Thoughts of a Colored Man Broadway Reviews

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. 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.

ixing spoken word, slam poetry, laugh-out-loud comedy, drama and razor-sharp dialogue, Scott's words are met with Steve H. Broadnax III's directorial flourishes that are so lovely they elicit gasps. Both playwright and director are Broadway newcomers, and their Thoughts of a Colored Man is a marvel from start to finish.

While the play, directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, was not written in response to events of right now, it is a timely and sometimes moving interrogation of what it means to be a Black man at this moment. The play speaks bluntly and directly to an audience about what racism, inequality, aspiration, love, sexuality, tragedy, success, and happiness look like to a broad group of Black men in contemporary Brooklyn. It is unabashedly earnest.

A hope for the future arrives in the final moments of 'Thoughts of a Colored Man,' a dutiful and expansive cataloguing of its title subject by Keenan Scott II. 'I can't wait for the day when my skin isn't a novelty,' a man known as Happiness, played by Bryan Terrell Clark, tells the audience. It's as much a self-conscious commentary on the playwright's own project as on the broader experience of Black men in America. That's the sprawling, diffuse subject that Scott ambitiously inventories here, in a series of vignettes, run-ins and soliloquies set in a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood over the course of a single day. Under the able direction of Steve H. Broadnax III, Scott's poetic distillations gleam with insights and vulnerabilities of heart and mind.

Thoughts of a Colored Man is the kind of play I make excuses for. The Broadway production of Keenan Scott II's new work is a study of Black masculinity and 'blends spoken word, slam poetry, rhythm and humor' to tell the stories of a group of Black men living in Brooklyn. Based on this description alone, it sounds like the kind of project - experimental in structure, bold in vision and written and directed by Black people - that I want to succeed in the glaringly white world of theater. And yet, days after seeing this entertaining but emotionally inert play, I am resistant to passing judgment, plagued by the ways it fell short for me.

Under Steve H. Broadnax III's artful direction, however, the cast avoids falling too neatly into types, and Depression and Happiness emerge with particular individual clarity. When the play is at its best-when the rhythms kick into place, and the details pop, and the language sharpens to a cutting edge-one is grateful for the voices that Scott has brought to Broadway.

If any one play comes to represent the current Broadway season's remarkable renaissance of new works by Black writers, it will probably be Keenan Scott II's soul-searching, rhythmically-driven, and widely-accessible drama 'Thoughts of a Colored Man,' which was produced in Syracuse and Baltimore prior to the pandemic.

These short speeches don't make for the most promising introduction to the lives of the seven men featured in 'Thoughts of a Colored Man,' which opened Wednesday at Broadway's Golden Theatre, after its world premiere in 2019 at Syracuse Stage. The barbershop scene, however, brings them all together to create a mashup of arguments, personalities, disagreements, friendships, backgrounds and conflicts that grip the attention immediately and don't let up for the next 90 minutes.

I'd argue that the piece actually could use yet more of those titular thoughts on the state of the nation, of New York City, of Black America. It's striking that the characters are named after emotions rather than ideas, although there certainly are examples of both here. It also could range yet deeper when it comes to exploring the clash of what we might think of as traditional values, such as the centering influence of church or community, versus new overtly secular notions of socialism, gender complexities and intersectionality, flowing out of college campuses and now fighting for influence with the Black men of New York, as every election reveals.

A happy surprise of 'Thoughts of a Colored Man,' which opened Wednesday night on Broadway, is that it's much more entertaining than its portentous and literary-sounding title would suggest. What you expect to resemble a book from a college syllabus actually gets belly laughs and a tear or two. And at 90 minutes, the show is not a second too long or short. Keenan Scott II's new play at the Golden Theatre, with refreshing warmth, gives us what it promises: the internal musings of a group of New York black men.

The play's title, loose structure, and code-named characters bring to mind For Colored Girls, Ntozake Shange's landmark 1975 choreopoem that similarly explores the trials and tribulations of American people of color. That brilliant exercise in communal triumph and warmth in the face of unceasing adversity, however, hits the raw nerve of confession-of words feared to be uttered, but necessary for survival and understanding. Scott's play is not without its moments, but is otherwise a rote recitation with little at stake.

Speaking, as I was above, of political correctness, I'm about to give the currently prevailing policy a tug of my own. I reiterate that Scott's Thought of a Colored Man is for all audiences, but I submit that there are really only two audiences and that both will profit deeply from it. The BiPOC audience members will recognize and appreciate Scott's understanding of who they are and what continuing indignities they experience daily. The white audience, realizing more in the last few BLM years than it historically has, will be taking in even newer revelations about a country so long and still too recalcitrantly the major societal and cultural influence. For his perspicacity and for his well-honed insistence on perceiving and respecting the life of the Other, playwright Scott is to be profoundly thanked.

There's a palpable urgency to Keenan Scott II's poetic drama making its Broadway debut after several regional theater productions. Revolving around numerous themes endemic to the Black experience in contemporary America, Thoughts of a Colored Man is the sort of finger-on-the-pulse work that elicits murmurs of approval from its audience, one that is more racially diverse than usually seen on the Great White Way. It's advertising proclaims it to be 'A New American Play for a New Broadway,' and the tagline doesn't seem like hyperbole.

Like Shange's seven all-female characters (called the Lady in Red, the Lady in Blue, etc. after the color of their costumes) who told the stories of Black women's lives through poetry, song and dance, Scott's seven all-male characters (called Anger, Lust, Happiness and other emotions or character traits) tell the stories of Black men's lives through spoken word poetry, and occasional song (sung, beautifully, by Luke James.). But like the various series in which the cast members have performed, 'Thoughts of a Colored Man' also presents credible characters in more or less straightforward scenes - watching a basketball game and bickering in a neighborhood barbershop (the best scene), working or shopping at a grocery store, discussing women while waiting endlessly for a bus, waiting at a hospital maternity ward, coaching basketball in a school gym, shooting the breeze on a line to get the latest Air Jordans.

Signs play an important part in the episodic play Thoughts of a Colored Man. For one thing, the show itself was a sign: Thoughts was the first new show to put up a marquee during the COVID shutdown. In February, no one knew exactly how or when an opening would happen, so the display was a big, bold, crocus-yellow promise that the theater was going to return. The play also takes place on a sign - Robert Brill's set is a gigantic billboard. Behind the performers on the Golden Theatre's stage is a huge white rectangle with the word COLORED blocked out in gray-on-white letters. As the characters visit various locations in their neighborhood in Brooklyn, the performers wander around and on the billboard's metal framework.

Signs play an important part in the episodic play Thoughts of a Colored Man. For one thing, the show itself was a sign: Thoughts was the first new show to put up a marquee during the COVID shutdown. In February, no one knew exactly how or when an opening would happen, so the display was a big, bold, crocus-yellow promise that the theater was going to return. The play also takes place on a sign - Robert Brill's set is a gigantic billboard. Behind the performers on the Golden Theatre's stage is a huge white rectangle with the word COLORED blocked out in gray-on-white letters. As the characters visit various locations in their neighborhood in Brooklyn, the performers wander around and on the billboard's metal framework.