����Ӱ��AV

“I cried,” she recalled. “I thought 2020 was the year. It wasn’t.”

But the timing might actually have played in her favor.

When she started working on the play about trailblazing Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm in 2015, she was hard-pressed to find many people under the age of 60 or 70 who knew Chisholm’s story.

By the time she premiered it, Chisholm’s memory and legacy were being revived by a new generation of female politicians of color.

The so-called Squad — Democratic Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, all elected in 2018 and up for re-election in 2020 — brought up Chisholm as an inspiration for their political ambitions.

Then-Sen. Kamala Harris evoked Chisholm, the first woman of color to run for president and the first female Democrat to take a stab at the highest office in the country, as her biggest inspiration.

“We stand on the shoulders of Shirley Chisholm and Shirley Chisholm stood proud,” Harris often said on the campaign trail as she attempted to follow in the Brooklyn native’s footsteps when she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.

Griffith went from a single show in 2020 to 15 in 2022 and 100 performances of “Unbossed & Unbowed” in 2023.

“This past year, it just really took off,” she said last week as she was preparing to bring the one-woman show to Tucson with . She will perform it twice this weekend at the Berger Performing Arts Center on the campus of the Arizona Schools for the Deaf and Blind.

“Unbossed & Unbowed,” whose title borrows in spirit from Chisholm’s 1972 presidential campaign slogan and later memoir, tells Chisholm’s story, from her time spent living with her grandmothers in her mother’s native Barbados — her father was born in Guyana and grew up in Barbados — from the ages of 5 to 9 to watching her immigrant parents struggle to achieve some modicum of the American dream.

The play follows Chisholm through her high school years onto college, marriage, a teaching career and her political career that included being elected in 1964 to the New York State Assembly as only the second African-American from Brooklyn to serve in the state legislature.

“It was all the fight for her; do anything to get it done,” Griffith said. “She had the tenacity and the courage and she had a mouth on her.”

In 1968, she successfully ran for Congress, becoming the body’s first-ever African-American woman representative.

But Griffith’s piece looks at more than Chisholm’s political career; it examines her life as a whole, from growing up with her three sisters in Brooklyn to her marriage and family life.

“She’s a person, and that’s also what I wanted to share,” said Griffith, who plays 15 characters throughout the 85-minute play, from Chisholm to her father, college professor, sisters and husband. “She’s ordinary but with a vision and we all have this. But ... we’re the ones to do it.”

“Unbossed & Unbowed” is Griffith’s second one-woman play. She earned critical acclaim for her 2014 semi-biographical play “Dememara Gold,” which traces Griffith’s immigration story from her native Guyana.