaged in a production like Kudzu. 

Martin explained that she wants the play to live inside people. 

“We don’t want to get the glaze. We’re not competing with Netflix. We’re not competing with staying at home on the couch and watching a movie. That’s a great night,” she said. “We wanted to be an experience, and we think that that movement is a part of what makes it this other art form.”

In addition to spreading awareness on a surface-level, MMP will be doing it on a deeper level. Forty percent of the ticket sales from the production will go to QC Family tree to support the work that they’re doing in the community.

“It’s not the artist’s job to show up in a community with answers,” she said. “It’s the artist’s job to show up with questions and creativity and digging.”

MMP isn’t trying to answer the question or solve the problem; they simply want to highlight an existing issue and encourage others to begin to solve the problem and they want to do it in a poignant way.

Though all of this may seem intense, Martin wants to remind people that it doesn’t have to be all bad. 

“There is always joy,” she said. “There is always humanity. And the more that we can lean into that and lean away from numbers that just make you go numb and a billion reports on the same issue from five different agencies, for us, the key to unlocking these conversations and to activating our community is its humanity. The art is always the way to do that. So it’s got to be joyful, too. And you’re definitely going to have some joyful moments inside of this piece.”

Kudzu: A Story of Belonging will run from Aug. 22 to Sept. 1 at QC Family Tree’s Big Blue House, 2916 Parkway Avenue in Charlotte.