“I am rather inclined to silence, and whether that be wise or not, it is at least more unusual nowadays to find a man who can hold his tongue than to find one who cannot.”
Right now, though, I think that I miss most of all a place that no longer exists save in the unfathomable precincts of memory, the Smalltown of fifty years ago. I can see it whenever I close my eyes, but I long to walk among its shadows, and I don’t know when I’ll get the chance to do so again….
“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.”
Barbershops of the old-fashioned three-chair type are integral parts of Black urban neighborhoods, quasi-community centers where the locals not only get their hair cut but hang out, see friends, swap gossip, and shoot the breeze. I learned this from “Barbershop,” Tim Story’s charming 2002 screen comedy about a 40-year-old shop on the South Side of Chicago, and “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” Keenan Scott II’s new play, much of which is set in and near a barbershop located in a Brooklyn neighborhood undergoing gentrification, bears a distinct family resemblance to Mr. Story’s film.
That said, “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” in which monologues, playlets, songs and slam poetry are loosely strung together for 100 intermission-free minutes, is more obviously patterned after “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf,” Ntozake Shange’s 1976 “choreopoem” about the lives of Black women in America. Like “For Colored Girls,” “Thoughts” has seven characters, all of them bearing symbolic names: Anger, Depression, Happiness, Love, Lust, Passion and Wisdom. In this case, though, their collective purpose, as Mr. Scott proclaims in the first line of the play, is to pose the question “Who is the Colored Man?” If this sounds both ambitious and pretentious to you . . . well, you’re right. Nor does “Thoughts” hold together well: Its 18 scenes land like a handful of darts flung randomly at a board…
Lucas Hnath’s “Dana H.” is the second of two documentary plays based on real-life events that are running in rotating repertory through mid-January at Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre (both have already had successful off-Broadway runs). Unlike “Is This a Room,” a four-hander that opened last week, “Dana H.,” directed by Les Waters, is a solo show in which Deirdre O’Connell lip-syncs a recorded interview with Dana Higginbotham, Mr. Hnath’s mother, the chaplain of a psychiatric ward in Florida who was abducted by one of her clients in 1997. The interview was conducted by Steve Cosson, whose voice is also heard on the tape, then edited down to one hour and 15 minutes by Mr. Hnath.
Ms. Higginbotham’s nightmarish story is horrific, even sickening…
