At once sobering and edifying, Alice Childress’ 1957 Trouble in Mind, currently running at Arena Stage, is a biting backstage satire of the theater world of the 1950s.
The play forces us consider the internal struggles that artists of color face during theater rehearsals. Here, a white director leads a well-meaning but stereotype-ridden drama about lynching, forcing the [...]
“There’s no way to escape the fact that I’m a racist,” Bruce Norris told New York magazine this February, two months before his play Clybourne Park won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. During his childhood, his family fled Houston in part because of school busing; until he was about 14, Norris said, his main exposure [...]
Robert O'Hara's Bootycandy is rich in '80s-specific references—Jheri curls, the moonwalk, Superman underpants—but it's mostly about examining associations and stereotypes, not conjuring them. The play takes on sex, sexuality, and the challenges of growing up black and gay, and audiences have responded with their wallets. Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company has extended its run of the [...]
A Time to Kill is now enjoying its third life. The play is set in Mississippi in the 1980s, when two drunken white men gang rape a 10-year-old black girl. Fearing that the men will receive a mere slap on the wrist, the girl's father Carl Lee takes the law in his own hands, shooting them as they [...]
Filmmaker Dalia Tapia's debut feature, Silent Shame, premieres at the National Geographic African Diaspora Film Festival Saturday at 12:30pm: It's a well-paced drama with tough subject matter—a man confronts the HIV-related death of his mother, who contracted the disease from his estranged father—that hits all the right notes. It's suspensful, and its characters are authentically [...]
