A Theatre-Goer's Thoughts

  Victoria Omoregie as Charity and Yetunde Felix-Ukwu as Mother in The Great Privatio n at Woolly Mammoth Theatre. Photo credit: Cameron Whitman. Part of the legacy of this nation’s history of the enslavement of Africans torn from their homelands is – and unfortunately may continue to be – the marginalization of African Americans in the area of healthcare. One of the most famous (and infamous) examples is “The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” in which the United States Public Health Service and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention studied approximately 400 Black men, for 40 years, from 1932 to 1972. Available treatments were withheld, resulting in much suffering and many deaths that could easily have been avoided. In this and similar circumstances, the lives of African Americans were (and perhaps are) controlled by societal and government (White) establishment. The men were literally human guinea pigs. The Great Privation (How to flip ten cents into ...

  Alysha Umphress as Gloria Thorpe with members of the team in Damn Yankees at Arena Stage. Photo credit: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman, Let me get right to the point: Arena Stage’s Damn Yankees is damn good! Originally produced in 1955, it is a classic American musical. Director/choreographer Sergio Trujillo calls it a “revisal”: not exactly a revival, but a revival with revisions to make it more meaningful for the audience 70 years after it debuted. Playwrights Doug Wright and Will Power have dusted off the musical’s book, re-setting it in the year 2000. Wright explains that just as we, in the 1980s and 1990s, nostalgically considered the 1950s to be “a comparatively innocent time,” we may similarly look back on 2000 – before the saturation and domination of the Internet and social media. Of course, changing the time period required and allowed some changes. In the original production, the focus was on the Washington baseball team: not the Nats, but the defunct Washington Se...

  The cast of Merry Wives at the Shakespeare Theatre Company. Photo credit: Teresa Castracane. Some Shakespeare scholars believe that it was during a period of the plague that Shakespeare wrote two of his best-known and most admired plays, King Lear and Macbeth . Just as in that troubled period, during the COVID-19 pandemic (the “plague” of our times), playwrights, actors, musicians, and artists were challenged to think outside “the box” in order to keep their creative juices flowing. New York’s Public Theatre commissioned award-winning playwright Jocelyn Bioh, who received a Best Play Tony Award nomination for Jaja’s African Hair Braiding (produced last year at Arena Stage), to work on a new production of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor . The resulting play, now titled Merry Wives , was first produced in New York in 2021. The production program credits Bioh as “Adaptor,” though I am certain that titleTdoes not reflect the magnitude of what she has accomplished, which i...