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    ‘Thoughts of a Colored Man,’ From University to Broadway

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    The playwright Keenan Scott II, the director Steve H. Broadnax III and others discuss how “a timeless piece” for Black actors has evolved over 15 years.Plays by August Wilson were nowhere to be found in the syllabuses of Frostburg State University’s theater classes when Keenan Scott II attended the Maryland school in the mid-2000s. Nor were works by Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Kennedy or Lynn Nottage.But there was Ntozake Shange’s pioneering “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” from 1975.Scott, who is making his Broadway debut as the author of the recently opened “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” said a class screening of the Shange work was his first — and essentially his only — exposure to theater by Black playwrights in college. And just as Shange coined the term “choreopoem” for her hybrid form, Scott began to describe “Thoughts,” his senior project, as “slam narrative.”The word “colored” brings with it a very different set of associations now than it did in 1975, when segregated drinking fountains and restrooms were only a decade in the past. And yet that word is both in the title of Scott’s play and more than 21 feet wide on the billboard at the center of Robert Brill’s set at the John Golden Theater.Like Shange (whose “choreopoem” is heading to Broadway next year), Scott has created a mosaic of speeches, poems and songs for seven performers of color. (And neither playwright identified their characters by name; Scott instead calls them such traits as Happiness, Love and Depression.) But when “Thoughts of a Colored Man” premiered in 2019 at Syracuse Stage in New York and then moved to Baltimore Center Stage, it also featured two female dancers and an onstage D.J. All three are gone, as are swaths of the original text. Only the Tony Award nominee Forrest McClendon (“The Scottsboro Boys”) remains from that cast.Scott and McClendon recently sat down with the “Thoughts” director, Steve H. Broadnax III, and Brian Moreland, a lead producer of the show, to discuss how the play has evolved, especially in the last two years. Their interviews have been edited and condensed.Forrest McClendon, second from right, with, from left: Tristan Mack Wilds, Dyllón Burnside and Da’Vinchi in “Thoughts of a Colored Man” at the Golden Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIs “Thoughts of a Colored Man” on some level a response to “For Colored Girls”? Or is it its own thing?KEENAN SCOTT II I’m inspired by the works of Ntozake and many others, but it’s completely its own thing. I liked the word “colored” because it causes a visceral response. To this day, people ask, “Why say ‘colored’? Why use ‘colored’? We don’t use that no more.” But that is the point. There was a time when we were labeled “colored.” And through the journey of the piece, you see why these men shouldn’t be labeled.FORREST McCLENDON Ntozake was writing for colored girls to have something to do. And Keenan was writing for colored men to literally have something to do. For us to be represented onstage.STEVE H. BROADNAX III The genre that Keenan coined, “slam narrative,” is loose plot — that’s the difference. You can take, say, “Def Poetry Jam” on Broadway, which is a bunch of poetry and poets that you can put in any type of mixture. But here, if you take one out, it starts to mess up the loose plot. So he’s really created something new. “For Colored Girls” doesn’t have a loose plot to it, but this does.If I’m understanding the title correctly, do these seven men also add up to, essentially, one human?SCOTT Absolutely. These are, these could be, seven parts of the same man. We can all be some of these things. We can all be all of these things.How much has the piece changed since Syracuse and Baltimore?SCOTT It’s really just a re-investigation of these characters, to make sure they all had their individual journeys. Some monologues have been added. A new scene here and there. We knew that some characters were a little more shallow than others, and we wanted to make sure that all of them are equally robust.Luke James in the play, which Scott describes as a “slam narrative.