Diarra Kilpatrick is the consummate multihyphenate: creator, co-writer and star of the + noir dramedy , which mines real elements of her life to tell a classic mystery tale that also deals with grief. “I wanted to tell a story about a Black private investigator for a long time. I was talking to my friend’s mom at a party, and she was saying that she had worked as a P.
I. in Chicago, and I thought that was so weird, because this woman was such a mom, in the best way, who could get answers, even more so than a guy in a fedora.” This wasn’t Kilpatrick’s first time playing with the mystery genre: She rose to showbiz prominence after creating the 2017 ABC web series , a satire dipping into the detective landscape that won her the Emmy for performance by an actress in a shortform series.
But Kilpatrick’s love of theatrics began far earlier than that, back in Detroit, where “I was the multihyphenate at 5, because I was operating the Fisher-Price thing to make music in my room, I was starring in the one-woman show,” she says jokingly. She formed a theater company with her friends, and, desperate for an audience, they agreed to take a gig performing at, among other venues, a youth jail. “My father worked for Wayne County, so we had an in.
There are all these kids, incarcerated,” she recalls. “We’re trying to inspire them through song, and they’re just looking at us like, ‘Really?’ I always found a way to perform.” She studied at NYU Tisch, but after grad.
