Broadnax III is the director of “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” which premiered on Broadway in October 2021 after runs in Syracuse and Baltimore. For more information, please click here.UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. “Thoughts of a Colored Man” runs through Novemat Baltimore Center Stage, Baltimore, MD. Running Time: 95 minutes with no intermission. Broadnax II, the play uses a spare set and the richness of the language to create mind pictures of each vignette. “Thoughts of a Colored Man” is written by the poet-playwright Keenan Scott II. This is a play that demands full attention to their lives, complete and complicated. The language is strong and lilting and conversational. These are incredibly strong performances. His deftness and sorrow bring to the fore that razor-thin line between giving up and finding a new path. Garrett Turner as Anger was tossed aside in college when his knee snapped in a basketball game, but he’s now teaching basketball. The two youngest-Ryan Jamaal Swain as Love, and his BFF, Reynaldo Piniella as Lust-talk some trash to each other, but they support each other and don’t step on each other’s approach to life and love. But they choose to listen to each other.Īnd that’s the tenderness-the characters listen to each other. In a confrontation at the new Whole Foods between Depression (Forest McClendon heartwrenchingly portrays a man forced to give up his dreams and still adjusting to that) and Passion (Brandon Dion Gregory) who comes from an upper middle class background and is trying to balance being black in a white business world they make a real connection, but still remain apart by circumstances and choices. This is not a play that offers easy answers. In his quietly authoritative way, he’s leading the neighborhood to think about their words and attitudes. He is also the most reflective-when some of the younger men make a fag joke, he nips that in the bud one of the newcomers to the neighborhood is a gay black man (Jody Renard as Happiness), and Wisdom understands that those unthinking words, on top of the racism each faces, is incredibly hurtful. The proprietor of the barbershop in this neighborhood, he is still crazy in love with his wife and excitedly awaiting the birth of his first grandchild. Wright as Woman # 2-being just identified with numbers, this play is about the experience of being black men in a society that marginalizes them and fears them and reflexively assigns them roles that are comfortable for the larger white society.Īs Wisdom, Jerome Preston Bates provides the long view, and grounds the work. While I might quibble at the roles of the two female characters-Ashley Pierre-Louis as Woman # 1 and Hollie e. Hopes, dreams, limits, viewpoints, biases-it’s all on display through their interactions, and their movements. Through a series of vignettes tied together by the experience of living in a changing neighborhood-one undergoing gentrification-it explores the complicated reality of black men’s lives. The cast of seven men and two women command that stage. “Thoughts of a Colored Man” at Baltimore Center Stage is a surprisingly tender show yes, it has anger and sorrow and exhaustion, but there is a golden wire of tenderness running amongst and between the characters that helps keep a kernel of hope alive.
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