![]() ![]() “Thoughts of a Colored Man” joins a wave of new works by Black artists on Broadway this season when it was previously presented at Syracuse Stage and Baltimore Center Stage in fall 2019, only one such play appeared on the Great White Way. Frequent and audible assent at a recent performance proved that it satiates a clear and present hunger. The play seems to offer up its excavations for the dual benefit of viewers to whom they are unfamiliar (mostly white Broadway audiences) and those craving the glow of recognition (a hopefully growing number of Black theatergoers). 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. Local motorcycle gangs have increasingly made contact with Mexican and other cartels to bring drugs into the country, according to Australian authorities.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. In 2019-2020, the last period for which data is available, some 39 tonnes of drugs were seized by police. “You can walk around at night time and feel like nothing is going to happen.”ĭespite having a population of just 26 million people, Australia is one of the world’s most lucrative markets for recreational drugs, with prices well above those on the streets of Europe or North America. “They think it is so safe and this is so different to home.” “I have friends that come here to visit and they think, ‘Wow, Australia is a dream’,” she said. Olivia Scanlan, a 27-year-old local actress and dancer, told the AFP news agency she was “shocked” by the shooting in the normally peaceful neighbourhood. He has not been formally identified but is believed to be aged in his 40s,” police said.Īuthorities did not name the suspect but the Sydney Morning Herald, citing police sources, said the “heavily tattooed” victim was linked to organised crime.Ī grey Porsche was found burned out nearby and was believed to be linked to the shooting, police said. Police established a cordon near a car park in the Bondi Junction shopping district, a few minutes’ drive from the Australian city’s famed beach, after the killing on Tuesday morning. A man has been shot dead in Sydney’s eastern Bondi district in what local media described as a “brazen daylight ambush”. ![]()
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