To Denver actor and comedian Janae Burris, they all hit.

Trayvon Martin hit.

Elijah McClain hit.

Breonna Taylor hit.

George Floyd hit.

Daunte Wright hit.

“They all hit,” she says, “because of Black skin.”

Nearly 1,000 Black Americans have died by gunshot at the hands of police since 2017. And one under the knee of a Minneapolis officer.

“Before it happened to George Floyd, it already mattered,” said Burris. “It mattered what happened to Tamir Rice and Ahmaud Arbery. Philando Castile bleeding out in front of his girlfriend and her daughter mattered. I was like, ‘That didn’t shake you? Rock you? Change you?’ ”

But the one that shook Burris the most was Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old Black woman who was found hanged in a Texas jail cell three days after she was arrested during a traffic stop. Her death was ruled a suicide.

“Growing up, my mom and her generation always told us about unexplained deaths and disappearances,” Burris said. “They told us about people who used to have experiments done on them. As kids we were always like, ‘That sounds crazy. That doesn’t happen.’ But there were too many suspicious things about the Sandra Bland story. And when they said she was mouthy — that was personal to me.”

Burris has been called mouthy, too. It’s kind of her living. Her mouth has gotten her booked at comedy festivals around the country, and named a 2019 Just For Laughs New Face. It got her cast in the Aurora Fox’s newly opened one-woman play, “Queens Girl in the World.”

Audiences are regularly charmed by that mouth. Police, not so much.

“I once had to call the police to my home, and when I came out I saw him talking to my neighbor,” Burris said. “But when I approached him and said, ‘I was the one who called you,’ he looked at me and told me to shut up. It was that feeling, like, ‘You can’t speak.’ That connected me to Sandra Bland, because she got in trouble for talking back. Now, talking back is something Black women are known for. But talking back and asserting yourself can get you killed.”

So can walking down the street wearing headphones. That’s one reason Burris now plays music only through her phone’s speaker – and she doesn’t care if that bothers passersby. If you can’t hear your surroundings, she said, you can’t protect yourself when approached. Maybe, if you’re Burris, by a strange man with an eye on your purse. Or maybe, if you’re Elijah McClain, by Aurora police officers.

“Elijah couldn’t hear those cops when they locked in on him,” Burris said. “He couldn’t hear that they were yelling out to him. I’ve discovered the same thing just by being a woman. If I have my headphones on, I can’t hear when men get into my personal space. I play my music out loud so nobody ever thinks I’m sneaking up on them. You can hear me coming. Yes, it’s rude. But I feel safer doing it.”

In many ways, Denver is a world away from where Burris grew up in L.A.’s notorious South Central neighborhood around the 1992 L.A. riots. “It was terrifying every day to walk to school,” said Burris. She moved to Colorado when a boyfriend landed a job here in 2014. When he got transferred to another city in 2017, he left. She stayed.

Some Black people move to Denver and its 10 percent Black population and feel isolated. Burris felt special. “My sisters tell me I got Blacker when I moved to Denver,” she said. “In Denver, where it’s mostly white people, I am that one Black lady right there. And I love it because they actually want to hear from a Black person – and I’m one of the only ones. I appreciate the opportunities that being a Black person has opened for me here.”

Burris hosted a season of the Denver Center’s popular lecture series “Mixed Taste” in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. As an actor, she has performed with Boulder’s Local Theater Company and the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. With her career booming, pre-COVID 2020 was the perfect time for her to move to L.A. And while Burris is funny by nature, there was nothing funny about trying to earn a living performing anything in 2020.

She’s home now because she won the one and only role in the play “Queens Girl in the World,” which can be watched live at the Aurora Fox through May 9. Burris plays 13 characters in Caleen Sinnette Jennings’ bittersweet story about a young Black woman who is coming of age during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. In the story, the character Jacqueline is suddenly uprooted from her protective, middle-class lifestyle in Queens and dropped into a predominantly Jewish private school in Greenwich Village.

And though the story takes place more than 50 years ago, Burris hears its echoes beating in the ears of Black girls today.

“What’s all too familiar about Jacqueline’s story is that several times within the play, she wakes up to tragedy,” Burris said. “And that’s happening again today. Every little Black girl is waking up to a new tragedy every day. So things just haven’t changed a whole lot.

“But what we can learn from Jacqueline is that you still have some power within yourself to make yourself happy and to impact the world around you in a positive way.”

“Queens Girl in the World” is being performed live Thursdays through Sundays through May 9 at the Aurora Fox Arts Center, 9900 E. Colfax Ave. For tickets, call 303-739-1970 or go to aurorafoxartscenter.org. Burris also was interviewed for “CO2020,” a documentary theatre piece by the Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company that looks at the year 2020 and is available for online viewing though Sunday (April 18) at betc.org.

Denver Gazette contributing arts columnist John Moore is an award-winning journalist who was named one of the 10 most influential theatre critics by American Theatre Magazine. He is now producing independent journalism through his own company, Moore Media.