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCan you point to any specific examples?SCOTT I started writing this piece when I was 19, so originally these characters all hovered around 20 years old, because that’s where I was in life. Fifteen years later, being a 34-year-old man who’s married with a child, my sense of the world has deepened. I’ve been with this piece so long that I’ve literally grown up with these characters. And through development, the characters started to grow as well. So now the characters range from 18 to 65 years old.BROADNAX The connections between each of the characters have changed. We discovered, for instance, how Love and Lust connected with each other. You now have all of these “aha” moments to see how they are all interconnected.Do you think the piece would look or feel different if you had opened on Broadway directly from Baltimore, which was the plan before the shutdown?SCOTT As Steve says all the time, everything happens in divine order. I think the show would have been just as great. But it would have been different.BRIAN MORELAND After Baltimore, Keenan went through a private workshop with himself, writing.SCOTT We moved to Baltimore so quick after Syracuse. I was taking notes, and there were certain things that just couldn’t be implemented quick enough. So that’s when I went into that private workshop. And then Covid happened, and we had all the time in the world.When I saw it in Syracuse, there were also two women in the cast. What happened to them?BROADNAX We discovered that this was a story, and a space, for these Black men. The women are still very much a part of their worlds. They are there in media; they are there in spirit; they are there in language. But we thought this was a space for the men.MORELAND You go out of town so you can have a safe space to experiment. In addition to the female dancers, there was also a D.J. who was originally part of the production. All of these elements kept evolving and changing.McCLENDON Music and movement and media are all super important in terms of this play, but the star of this play is the text. And anything that in any way upstaged the text — including the actors — had to take its rightful place on the periphery. For me, in both Syracuse and Baltimore, the discovery about the women came from women in the audience. They felt it was a story really about men.SCOTT I’ve known from day one that the spectrum of the Black man is rarely, rarely shown, especially on Broadway. We don’t have that space. That’s what I wanted to create 15 years ago for myself and my peers who felt excluded from an art form we were studying.The show opened on Broadway on Oct. 13, over two weeks earlier than originally planned. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesYou were scheduled to open Oct. 31, and then opening night suddenly moved up by two weeks. Openings shift all the time, but in the other direction. What prompted the move?MORELAND Their dress rehearsal. Their first preview. Their second preview. The audiences clamoring to see these men, hear these stories, hear Keenan’s words. That’s what prompted the change. Because it was ready.When you sat back down to write, Keenan, did you feel like the play needed to be different because the world felt different?SCOTT That’s a tricky question for me. I started writing this play when George W. Bush was president. So that’s three administrations ago. A lot has changed, and a lot hasn’t. People often ask me how the events around George Floyd affected me. For the Black community, George Floyd wasn’t new. When I started writing this piece, I was loosely inspired about what was going on in my community in Queens when Sean Bell was killed [in a police shooting]. A lot of the themes that I cover in the play are as ever-present as they were 15 years ago. I feel like I created a timeless piece that can live, but it saddens me as well, because I would have hoped that these issues would have been solved by now.Do you feel as if a lot of people in the audience on Broadway are only now beginning to understand what you have known this whole time?McCLENDON The thing that radically shifted is that the American theater shut down. Audiences had an opportunity to step back and really ask themselves about what they’d been consuming. We’re dealing with longstanding, oppressive practices, but this is an industry that is usually willing to look in the mirror. To look at itself and stare. In what ways are we complicit? I think we’re in a new moment. And I think the play is a huge part of representing that. More

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      Review: In ‘Crowns, Kinks and Curls,’ Getting to the Roots of Black Hair

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      Keli Goff’s series of vignettes feature Black women recounting how their hair affected their school lives, relationships or careers.I have 4b hair that remained virgin hair, mostly styled in box braids and cornrows with extensions, until I was 13, when I got my first relaxer. My scalp has known chemical burns, hot comb burns, curling iron burns, flat iron burns and the unrelenting throbbing that comes with hours of tight root-wrenching braiding. I got my big chop at 21 and have been natural — years of T.W.A.s and twist-outs and wash ‘n’ go’s — ever since.Do you get what I’m saying, or am I speaking another language?I’ve written about my hair before, and every time I do I’m well aware of the vocabulary, which I’m sure is unfamiliar to many non-Black readers. Though it’s not just a matter of terms or phrases: Black women often encounter unprovoked