Actress MaYaa Boateng is well-known for her roles on The Blacklist, FBI, and Chicago P.D. (2013).
What do we know about MaYaa Boateng’s educational background?
One of the few graduating seniors who is looking forward to her future and profession and feels prepared for it is Boateng, a well-known performer at Fordham University’s Theatre Department.
Mayaa exhibits a calm concentration during a Saturday morning interview shortly before tech rehearsals for her final performance on the Fordham Mainstage; this is the ideal state for someone getting ready for big success with more parts and interviews to come. Near the Maryland town where she was raised, Mayaa attended the esteemed Duke Ellington School for the Arts.
How did MaYaa Boateng’s journey in her career start?
Mayaa did not start in any conventional manner. It wasn’t always simple for the child of Ghanian immigrants who moved in a difficult urban area of Maryland to find artistic outlets in her environment. She started practising pantomime at the tender age of nine, which was one of her very first performances. She used face paint, sign language, and music to master the gestures. She originally began to communicate stories through movement.
Mayaa attended the prestigious School of Duke Ellington for the Arts in her teens, which was located close to her home in Maryland in Washington, D.C. She attributes this time in her life with making her aware of the difficulty and importance of acting. In high school, she acquired a variety of worthwhile theater-related experiences. She laughs as she remembers her performance in, where she did not play a typical role and once admitted that she was the stunt performer of the production, soaring over the stage. And if flying wasn’t impressive enough, she also learned to use a whip and walk on stilts, skills that are still listed on her CV today.
What did MaYaa Boateng do after completing her high school?
She made an effort to keep a diverse range of interests outside of theatre throughout her entire life up until the conclusion of high school. She acknowledges that is a factor in why Fordham University’s theatre programme, which offers a Bachelor of Arts degree along with academic work, appealed to her. She appreciates the academic program at Fordham. She understood that she had a vast array of skills, interests, and pursuits that she wished to pursue in order to enrich her acting.
Mayaa firmly believes that acting is just another academic discipline. As an illustration, she has always considered Spanish to be one of her favourite and most useful academic courses. She considers learning a foreign language to be humble. When she played a Mexican role in Lydia in 2012, as well as when she visited Colombia in real life, her Spanish language abilities came very handy. She and her friend ended up at the local high school where her friend’s father was a professor while they were there. They visited the area and interacted with the kids while instructing them in English! They remember that it was incredible.
Mayaa visited Senegal in 2007 as part of another overseas adventure with the humanitarian organisation Art Creates Life. It was most likely one of her best educational opportunities ever. She said that their goal was to increase AIDS awareness. Mayaa has always discovered ways to put her gift to use in ways other than for her personal amusement. She considers it crucial that the job she does has a wider impact on society. She discovers that she constantly tells herself that she doesn’t want to live her life “simply performing.” Why is she doing it in the first place if she isn’t using her acting talents to benefit the world or to accomplish something greater?
She has given generously of her enormous talents ever since arriving at Fordham. Every semester of her undergraduate tenure, she was cast in at least one play, frequently in the main roles that required emotional nuance and character study. Audiences in The Wedding Band in 2010 were moved to tears and stood up during her performance.
She was shocked to learn that she was the first-ever winner of the Denzel Washington Theatre Scholarship in the summer between her junior and senior years. This was a significant honour that resulted in her being highlighted in numerous publications, including the school newspaper and promotional materials for the theatre department.
Ruined, written by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Lynn Nottage, is her most recent and final Fordham production. It depicts the struggles that Congolese women faced while the brutal civil war of the 1990s and the early 2000s was going. Many ladies discovered that both national and rebel soldiers were abusing them viciously. Like majority of women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the protagonists in Ruined were forced to make the decision that it would be safer for them to live in a brothel. The drama addresses rape, prostitution, genital mutilation, and sisterhood—which is viewed as one of the only means of survival—as well as other concerns.
What are MaYaa Boateng’s views on the play Ruined?
According to Boateng, this production was the most difficult she had ever worked on. It’s been a wild ride. Salima, the character who experiences the most sad ending in the drama, is portrayed by Mayaa. Mayaa was aware of how difficult the role would have been from the very first practise. At the first read-through, she experienced an unexpected triggering of her emotions as she broke down while practising. She realises how difficult it is to identify with the character while also separating herself from the pain. However, her advise is to trust your director if a programme is seriously challenging you.
Mayaa has gathered a lot of insights from Isis Misdary, who’s the director of this Fordham production of “Ruined.” Isis urged them often to pursue their goal passionately. She has been incredible. Ms. Boateng felt like an actor in response to Misdary’s supportive attitude, and she pursued her goal fervently. That merely illustrates what she discovered about acting—that she must also passionately pursue her life goals as Mayaa.
She expresses a deep sense of commitment to the play’s goal of educating the public about the violence against women. She wants to keep bringing significant stories to life, which she sees as acting’s true calling. She believes that those women’s bodies were utilised as a battlefield… They all have such a strong want to have their tales heard and to be heard. She believes that this gives the characters, the actual Congolese women, and herself the opportunity to be heard.
What are MaYaa Boateng’s current plans? What is she doing currently?
Mayaa reiterates while firmly smiling that she is prepared to pursue her goal with passion. Ms. Boateng plans to remain in New York and continue to apply for roles until she gets another opportunity. MaYaa has been working as an audition monitor for Actor’s Equity Association for the past few months in addition to getting ready to face the big city. Since she is aware that her passion is for the stage, Mayaa is open to new performing opportunities in both cinema and television.