It only took one monologue for A’Keyah Williams to fall in love with acting. She was in fifth grade at her very first theatre audition, at Bak Middle School for the Arts in West Palm Beach, playing a character who was getting the news that her grandmother had passed away. Williams’ own acquaintance with loss following her grandfather’s death grounded her in the role, and she felt a connection to the character that revealed a deeper regenerative magic that would empower her through the traumas of the years to come.
Williams recounts her family history almost diagnostically, climbing a chain of cause and effect through time, looking for anything that might explain the strangeness of her own life. “If I go back far enough,” says Williams, “will I find the incident that caused all this stuff to happen and then be able to understand how to undo it from here?”
As a child, Williams says she could have set a world record for the number of teeth in her mouth (37 as opposed to the normal 32). She recounts being struck by a machine in an arcade that left her forehead permanently scarred, and the abuse inflicted by a family member. Williams was still trying to make sense of her looming past when she was confronted with another trauma that would change everything.
After returning home to Boynton Beach from Los Angeles following her 2018 film debut in “Me Little Me,” Williams began teaching at Atlantic Community High School where, in January 2023, a troubled student threatened to shoot her and his fellow classmates.
“I was frozen,” says Williams, confused as to what prompted the threat and wondering, after the incident, what would be done to keep everyone safe. Days of uncertainty followed, with the school making vague promises about the situation being handled. Then, Williams took to social media, expressing her frustrations, saying she felt that she didn’t want to live anymore. The post quickly circulated among students and faculty, and it wasn’t long before the police showed up to her door, cuffed her on the floor of her bedroom and took her to Delray Medical Center, where she was put under a 24-hour psychiatric hold.
“People were touching me, asking me if I’m on drugs, being invasive,” recalls Williams. “[It led to] me feeling even more unprotected and feeling like my voice has no power.”
When she was discharged, Williams began to retreat into herself, escaping through books by James Baldwin, Cicely Tyson and Viola Davis, discovering how each had overcome their own traumas. One day she was scrolling through social media when she happened upon a post promoting the National Society of Arts and Letters’ (NSAL) drama competition.
Williams hadn’t been onstage in more than four years but felt she may have found the perfect outlet to reclaim her power and voice. “The stage, or arts in general, just gives you that freedom, that liberty to say, ‘hey, it’s not all great, but it will be,’” says Williams.
She entered the competition with low expectations, and performed monologues that “all spoke about something that I didn’t have the words for yet.” As the tragic heroine Electra from the eponymous Sophocles play, she confronted her childhood abuser. As Norca from “Our Lady of 121st Street,” Williams wrestled with her feelings of abandonment. And as Rose from “Fences,” she navigated the battlefield of love with streaming tears.
The judges were blown away, and so was Williams: “It was the most amazing experience I’ve ever felt in my life.” Williams won the state competition and moved to the national stage, where she won fourth place overall and first place among the women.
Williams has been more selective about the characters she plays since returning home from the competition, taking roles only where she “actually feels called.” Despite the anxiety surrounding classrooms, she returned to teaching this year and took over the Theatre Academy at Boynton Beach Community High School. In March, she will be co-chairing—alongside her mentor, Shari Upbin—NSAL’s musical-theatre competition.
Beyond future stage ambitions, Williams hopes to write a book about her life that she hopes will inspire other survivors of trauma. Its message? “It’s never the end when you think it’s the end; it’s probably just a new beginning.”
This article is from the November/December issue of Boca magazine. For more like this, click here to subscribe to the magazine.
