BWW Reviews: HOW WE GOT ON Expertly Mixes Authenticity, Rap and Growing Up

Hip hop is the beating heart of Forum Theatre's tender coming-of-age story of three suburban teens miles from the big city honing their talents and searching for acceptance and authenticity.

How We Got On brings us back to the late 80s hip hop scene when Yo! MTV Raps was the authority of what was cutting edge in music and a rap battle could settle a score. Three suburban kids - Hank (Manu Kumasi), Julian (Thony Mena), and Luann (Kashayna Johnson) - express and explore their changing emotions and tumultuous relationships through rap. Discovering rare kindred spirits at a time Top 40 radio was churning out Guns 'N Roses, Debbie Gibson and Rick Astley, the teens balance their growing friendship and mutual respect with the threat each poses to the others' authority and skill.

How We Got On is wonderfully kindhearted, rather than the confrontation and swagger so often associated with rap. The play delves into the vulnerability and limitations of the teens as much as it celebrates their joy to express and create. Director Paige Hernandez, whose work frequently merges hip hop, dance, theater, poetry and arts education, expertly sets the emotional stakes of teens Hank, Julian and Luann. Playwright Idris Goodwin's script was developed at The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center and premiered two years ago at Actors Theatre of Louisville's famed Humana Festival, two tremendous forces in the development of new theater work in this country. Like director Paige Hernandez, the playwright is a multi-faceted artist - an award-winning essayist, spoken word artist, and playwright. Both Hernandez and Goodwin are teachers of hip hop aesthetics - the audience comes away from Forum Theatre's How We Got On with a greater understanding of the history and evolution of rap though it never feels academic.

15-year-old Hank, an MC wannabe who initially thinks he's alone in his love for rap among his classmates on The Hill, is played by Manu Kumasi. Kumasi expertly balances the character's openness, yearning, earnestness and growing confidence. Soon Hank meets Julian, aka Vic Vicious, who is full of swagger and able to imitate anything he hears and looking very cool in the process. Forum Theatre ensemble member Thony Mena brilliantly shares Julian's strutting overconfidence of a 15-year-old who owns the place as well as his slowly revealed more vulnerable side.

We learn Hank is not confident in owning the boasts he so cleverly pens, but Julian can win over any audience with Hank's ghost-written words. Hank realizes, "Sure, Julian - Vic Vicious - would get the applause - but this way, Hank wouldn't hear them boo again." Together, they are a 1980s Cyrano story as Hank feeds his rhymes to the confident Julian. The balance between Hank and Julian drives the play.

Enter Luann, a female voice in this male bastion. She can conjure rhymes from thin air, a skill honed after her disapproving father tears up her writing. Actress Kashayna Johnson as Luann is endearing but the script calls for more fierceness and Johnson needs to project - we lose too many of the playwright's marvelous words.

Pushing the action forward is The Selector portrayed by Alina Collins Maldonado, a Forum Theatre company member. The Selector controls the action like a god on high, behind her mic, looping, spinning, remixing the action on stage. Maldonado also plays Hank's and Julian's fathers, the basketball coach, the Battle of the Bands host and other characters. Just as the music crossfades and makes a smooth transition between two songs, Maldonado shifts seamlessly between characters making clear physical and vocal differentiation among her many characters. She is an adept and captivating storyteller.

Maldonado, as Hank's father, has one of the production's most compelling moments. We find that the exacting father who claims there is a science to everything, has studied poetry with Robert Hayden, the celebrated poet who died at age 67 in 1980 - eight years before the play takes place. Dad might not understand rap as music, but he hears the youth's poetic cry from the heart. Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays," quoted by Hank's dad, reminds us of the continuing generational divide, scratching and back-cueing we hear this disconnect between father and son over and over through time: "Speaking indifferently to him/who had driven out the cold/and polished my good shoes as well./What did I know, what did I know/of love's austere and lonely offices?"

The sound design for the production by Thomas Sowers is lush and fully integrated into the action as it should be for a play with music and sound so vitally interwoven. John Bowhers' set - multi-leveled, gritty and spare - easily and skillfully moves the audience from place to place. Christopher Annas-Lee's lighting aids Bowhers' scenic design from flashing dance lights to a single red bulb as the teens climb the town's water tower. Frank Labovitz's costuming takes us back to those late 80s days in the 'burbs.

Through How We Got On we discover, as The Selector says, "that moment of spark, recognition that music lives in the body ... Recognition that the funk - It lives in the DNA." The smart and skillfully-rendered production has great energy and heart.

Runtime: 80 minutes with no intermission

How We Got On runs through November 22 with shows Thursday - Saturday at 8 pm, Saturdays and Sundays at 2 pm, with an additional show on Monday, November 17 at 8 pm. The production is at the Silver Spring Black Box Theater, 8641 Colesville Road in Silver Spring. For tickets, please visit Forum Theatre's website here.

Photo Credits: (Top L-R) Julian (Thony Mena) and Hank (Manu Kumasi). (Bottom L-R) Julian (Thony Mena), Luann (Kashayna Johnson), Hank (Many Kumasi) and the Selector (Alina Collins Maldonado). Photo courtesy of Noe Todorovich Photography.

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