Thank you to Syracuse Stage and Baltimore Center Stage and the TOACM team. He directed The Man in Room 306 at Luna Stage, and both Easy Money and A Salute to August Wilson and Religion at the Billie Holiday Theatre. Television: HBO’s Oz, All My Children, Law & Order, NYPD Blue, Third Watch, and Lights Out. As a writer, he penned the plays Augusta Brownand Electric Lady, and the Jimi Hendrix screenplay. Film: Peeples opposite Kerry Washington, Musical Chairs, Tio Papi, Shaft 2000, The Out of Towners, It Runs in the Family, The Narrows, and Romeo and Juliette in Harlem. Regional:Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Two Trains Running, A Comedy of Errors, and Richard III The Old Globe in Macbeth Arena Stage, Denver Center, Goodman, and Alley Theatre in Satchmo at the Waldorf Yale Rep, Hartford Stage, Wilma Theater, Philadelphia Drama Guild, Philadelphia Theatre Company, Arden Theatre Company, Center Stage, Folger Theatre, Long Wharf, and the Goodman Theatre in the world premiere of Seven Guitars opposite Viola Davis. Off-Broadway: The Public Theater, Classic Stage Company, Classical Theatre of Harlem, The Beckett, Negro Ensemble Company, Abingdon Theatre Company, New Federal Theatre, 127th Repertory Ensemble, and Circle Rep. No intermission.Broadway: American Son, Jitney, Stickfly, and Seven Guitars. When the play is at its best-when the rhythms kick into place, and the details pop, and the language sharpens to a cutting edge-one is grateful for the voices that Scott has brought to Broadway. Broadnax III’s artful direction, however, the cast avoids falling too neatly into types, and Depression and Happiness emerge with particular individual clarity. As I came behind her, I touched her shoulder like the wind”), and with so many topics to cover, the characters are sometimes overwhelmed. Love is often trapped in gummy lyricism (“The world fell silent as I listened to the internal instrumental my heartbeat made. ![]() Some of those colors are deeper than others. Simmons, Scott aims to give them a full palette of colors beyond their allegorical-sounding names. Although they are costumed in black, white, grey and red by Toni-Leslie James and Devario D. The play touches on a wide range of problems faced by these men (gentrification, absent fathers, financial strain, violence) as well as some of their pleasures (mentorship, parenthood, sneakers, romance). (“When an elder speaks make sure you listen,” he says.) Wisdom (Esau Pritchett) is a Nigerian-American barber in his sixties who keeps a swear jar in his shop and doles out guidance. Happiness (Bryan Terrell Clark) is a well-heeled gay buppie who uses gender-neutral pronouns for his lap dog. ![]() Anger (Tristan Mack Wilds) is a once-promising athlete sidelined by an injury, and Depression (a distinctive, snappish Forrest McClendon) is a genius who has given up his studies to support his family by working at Whole Foods. Lust (the likable Da’Vinchi) is a young guy on the make, and Love (Dyllón Burnside) is his dreamy, moony counterpart. Much of the show consists of personal monologues there is also a storyline that follows the men from dawn to dusk on a single day as they interact in locations including a barbershop, a grocery store and a line to buy the latest Jordans. In some ways, the play suggests a companion piece to Ntozake Shange’s 1976 choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, but its characters are identified by personality traits instead of colors, and it incorporates far less music and movement (though the schoolteacher called Passion, played by Luke James, sings briefly and beautifully). In language that moves between dialogue and slam-poetry style jazz verse, Scott gives each of them a hearing. ![]() It’s a direct challenge to the world at large, but also specifically to the Broadway audience-mostly white, unlike the actors onstage-that has come to see this full-hearted survey of seven Black men in modern Brooklyn. “But you don’t hear us, though!”: That is the refrain of the seven characters in Keenan Scott II’s Thoughts of a Colored Man, voiced in unison at the end of the play.
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