opinions and wrong assumptions from employers, strangers — even family and friends — about what their hairstyle says about their professionalism, their social status or their relationship to Blackness.The personal, cultural and political implications of Black hair are at the root of the well-meaning but less than inspired “The Glorious World of Crowns, Kinks and Curls.” (And yes, pun definitely intended.)Written by Keli Goff and produced by and filmed at Baltimore Center Stage, “Crowns, Kinks and Curls” is a series of vignettes, each one featuring a Black woman recounting how her hair affected her school life, relationships or career. The piece channels the spirit of Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls,” though the writing, albeit earnest, is far less poetic.The actresses Stori Ayers, Awa Sal Secka and Shayna Small embody all of the fictional women, donning different do’s to do so. (Nikiya Mathis handled the eclectic mix of hair and wig designs.) Most of the scenes are monologues, though occasionally two or three women meet, say, in the office of a mostly white law firm, where an older straight-haired lawyer named Sharon (Ayers) berates a younger one, Ally (Sal Secka), for wearing her hair in braids: “I’m sorry, I can’t let you meet a major client looking like this.”Gaby (Small), with sleek face-hugging Josephine Baker-style finger waves, recalls her mother’s distress that she cut her “good hair” for her wedding day, showing how hair reflects the generational trauma held by some Black women. Wanda (Ayers), in bouncy mocha and champagne blonde curls, recounts how an ex-boyfriend reproached her for pressing her natural hair for an interview, illustrating how “authentic Blackness” is often policed even within the Black community.And so every tale has its moral, none of which should be new to any Black woman. They certainly weren’t for me, a woman who has had white people make awkward comments about my hair, ask questions and even ask to touch my crown in admiration.Which is to say “Crowns, Kinks and Curls” excited me more conceptually than it did in its actual execution, which was all perfectly serviceable, from the performances to Bianca LaVerne Jones’s staging, to Dede Ayite’s set, with a big, puzzling backdrop of large flowers.Scenes span recent history, some taking place during the Obama Administration and others referencing former President Trump and 2019’s Crown Act against hair-based discrimination. These glimmers of vibrancy underscore the timeliness of the topic, given how the social consciousness of Blackness has shifted since the Obama era.In one humorous monologue, Sal Secka, wearing an Afro pony — ethereal and exquisitely cloudlike — plays a woman named Adaora who has accompanied her biracial daughter to see the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and cheer on the Black princess.In a somber scene, two unnamed women (Sal Secka and Ayers) unwrap and unpin their hair in silence, as “Strange Fruit” is sung offstage; they are preparing to go to a funeral for a Black husband and son unjustly killed. It’s the one sequence in which hair is not so explicitly the topic of discussion, but rather is powerfully positioned as part of a larger expression of the Black experience, particularly at this moment in history.In a somber scene, Stori Ayers unwraps and unpins her hair in silence.Diggle/Baltimore Center StageThe show’s program includes a brief timeline of the history of Black women’s hairstyles and hair practices, referencing enslaved women’s use of head wraps and braids before enduring the Middle Passage, along with the work of hair pioneers like Madam C.J. Walker and George E. Johnson Sr. There’s so much to be mined in the history of Black hair that “Crowns, Kinks and Curls” feels like it has missed opportunities to go further — or even incorporate real stories.Why not use the smart, funny and vulnerable voices of real Black women? Why not devise scenes that are more than neatly prepared monologues?And because it is a rarity to see Black women talking about their Black hair onstage, what I saw only made me hungry for more: I wanted to see more Black women of different shades, in not only wigs and weaves but also their own natural ‘fros. I was disappointed, in scenes where women were supposed to be wearing natural hair, to see false approximations.I believe this very capable show — which had a creative team entirely comprising Black women, to my utter delight — can be more. I hope it happens if and when it’s staged in person, as it’s the kind of work I both want and need to see, as a Black female critic and as a Black woman writing about an art form that too often fails people of color.So as I undid my own head of flat twists this weekend in preparation for a much-needed trip to the salon, this earnest request crossed my mind: more Black women, and more (and more and more) of those curls.The Glorious World of Crowns, Kinks and CurlsThrough April 18; centerstage.org More