![]() Scott’s mode of expositional storytelling can also grow to feel didactic, in a way that feels in conflict with efforts to ground the play in everyday reality. The result attempts an uneven sort of naturalism, as the men posit one purportedly universal truism after another, tracing the outlines of life in place of illuminating its substance. Like Shange, Scott wields poetry like a magnifying mirror, drawing attention where too little has historically been paid, and spinning those revelations loosely into narrative.īut where “For Colored Girls” assembles vivid and discrete portraits into a kind of cosmic ritual, Scott and Broadnax plant their kicks on the pavement, purveying a streetside take on the men’s daily lives and intersections. “Thoughts of a Colored Man” shares clear lineage with another restless and expressive probing of Black interiority and outward entrapment, Ntozake Shange’s 1975 “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” a revival of which is aiming for Broadway this spring. A scene at Wisdom’s old-school barbershop gathers the guys in a rare group interaction, more toward the purpose of traversing a roadmap of pressing social issues - redlining, the tyrannies of Black consumerism, homophobia - than generating character-driven drama. Scott favors language - verse, rhythm, rhyme - over action, and the men expound on their interior lives more often into the middle distance than in dynamic relation to one another. ![]() On a set by Robert Brill featuring a giant billboard as a kind of blank canvas, our primary encounters with each man come in the form of direct address, through which their backstories and resulting perspectives are mostly spelled out rather than illustrated. Most of the men know each other from around the neighborhood (Fort Greene or nearby, for eyes trained on Sven Ortel’s projections), and Scott hangs the play’s chronology on quotidian happenstance: a morning jog, a midday work break, coaching after-school basketball.
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