James Baldwin’s celebrated essay collection, “The Fire Next Time,” has inspired numerous artistic works since its 1963 release. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ instant classic, “Between the World and Me,” and Jesmyn Ward’s race-themed anthology of 2016, “The Fire This Time,” are among them. Earlier this month, a New York celebration began serving up Baldwin-esque food for thought, and a few days remain to experience the cultural event.
Making statements about race, colorism, female agency and queer identity, the 15th annual The Fire This Time Festival – running at The Wild Project in the East Village of Manhattan until January 28 – extols the resilience of Black theater. Kelley Nicole Girod founded the Obie Award-winning festival to support the work of rising playwrights.
The event features a series of 10-minute vignettes from six up-and-coming African American playwrights, and this year The Fire This Time Festival focuses its mini-productions on Black women and the Black family. Director Cezar Williams reprises what’s known as the Ten-Minute Play Program. The idea debuted in 2017 to give emerging writers of color the platform to workshop their underrepresented stories for future development.
Employing a small troupe of actors –including Marinda Anderson, Danielle Covington, Benton Greene, Larry Powell and Shayvawn Webster – some plays’ themes overlapped, and a few clichés crept into the writing, but the ideas were all worth mulling.
“It’s Karen B****!,” written by Brooklyn-based playwright Taylor Blackman, takes the “Cosby Show” scenario of a liberal, upper-middle-class, two-parent household raising a socially aspirational daughter and turns it on its head. When the daughter asks her parents to prepare for a self-revelation, they comically assume the announcement will be of the LGBTQ variety – hanging a Pride flag and rocking rainbow T-shirts. Instead, she arrives home in a blond wig confessing that she…
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