Sokeo Ros plays B-Boy in The Etymology of Bird, a new play by Zakiyyah Alexander, now at the Providence Black Repertory Company.

John Deputy

Playwright Zakiyyah Alexander was thinking about writing a coming-of-age story set in present-day New York when she came across a newspaper account of a 19-year-old high school student shot and killed by a housing cop in the tough Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.

The victim, Timothy Stansbury Jr., was taking a rooftop shortcut to another building when he pushed open a door and startled officer Richard Neri, who was patrolling the area with his partner. Neri fired his weapon and hit Stansbury in the chest.

The story of the killing not only gripped the city, but found its way into the imagination of Alexander, an award-winning playwright who teaches at Bard College in upstate New York. Stansbury’s death provided a jumping off point for her play The Etymology of Bird, which debuts this weekend at Providence Black Repertory Company.

The touching story takes place during a long hot summer in Brooklyn and follows a group of teenagers just out of high school. It is the story of young love and death, a play that is at once sad and celebratory.

Etymology of Bird offers an unvarnished slice of contemporary urban America, a look at typical urban kids who get caught up in tragic events through no fault of their own.

In fact, that is one of the things that attracted Alexander to Stansbury’s story, that he was just an average youngster like those she knew growing up in Brooklyn. Stansbury had just earned his GED and was working at a McDonald’s. He wasn’t a gang member, wasn’t a troublemaker, just a teen on his way to a late-night party who ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“He was just this young innocent looking kid who went against all our ideas of what some hard teenager from Bed-Stuy should look like,” Alexander said on a recent trip to Providence to attend a rehearsal of her play. “But he looked like the kids I knew.”

Likewise, the youngsters in her play are just hanging out on the streets during summer vacation. Jermaine, Stansbury’s character in the play, is a budding rapper trying to find his voice. Bird, his girlfriend, is smitten with language.

Like most of Alexander’s eight plays, Bird is all about asking questions. She was interested, she said, in what a coming-of-age story looks like in a culture that doesn’t support its youth, and what love looks like in that kind of world.

Most of the answers are of her own invention, and not wedded to the story of Stansbury’s death.

“I didn’t want to stay stuck with the story,” said Alexander, who lives in midtown Manhattan. “I was more interested in what the moment looks like.”

While Jermaine is black and the housing cop who shot him white, Alexander said her play is not about racial relations. It’s more about class, which often gets confused for race, she said. And it could happen anywhere.

“I don’t even think it’s an urban story,” said Alexander, who got a graduate degree from the Yale School of Drama in 2002. “I think it’s an American story. Things like this happen in every neighborhood.”

Indeed, there has been a rash of police-related shootings in Rhode Island in recent years, particularly in Pawtucket, where not long ago an emotionally disturbed man was shot by officers as he took off his clothes. That sort of violence involving the police seems more prevalent today, Alexander said.

“It didn’t occur 30 years ago, that sort of random police violence.”

But Alexander, who has written plays about health insurance and Reconstruction and has three new scripts in the works, is not out to bag cops. In the real story, the shooting of Stansbury was found to be accidental; in Alexander’s play we don’t know what happens to the officer.

“I think it’s complicated,” she said, “if you look at all the different sides. I just think it’s too simple if there’s this discussion of clear good and clear bad. Then there’s a lack of discussion about where we go in the community.”

Etymology of Bird director Megan Sandberg-Zakian met Alexander when the two were working with the 52nd Street Project, a program in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan in which youngsters and adults produce original plays.

When Sandberg-Zakian applied for a job as associate director at Black Rep three years ago, artistic director Donald W. King asked her what plays she would be interested in directing. Etymology of Bird was at the top of her list, she said. The 2 1/2-hour show with a cast of nine is the largest play ever undertaken at Black Rep, said Sandberg-Zakian.

The play, written three years ago, has been seen in workshops, but the run at Black Rep marks its premiere.

The Etymology of Bird opens in previews tonight at Providence Black Repertory Company, 276 Westminster St. and runs through May 18. Tickets are $20, $10 for seniors and students. Call (401) 621-6123 or log on to www.arttixri.com.

cgray@projo.com