Simmons lighting, Ryan O’Gara sound, Mikaal Sulaiman projection design, Sven Ortel production stage manager, B.J. Sets, Robert Brill costumes, Toni-Leslie James and Devario D. Lane Marsh is executive producer.ĭirected by Steve H. Gayle Jennings-O’Byrne, Thomas Green, and Denise Spillane are associate producers. Nederlander, Gabrielle Palitz, Plankfedermanwolofsky Productions, Jana Shea, The Shubert Organization, Deroy/ Robertson/ Adler, and Rick Miramontez presentation of a play in one act by Keenan Scott II. Cornfield, Buzzy Geduld, Arlan Hamilton, Erik A. Mott, Winkler/ Cohen/ Fineman, Valencia Yearwood, Laura Z. Running time: 1 HOUR, 40 MIN.Ī Brian Anthony Moreland, Ron Simons, Diana DiMenna, Kandi Burress, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Samira Wiley, Hunter Arnold, Four Thoughts Productions, Dale A. ‘Thoughts of a Colored Man’ Review: A Welcome if Uneven Excavation of Black Masculinity on Broadway “To live.” What’s devastating is that it needs to be said at all. “All we ever wanted was to be ourselves,” Depression concludes. “Thoughts of a Colored Man” lays essential foundations for embracing the humanity of its subjects, while at the same time longing for a world that obviates its existence. In the intervening shutdown, a need for education in even the most rudimentary particulars of Black life has become painfully obvious.īut if the latest welcome influx of work by Black artists should prove anything, it’s challenging the notion that Black voices - and the experiences they express - are a novelty. “Thoughts of a Colored Man” joins a wave of new works by Black artists on Broadway this season when it was previously presented at Syracuse Stage and Baltimore Center Stage in fall 2019, only one such play appeared on the Great White Way. Frequent and audible assent at a recent performance proved that it satiates a clear and present hunger. The play seems to offer up its excavations for the dual benefit of viewers to whom they are unfamiliar (mostly white Broadway audiences) and those craving the glow of recognition (a hopefully growing number of Black theatergoers). Scott’s mode of expositional storytelling can also grow to feel didactic, in a way that feels in conflict with efforts to ground the play in everyday reality. The result attempts an uneven sort of naturalism, as the men posit one purportedly universal truism after another, tracing the outlines of life in place of illuminating its substance. Like Shange, Scott wields poetry like a magnifying mirror, drawing attention where too little has historically been paid, and spinning those revelations loosely into narrative.īut where “For Colored Girls” assembles vivid and discrete portraits into a kind of cosmic ritual, Scott and Broadnax plant their kicks on the pavement, purveying a streetside take on the men’s daily lives and intersections. “Thoughts of a Colored Man” shares clear lineage with another restless and expressive probing of Black interiority and outward entrapment, Ntozake Shange’s 1975 “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” a revival of which is aiming for Broadway this spring. A scene at Wisdom’s old-school barbershop gathers the guys in a rare group interaction, more toward the purpose of traversing a roadmap of pressing social issues - redlining, the tyrannies of Black consumerism, homophobia - than generating character-driven drama. Scott favors language - verse, rhythm, rhyme - over action, and the men expound on their interior lives more often into the middle distance than in dynamic relation to one another. On a set by Robert Brill featuring a giant billboard as a kind of blank canvas, our primary encounters with each man come in the form of direct address, through which their backstories and resulting perspectives are mostly spelled out rather than illustrated. Most of the men know each other from around the neighborhood (Fort Greene or nearby, for eyes trained on Sven Ortel’s projections), and Scott hangs the play’s chronology on quotidian happenstance: a morning jog, a midday work break, coaching after-school basketball.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |