Dede Ayite

Off-Broadway Review: “The Underlying Chris” at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater

A three-month-old infant named Chris looks up from his stroller at his thirty-something mother (Hannah Cabell) as she makes an appointment with his pediatrician for the next day at 11:15. Chris has twisted himself and possibly hurt his back after his big stuffed toy carrot hits him in the eye. Chris’s back injury isn’t the worst of his or his…

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Broadway Review: “Slave Play” at the Golden Theatre

“Slave Play,” currently running on Broadway at the Golden Theatre, reiterates the events on the fourth day of the Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy being held at MacGregor Plantation, a few miles south of Richmond, Virginia. Three couples have signed up for the workshop to engage in the “radical therapy designed to help black partners re-engage intimately with white partners from…

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Off-Broadway Review: “BLKS” in the Newman Mills Theater at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space

Poet-playwright Aziza Barnes puts many ingredients into their script blender to whip up a “comedic look” at the lives of Octavia (Paige Gilbert), Imani (Alfie Fuller), and June (Antoinette Crowe-Legacy, three twenty something black women living in New York City – a city where black lives seem not to matter and where, for that reason, it has become difficult for…

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Off-Broadway Review: “If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka” in the Mainstage Theater at Playwrights Horizons

Once upon a time, in a not so very long time ago there was a beautiful young Nigerian woman named Akim (a self-absorbed yet fragile Níkẹ Uche Kadri) whose Ma (a stern but loving Maechi Aharanwa) and Dad (a somewhat subservient Jason Bowen) project their own flawed conception of what real beauty is (a thoroughly Eurocentric standard of beauty) upon…

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Off-Broadway Review: “Fireflies” Redefines Love and Hope at Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater

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…

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Off-Broadway Review: “Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties” at MCC Theater’s Lucille Lortel Theatre

By agreeing to carefully examine the sex-role stereotypes attributed to women, five disparate women named ‘Betty’ cautiously approach self-acceptance and self-understanding in Jen Silverman’s “Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties” at MCC Theater’s Lucille Lortel Theatre. Their collective rage about their loneliness, their fears, their submission, and their dismissions by men is a welcomed examination of gender and sexual…

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Off-Broadway News: Extension Announced for “Sugar in Our Wounds” at Manhattan Theatre Club at New York City Center – Stage II

Due to popular demand, Manhattan Theatre Club (Lynne Meadow, Artistic Director and Barry Grove, Executive Producer) is pleased to announce one additional week of performances for the world premiere of of Sugar in Our Wounds, a new play by Donja R. Love, directed by Saheem Ali (Twelfth Night for the Public Theater’s Mobile Unit), at The Studio at Stage II –…

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Broadway Review: “Children of a Lesser God” at Studio 54

“For why is all around us here/As if some lesser god had made the world/But had not force to shape it as he would?” – Alfred Tennyson The current Broadway revival of the groundbreaking play “Children of a Lesser God,” the first since it opened thirty-eight years ago to win the TONY award for best play, does not seem to…

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