'The Chi' Season 5: How Miriam Hyman's Yale drama degree and theater work shaped her as an actor
Showtime’s fan favorite and acclaimed series ‘The Chi’ Season 5 premiered in June 2022. Critics and fans alike have given amazing reviews on authentic representation of Black culture throughout the show. They have also lauded for the fact that since its inaugural season in 2018, ‘The Chi’ has primarily focused on depicting the real-life problems and lives of the Black community who reside in the Southern part of Chicago.
The Emmy award-winning director Lena Waithe has created an entirely relatable storyline in which Miriam Hyman plays the role of Dre, who marries Nina (Tyla Abercrumbie). Her relationship with Nina as a same sex couple has not been smooth but they have always supported each other through the highs and lows. Last season we saw, how Nina ended up cheating on Dre, which saw their relationship go through a rough patch. This season we are witnessing how Dre and Nina are trying to reconnect with each other as a couple and giving it their all to stay together.
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Miriam A Hyman’s first lead role was in ‘Three Musketeers’ play
According to an interview at the Black Book.com, Miriam Hyman graduated from the Yale school of Drama. After her graduation, she clinched an off-Broadway production of 'Richard III' at The Public Theatre in New York. But her first lead performance as a theatre actor was in a performance of ‘Three Musketeers’ at the Classical Theater of Harlem in the lead role of D’Artagnan. Slowly, her exemplary work on stage gained her immense respect and recognition and, unexpectedly, led to a break in the music business as a rapper. Around that time, Miriam adopted her stage name and began releasing mixtapes and EPs, garnering for herself a Best New Artist nomination at the Philadelphia Hip-Hop Awards.
Miriam Hyman as a budding rapper
Miriam Hyman, also known by her moniker 'Robyn Hood', began her career as a rapper back in 2013. Hyman shared, “A combination of things. I had finished graduate school around that time, and basically I went on to do one of my first plays at the Public Theatre in New York, I was working on Richard III. I do a lot of Shakespeare, and the way Shakespeare writes is quite poetic. Like I always say, I went from the bard to the bars. I had a lot of time on my hands then. I was just coming outta graduate school, so I was very well prepared. I was coming into rehearsals off book, ready to go. And when the director wasn’t working with me, I had to fill my time with something. So I just started playing with writing verses. What I’d do is download a lot of instrumental beats and I would rap over them—some of the people who I named initially, I loved their lyrics, but I also loved the beats. Characters like Swizz Beats, he always has a lot of really great tracks. That’s kinda how it started, basically.”
Why Miriam Hyman became ‘Robyn Hood’
Giving an insight about why she choose the stage name ‘Robyn Hood’, which became her identity as a musician, Hyman explained, “I thought about a lot of different names when I started playing around with writing, as I’m sure a lot of artists do. Like you come up with maybe five or ten names before you decide on one. I just liked the versatility in terms of what 'Robyn Hood' can actually stand for and mean. I think of myself as being a pretty well-rounded and grounded individual. And the name encompassed all of the ideas I wanted to relate in my music. So I changed the “i” to a “y,” being a female, but also to have a different swag on it. I didn’t want people to think, Oh, Robin Hood. She’s trying to be a new example of the old-school Robin Hood. But it is that idea of robbing for the hood, you know. Being very present for my community, and doing as much as I can to take what I’ve learned and give back and affect them in a very positive way. I also just thought there’s a lot of fun in the name, and that it’s something a lot of people could relate to. I didn’t want to call myself any old thing. So it was like, what can I come up with that’s going to be really representative of who I am as a person? Not just a musician, but a musician as well as an actor.”
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Miriam Hyman’s transition from theater to TV
Opening up on her transition from theatre to television as an actor, Hyman added, “No, I mean I had done a little bit of TV before I went into graduate school. I did an episode of ‘The Wire’. I did an episode of ‘Law and Order’. Another show called ‘Conviction’. It wasn’t completely new, but it was approaching it on another level because of all the training I had, which really helped me to up the ante. I think because of the theatre, I’m so accustomed to redoing. They call it rehearsal because you have to re-hear, redo, and repeat. I’m so accustomed to taking it from the top and running through it again that for TV and film, I don’t feel like you get as many takes as you do in the rehearsal room.” On the 'The Chi', her powerful performances show how well her degree in acting and her subsequent theater work helped her present a fully-fleshed out and believable Dre.
