Word: playwrighting
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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...
...South, as they try to decide whether Hannibal should run away from slavery. The central characters from A Raisin in the Sun wrestle with the same question when they debate if they should accept a white man's money in exchange for not moving into his neighborhood. The Playwright herself wonders whether she can best serve her the cause of civil rights by writing in New York or by journeying South with the Freedom Riders...
...tribute to this play's realism that the characters in these situations do not make consistent decisions; while Hannibal flees slavery, the Playwright's decision is to remain foremost a writer and not a marcher...
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...