Reviews
Posted September 29 in Reviews, Comments 0
The Reader 9/29/11 - RECOMMENDED
Speaking in Tongues: The Chronicles of Babel
Playwright Shepsu Aakhu interviewed eight members of his extended family about the years they spent living in the Washington Park housing project, which used to stand near Lake Park and 41st. The resulting show, consisting of verbatim excerpts from those interviews, is digressive, making the two acts appear nearly identical and the two-hour running time feel destinationless. I couldn't have cared less (about that). Aakhu's insightful, engaged, articulate interviewees make extraordinary company, and director Andrea Dymond's exquisite cast speak with the kind of graceful candor that makes everything ring true. Best of all, Aakhu understands that good theater isn't social work or group therapy. He offers no lessons but simply charts the evolution of complex lives lived in a nearly impossible situation. --Justin Hayford
Posted February 1 in Reviews, Comments 0
'Ghosts' lays race, adolescence bare
By Nina Metz, Tribune reporter
Every so often a play comes along that captures the heady mix of comedy and frightening unpredictability that defines teenage life. These kinds of plays can be some of the most exciting nights at the theater, which is the case with "Ghosts of Atwood," the terrific new show from playwright Shepsu Aakhu about the turbulent months he spent boarding at a Wisconsin military school in the late 1970s — the rare black face in a sea of white.
As a portrayal of schoolboy camaraderie and peer pressure, Aakhu's play bears a resemblance to Barry Levinson's 1996 film "Sleepers" and more pointedly Alan Bennett's 2004 play "The History Boys." But "Ghosts of Atwood" (produced by MPAACT on the Greenhouse mainstage) stands on its own. Though it has some minor issues that need addressing, it has all the makings of a breakout hit and deserves a long run.
At the play's center is Quinn (Wardell Julius Clark), a sweet-faced kid from Chicago who is beaten to a pulp upon his arrival at the school, Atwood. The hazing has less to do with race than his newbie status — but the racial tension is ever present. "This was a brand new alone," Quinn says. "I was alone with white people." It is a very good performance from Clark, who portrays Quinn's naiveté with a real sense of texture and human nuance.
An upperclassman named Whitehead is the only other black on campus (a first-rate Corey Spruill, wound tight in all the right ways), but for the most part he leaves Quinn to fend for himself in the dorms — a hothouse of unchecked adolescent energy fueled by testosterone, marijuana and Led Zeppelin.
The play is a major step forward for MPAACT, which is one of the city's only black storefront theater companies. Not everything works. Casey Diers' lighting is clunky and the script could use some edits — the too-long, abstract preamble needs to go. But the play has serious commercial potential. Director Andrea J. Dymond pulls no punches. The production is light enough on its feet to sidestep anything too earnest — horrible as these boys are, they are also entertaining doofs — and the show has a real sense of momentum.
Brooding and complicated, the boys are quick to taunt one another but just as quick to crack jokes. Fistfights break out with alarming frequency. The school itself doles out its share of physical punishments. And at night, under the cover of darkness, the boys are haunted by "ghosts" — their euphemism for a particular adult who roams the halls with odious intentions.
Dymond and her crackerjack, 13-member ensemble (including Dan Loftus as the stern but fair drill sergeant and Zack Shornick as a bratty jerkoff cadet) never once let up. There is a locker room mentality that courses through everything these boys say and do, and Aakhu brings it all to life with dialogue that rings true.
Ten Square featured on NPR's 848
Posted October 16 in Afrikan Centered Theatre & Culture, Events, News, Reviews, Comments 0
From the Chicago Public Radio's website:
Chicago Playwright Imagines Life After Reparations
Chicago playwright Shepsu Aakhu says he didn’t make up any of the atrocities depicted in his new play. Ten Square imagines what life might be like for African Americans in a society where reparations were actually made for slavery. Aakhu says contemporary and historical political systems helped fuel his dystopic vision – the post-war division of Germany, the cold-war isolation of Cuba and the ongoing conflict in Israel and Palestine. He and lead actress Carla Stillwell spoke with Richard Steele.
Click here to listen to the interview
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.
Stage Black: Recommended in Chicago Reader
Posted January 30 in News, Reviews, Comments 0
Friday, January 30, 2009
Review by Zac Thompson
In Lydia Diamond's play, a bright, underfunded African-American playwright sets out to write a drama about an affluent black family, but is constantly interrupted by the characters, who have their own ideas about how they'd like to be portrayed. Protective of their complexity, the family members--an unruly lot, including a spunky lesbian daughter, dyspeptic older brother, and suave grandfather--suspect the writer of wanting to turn them into easily marketable stereotypes (angry young black man, wizened gramps, hypersexualized vamp). Diamond's razor-sharp skewering of what audiences expect from black playwrights—historical pieces about slavery or family comedies with "a big momma on the couch"--is bitterly funny and saves the piece from the tedious self-indulgence that often befalls writing about writing. Mignon McPherson Nance's staging for MPAACT is pitch-perfect, with a fluid style somewhere between satire, realism, and Pirandello.