Two deeply significant plays by Jeremy O. Harris – “Daddy” (Off-Broadway 2019) and “Slave Play” (Broadway 2021) – highlighted significant issues about the self-identity of young black gay and queer men and raised rich and enduring questions about the role of family, friends, culture, and “indifferent yet fetishizing white gays” in that process of discovery. This season, Michael R. Jackson’s…
As Stacey Derosier’s lighting comes up on the stage of Charly Evon Simpson’s “sandblasted,” which is currently being co-presented by Vineyard Theatre and Women’s Project Theater at the Vineyard, Angela (a willful yet vulnerable Brittany Bellizeare) and Odessa (a confident and temperamental Marinda Anderson) slowly emerge from behind beach umbrellas (“where the sand is”). Both complain about the omnipresence of sand…
Last season, two off-Broadway plays – “Daddy” and “Slave Play” (both by Jeremy O. Harris) – highlighted significant issues about the self-identity of young black gay and queer men and raised rich and enduring questions about the role of family, friends, culture, and “indifferent yet fetishizing white gays” in that process of discovery. This season, Michael R. Jackson’s original musical…
The present-day social climate in the theater world has fervently addressed non-traditional casting, gender identity, and diversity as part of an effort to be inclusive and accepting. When a production exhibits a little gender bending, there should be a valid explanation or reasoning behind the decision, whether it be historical, social, or dramatic persuasion. In the case of “Eddie and…
Beartrice Albans (a resolute and Machiavellian Lynda Gravátt) spent her life under the oppressive laws that governed people of color in the colony of Louisiana. Specifically, she was Lazare’s placée a status that allows her as a woman of color to set up common law households with a white man to circumvent legal prohibitions. Beartrice’s mother signed the papers that…