But instead of shying from that otherness, she dines upon it, a lesson for any of us who have held onto the shame of difference. When listening to her repetitive, patois-filled song - work, work, work, work, work, work - one hears a Barbados-born 1 musician who recognizes that the histories that are carried in her movement and her tongue are foreign to the listener.

This sense of casual immensity is what drew me to Robyn Rihanna Fenty, 31, as not only a performer but as an artist and a businessperson: a model for my own maturation.

The song, which weaves through the dialogue, brought more attention to the play than any other device could have. In my script for “Slave Play,” which debuted at New York Theater Workshop in 2018, the protagonist Kaneisha suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder and Rihanna’s “Work” plays in her head on repeat, taking on a frighteningly oppressive quality and revealing the historic bedrock I was attempting to excavate: namely, that black people, specifically women, must live with the knowledge that their emotional and physical labor is the backbone of every relationship that they endeavor to have with their partners, with America. Then “Work” found its way into my own work.

FOR THREE YEARS, I have been a diligent student of Rihanna’s 2016 song “Work.” The first lesson it taught me was in the fine art of ubiquity: The omnipresent earworm hovered over casual intimacies, significant encounters, mundane journeys and made sense of itself wherever, in whatever crevices it chose.

Rihanna work costume