February 2009
Lydia Diamond's Stage Black Rocks the Storefront
Posted February 18 in News, Reviews, Comments 0
February 18, 2009
Kerry Reid - Chicago Tribune Review
Playwright Lydia Diamond's sharp self-deprecating broadside against the worn-out tropes of African-American theater features a saintlike, albeit catatonic, black matriarch on a couch. This dig at the theatrical images of long-suffering black women, such as those found in Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun," isn't completely original with Diamond. George C. Wolfe covered similar territory in 1986's hit comedy revue "The Colored Museum" with his biting sketch, "The Last-Mama-on-the-Couch Play." But Diamond brings her own unique spin to exploding the stereotypes.
Diamond's "Stage Black," now in a world premiere with MPAACT (Maat Production Association of Afrikan Centered Theatre), also contains elements familiar to anyone who has followed this extraordinarily talented writer over the last several years.
As in "The Gift Horse" and "Stick Fly," Diamond's characters come out of a comfortably upper-middle-class black experience, not inner-city poverty. But in her latest, they don't save the drama for their mama or each other. They let their creator have it with both barrels, and the verbal fusillades offer side-splitting insights into the creative process and the dominant mind-set of theatrical producers in choosing what's "marketable" when it comes to black narratives onstage.
Time Out Chicago Review - Stage Black
Posted February 8 in News, Reviews, Comments 0
http://www.timeout.com/chicago/articles/theater/71169/stage-black
February 5, 2009
Christopher Shea
DOPPEL YOUR GANGER, DOPPEL YOUR FUN
The cast of Stage Black features Diamond’s stand-in.
As a young, black playwright striving to produce relevant material, Lydia Diamond’s got some bones to pick with her audience. Black viewers crave nothing more incendiary from her than woe-begotten tales of buppie strife. And white folks? They just want sagas of sexual abuse. Diamond uses meta means to settle her score, writing herself (or an indistinguishable doppelganger) straight into her script, and hashing things out with characters as she creates them. At times, the antsy audience members she’s appeasing feel more than a bit like straw men (one beguiled white lady hints aloud that black writers just “need to get over that whole slave thing.” Really?). Diamond warns us not to label her self-aware tale “Pirandello-esque.” As her pomo conceit assumes a ludicrousness that threatens to overtake the broken-home story, David Ives gone frantic springs more readily to mind.
Still, Diamond’s got a whip-smart feel for character, and, with MPAACT, a cast that can’t be beat. Diamond’s fear of the archetypical tends to serve her well. Her array of total weirdos, from sleazeball, Boogie Nights Grandpa to sissified, but hetero nerd Sasha, reaches legitimately uncharted waters. Watch in particular for LaNisa Frederick’s Monica: The Writer intends to forge her protagonist as a hearty woman of uncommon get-up-and-go. She instead births a 23-year-old slacker with a warm heart, and a stunted need for Mom. In Frederick’s hands, Monica’s both hopelessly naïve and boisterously authoritative, a joy to watch when she commands center stage, and even better when she regards her family with eye-rolling, adolescent abandon from the sidelines.
About MPAACT: History and Examples of the Work
Posted February 6 in Afrikan Centered Theatre & Culture, Video, Comments 0
Excerpted from 2007 episode of WTTW's ArtBeat Chicago.