Playwright Levy Lee Simon is a warrior. It’s a role he had thrust on him by a world of cutting comments and unmistakable racism. Simon fights back with this compelling show, in which he shares his family’s story and his own.

Half storytelling and half an awesome spoken word piece, Odyssey, Race and Racism, also directed by Juliette Jeffers, memorializes a long and difficult, but ultimately triumphant journey—an odyssey, indeed. It starts in “Harlem USA” in the 1960s and ‘70s, during Simon’s childhood, with trips to Lee County, South Carolina, where his grandparents remain. Hearing his grandfather called “boy” by a shopkeeper sparks tales dating back into the 19th century of sharecropping, bootlegging and preaching.

Simon shares the wrenching stories of two people he knew who were killed by the police. The losses, especially of his friend Michael, remain open wounds. His encounters with racism in the workplace are chilling and, as he notes, just as damaging as what his mother endured in the Jim Crow South.

In his extensive and riveting spoken word section of the show, Simon tells the audience, “I am song and dance and tribal rhythms, a heartbeat of life, know me…I am a Black man, see me.”