I thought I wanted to be a lawyer because I knew I had a mouth on me, and from a very early age I had a profound sense of justice. I wanted to Fix the fact that I felt uncomfortable when my mother and I went into certain places together. When I said, "It's not fair!" I said it with unusual conviction. When in doubt, I could yell real loud.

By the time I was ready to go to high school, we were living in New York and I went to the United Nations school. I found myself really enjoying the sounds of people's voices—I liked mimicking people's accents, and I got really good at making fun of the teachers. It was an easy way to hide through a very insecure adolescence.

After college at Bryn Mawr, I started performing my own poetry and became very entrenched in the Fort Greene, Brooklyn, black bohemian lifestyle. I realized that poetry readings could help me dig a little deeper into who I was. I read everything I  could get my hands on, Alice Walker in particular. The readings became a character-building exercise for me, to get up in front of people and sort of exercise my demons—even though they were mostly terrible poems. 

I had never really performed in public before. I had always been a "performer," leaving crank calls on my friends' answering machines, but when I  started winning poetry slams, it gave me the confidence I had been searching for. The first poem I won an award for was "Your Revolution." It was an ode to young female independence:

Your revolution will not happen between these thighs
the real revolution ain't about booty size
the Versaces you buys
or the Lexus you drives

I thought it was more important to get my voice out there rather than keep a regular job, so I started performing fulltime. I developed a one-woman show at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York City. It was 1997, and I began  to write what would soon become Surface Transit, a collection of intriguing characters I had grown up with as a biracial child in New York.  There was a prejudiced Jewish grandmother, a racist Italian cop, and a widowed Russian woman who had been married to a black man and was struggling to raise their child. Surface Transit is tremendously personal. It was like I was getting paid for my own therapy. I wanted people to walk away from the show feeling quenched or refreshed or at least confused.

Gloria Steinem came to a performance of Surface Transit when it moved to the American Place Theater, and an organization she was involved in, Equality Now, approached me about doing a show on women's rights. They began to send me reports they had done on various laws around the world that have oppressed women: In countries like Syria and Jordan, women can be beaten or even killed if their husbands suspect them of infidelity. I read about a law in Israel that requires a woman to obtain a permission slip from the government to get a divorce from her husband, and about teenage girls in Africa who were forcibly circumcised, leaving them debilitated. I cried every day, realizing what these women had been through. I wanted to express these women's voices as well as I possibly could. And so with Equality Now I tried lo create a piece that could be performed at the United Nations.

The show came to be called Women Can't Wait. It revolves around eight different characters who have been subjected to oppressive laws in their respective countries, and I decided to use only a scarf to differentiate the women. With one character I use it as a Middle Eastern veil; with another I wrap it around my wrists like handcuffs.

There's Praveen—she's my favorite. She's from India, and she talks about the issue of marital rape and how women can be subjected to forced intercourse with their husbands, with no retribution for the men. She thinks, these men are our lovers, our friends, our fathers, and sometimes they just don't know what they're doing. She's got a huge, open heart and has tremendous respect for herself but is not afraid to take action.

There's still a law in France that prohibits women from working  at night. Emeraude is a French feminist with a very interesting perspective. She probably wouldn't even call herself a feminist, because she'd say, "Well, you know, I shave." She's a little arrogant and typically French in some ways. But she's trying to have a sense of humor about the law because it is so ridiculous. She says, "Tell me your story some other time, garcon, just unlock ze door and let me in. I need to work."

Then there's Bonita. Bonita is based on a real girl who I met while doing poetry workshops in Rikers Island State Prison in New York. She's African-American, she's been in foster care, has no family to speak of, and she's got all kinds of problems with her sexuality and with promiscuity. She has a boyfriend who's abusive, and they end up in a confrontation where she kills him in self-defense. So she becomes a teenager looking to spend a good majority of her life in prison. In my fictional case, someone comes and helps her to get out, but there are many young women who never regain their freedom.

It was difficult to imagine myself in these women's shoes given that I haven't lived their lives, but whenever I found myself faltering a little bit, I went to someone who had been through the experience for guidance.

Gwyneth Paltrow introduced me on opening night, and hearing the response to the show was amazing. There was a tremendous feeling of community in the air. We're now in the planning stages of taking Women Can't Wait around the world. Granted, I don't know how long this show's impact will last for everybody, but I hope that for young people it will last a lifetime. From all these experiences, so many other doors have opened for me. I just completed a role in Spike Lee's new movie, Bamboozled. My goal is to stick with work that is unafraid, loud, and at times unpopular work that makes me feel more whole as a human being. I used to be a liar on fire, but now my stories are my truths.

—Interview by Mazi Gaillard

Surface Transit will be touring the U.S. this fall, for dates, log on to surfacetransit.com. For information on Equality Now, call 212-586-0906.