About Wayne
Wayne Harris is an award-winning solo performer, writer, educator, curriculum innovator, and musician. His plays include Mother’s Milk, The May Day Parade, and Jockamo. His production, Train Stories, was critically acclaimed, earning a Bay Area Broadway nomination and an extended sold-out run.
Wayne was invited by the U.S. State Department to travel to the Middle East and perform his play, The Letter: Martin Luther King at the Crossroads. From this experience, he developed his one-man show, Drapetomania: “A Subversive Journey to Activism,” which debuted at the Marsh Berkeley in fall 2025 and was extended for several months. This production has been in collaboration with social justice organizations such as Indivisible and Movement Voters PAC (MVP).
A gifted artist with wide-ranging interests, Wayne is passionate about storytelling that combines his lived experience with hopeful declarations for the future.
Having just retired from being Program Director for The Marsh Youth Theater in San Francisco, serving underprivileged students in after-school programs, Wayne now travels extensively throughout the U.S., providing “Improvisation & Performance” workshops for Youth Pageantry groups (marching bands, dance teams, etc.) In addition, he is currently a facilitator for the Formerly Incarcerated People’s Performance Project (FIPPP), an exciting and important project guiding formerly incarcerated adults in creating, producing, and performing their stories and partnering with Berkeley Rep in bringing storytelling to programs in San Francisco Jails.
Watch “The May Day Parade” Here
Wayne Harris’ “The May Day Parade” is a solo performance that tells the story of an 8-year-old’s experience watching and marching in the iconic St. Louis event “The Annie Malone May Day Parade”. It is an intimate story of family and faith as well as a story of a proud and vibrant community in the mid-1960s. The story is populated by vivid characters ranging from a grandmother of biblical proportions to a slightly inebriated church deacon/drill instructor to the entire Sumner High School marching band! It is a joyful and inspiring story set against the backdrop of the early civil rights movement, the post-WWII migration of African-Americans to the north, and a changing American landscape. The work embodies the black experience in America while affirming the universal truths that are the foundations of all races. Honesty, hard work, and the indomitable human spirit are explored and displayed through character, story, and song. Presented in Cooperation with Paramount Winter Guard! Click the poster to watch it on YouTube!