What are you saying? It happens just after the man you love visits you at the regiment and is dragged off.

Well it’s different every night. The rough translation is: “Oh, my goodness, I really wanted to kiss him more, but what can I do? I have to work, now he’s gone! O.K., fine, I have to do what I need to do. This doesn’t have to be here, it has to be here! So that I can work properly. And then, of course, what can one do? It’s the military: left, right, left, right!”

But one thing that you probably heard was the clicks when I say “ingqondo,” which is “mind.”

What does it feel like to be able to speak Zulu at the Met?

It feels so wonderful because I never thought of having this kind of possibility to be able to literally have a piece of my true self onstage. We embody these characters, and we go through their emotional journeys. And we are somewhat restricted to their texts, and the music of course, and sometimes the production as well.

But somehow this production has allowed me this incredible privilege to actually show literally that a part of me is in the music, too. Saying that this is Pretty, and she’s playing Marie. And these two human beings are meeting together to express a common human emotional state. Because I, too, when I am crushing on a boy, don’t have words sometimes. That happens; it’s a human experience, which is truly wonderful.