Word: playwrighting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Young, Gifted, and Black unfolds in a standard stream-of-consciousness manner, following Hansberry's life in rough chronological order. Autobiographical vignettes are interspersed with scenes from her two famous plays, A Raisin in the Sun and The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. The Playwright (Amanda Frye) narrates scenes as the ensemble enacts her memories. She moves around the perimeters of those scenes, smiling bemusedly and offering commentary taken from Hansberry's speeches and writings...
...members perhaps too much time to mull over what they have just seen. But Frye provides an admirable bridge between the play's various moments, her whimsical smile and wry analysis investing the scenes with a relevance that would be lacking if the play ran without a narrator. The Playwright resembles the Stage Manager from Thorton Wilder's Our Town, but Frye plays her role with an emotional immediacy that reminds the audience that Hansberry is constantly discussing events from her own life...
Neither Pachter nor Velasquez dismisses the ideal of cross-casting. Each is mindful of the responsibilities of that political gesture. Cross-casting is an ideal precisely because our society is not, and audience members are mindful of race and sex, especially when it goes against the proscriptions of a playwright. We have to be careful about the messages we let them take from the theater. We do not advance feminism if we cast women in subservient roles written for men, or egalitarianism if we cast Black actors in subservient roles written for whites. Those roles have already been scripted...
Obviously, Ethel, Lionel and John were wrong. The epic drama they sought was there all the time, too close and too painful for acknowledgment. Peters' work underlines the irony: only a biographer could relate this family saga. The playwright who attempted to describe the turrets, basements and closets in the House of Barrymore would never be believed...
...after Man has brought the pregnant Woman to Priest (Richard Claflin). Apparently, Man is questioning the puzzling genesis of their unborn child. He wants help and advice from the Priest--some allusion is made to the possible demonism of Woman, but we do not discover the details until later. Playwright Coover's attitude toward the church is clear as the Priest voices his self-righteous rigidity. He says of the pregnancy, "Even if it should occur, we could not permit...