“Since its premiere at The Public in 1976 and its subsequent transfer to Broadway later that year, much has happened to continue to impact the lives of the women of color celebrated by Ntozake Shange in her choreopoem “for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf” currently running at the Booth Theatre for the second time…
In “Tambo & Bones,” currently running at Playwrights Horizons, playwright Dave Harris (“Summertime,” “Patricide”) gives the audience a minstrel show with three variety acts whose timeframes span more than two centuries. Endmen Tambo (W. Tré Davis) and Bones (Tyler Fauntleroy) appear as humans in olios one and two performing for white audiences, and they appear as robots, themselves, and their…
In Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s most recent iteration of “Pass Over,” two “brothers” Moses (Jon Michael Hill) and Kitch (Namir Smallwood) engage in an interminable exchange of escapist fantasy-dialogue in which they ask one another, “What kind of plans you got?” Moses’ His Promised Land Top 10 list includes “reaching his full potential,” “getting his ass off this block,” “a penthouse…
The title of Donja R. Love’s play “one in two,” currently running in The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre at The Pershing Square Signature Center, is reflective of the alarming 2016 study released by the CDC, which projected that “one in two Black gay and bisexual men will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetime.” Trapped in a stark white…
Three Gen Y Conservative Christians gather at Justin’s (a thoughtful and broken Jeb Kraeger) backyard in Lander, Wyoming to celebrate Generation X Gina’s (a confident and willful Michelle Pawk) inauguration as president of Transfiguration College of Wyoming. These “heroes” are preparing for a battle of Armageddon-like proportions. They do not simply disagree with those infidels on the left: they despise…
It is clear from the start of Donja R. Love’s “Fireflies” that Olivia Grace (DeWanda Wise) is among the disconsolate: Olivia is languishing: Olivia’s wounded heart needs healing. There is a fire in Olivia’s soul that counterpoints the fire in the 1963 Fall sky above the home in the Jim Crow South she shares with her preacher-activist husband Charles Emmanuel…
Beartrice Albans (a resolute and Machiavellian Lynda Gravátt) spent her life under the oppressive laws that governed people of color in the colony of Louisiana. Specifically, she was Lazare’s placée a status that allows her as a woman of color to set up common law households with a white man to circumvent legal prohibitions. Beartrice’s mother signed the papers that…
“For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.” – Matthew 34:28-29 “Soon and very soon,/We are going to see…