At one point, he says: “She was like the perfect use of assonance in just the right amount of lines. As Love, his spoken-word poetry is almost nonsensical. Even Ryan O’Gara’s lighting, which at one point dresses the whole theater in a stunning constellation of speckled lights, cannot elevate the language.ĭyllón Burnside has the toughest job. It doesn’t help with the show’s overdone approach. How does one design a stage for a show that wants to claim representations of Blackness without knowing what to say about it? Robert Brill’s stage design, low black scaffolding and that “COLORED” billboard, recalls Glenn Ligon’s 1990 “Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background),” which was in turn inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s famous quote. There are barely any mentions of how whiteness shapes the Black experience in America. Despite being set in the present, the play feels removed from time Scott doesn’t touch the Black Lives Matter protests or the institutional systems that hold Black men back. to the gay gentrifier who was raised in the upper middle class.
Thoughts of a colored man full#
The play sits at the intersection of different avenues of Black life, from the bright retail worker who had to forgo a full scholarship to M.I.T. More broadly, though, what does “Thoughts” ultimately contribute to this long conversation about Blackness in America? The minute insights are clear, about class and masculinity. So Passion (Luke James) talks Lust (Da’Vinchi) down after a barbershop argument, and Happiness has an awkward confrontation with Depression (Forrest McClendon) in a grocery store. It has a narrative continuity that Shange’s doesn’t, though to what end is unclear. “Thoughts” may be inspired by Ntozake Shange’s renowned choreopoem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” in which seven unnamed women alternate among songs, dances, monologues and choral poems.
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Broadnax III, only runs for about 100 minutes, it takes us to a bus stop, a basketball court, a barbershop, a hospital and other locations, in a series of 18 snappy scenes.
Set in present-day Brooklyn, amid the many symbols of gentrification (Citi Bike stations, Whole Foods and a Paris Baguette), “Thoughts” employs vignettes to check in with various characters, who are often grouped together. Incorporating slam poetry, prose and songs performed by its cast of seven, “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” which first premiered in 2019 at Syracuse Stage in a co-production with Baltimore Center Stage, aspires to be a lyrical reckoning with Black life in America but only delivers a gussied-up string of straw-man lessons.
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It’s a question that Scott’s Broadway debut, which opened on Wednesday night at the John Golden Theater, doesn’t quite know how to answer. One of them then asks the question that begins the play: “Who is the Colored Man?” Wearing different combinations of black, gray and red, they stand staring at a hulking billboard that reads “COLORED” in declarative black caps.
Seven Black men step onto the stage in the opening of Keenan Scott II’s “Thoughts of a Colored Man.” Over the course of the play, each will reveal a personality and history, but not a name, though later they will introduce themselves as Love, Happiness, Wisdom, Lust, Passion, Depression and Anger.
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