Hooded; Or Being Black For Dummies Off-Broadway Original Cast

Hooded; Or Being Black For Dummies is a wickedly funny story of a chance relationship between two 14-year old black youth, living in the same city, but growing up in totally different worlds. Marquis is a book smart prep-schooler living with his adoptive white family in the affluent suburb of Achievement Heights, obsessed with the philosophy of Nietzsche; Tru is a street savvy kid from the inner city of Baltimore, obsessed with Tupac. Their worlds overlap in a holding cell, a first for Marquis, who has been protected by his family’s privilege, but all too familiar to Tru. They butt heads, debate, wrestle and ultimately prove Nietzsche and Tupac were really saying the same thing.

From Director, Anthony Richardson: Tru and Marquis are two young kids from opposite sides of the tracks who cross paths in a jail cell. Tru will try to instill lessons of survival in Marquis, which will offer him a portal into an untapped cultural knowledge that can’t be duplicated, even when outside forces work diligently to steal the “secret.” At the core, Hooded is a pseudo-satirical examination of “culture as mask or costume” and the social dynamics that exist in the lead-up to racialized violence against black people. Black men and white men; black men and white women; white women and white men; and now, due to casting, a possible glimpse of all those in relation to black women.