Word: frye
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...Young, Gifted, and Black unfolds in a standard stream-of-consciousness manner, following Hansberry's life in rough chronological order. Autobiographical vignettes are interspersed with scenes from her two famous plays, A Raisin in the Sun and The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. The Playwright (Amanda Frye) narrates scenes as the ensemble enacts her memories. She moves around the perimeters of those scenes, smiling bemusedly and offering commentary taken from Hansberry's speeches and writings...
...action proceeds slowly, and the gaps between scenes allow audience members perhaps too much time to mull over what they have just seen. But Frye provides an admirable bridge between the play's various moments, her whimsical smile and wry analysis investing the scenes with a relevance that would be lacking if the play ran without a narrator. The Playwright resembles the Stage Manager from Thorton Wilder's Our Town, but Frye plays her role with an emotional immediacy that reminds the audience that Hansberry is constantly discussing events from her own life...
...Young, Gifted and Black is a powerful exposition of racial problems within American society. But this play is also the engaging story of one author's attempts to give voice to her own emotional concerns. And the success with which Frye and the rest of the cast reproduce Hansberry's life only makes the brevity of that life seem all the more tragic...
...well-cast as the youthful and somewhat spacey Alex, who flirts with the various characters encountered in "Terra Incognita" and has a deep penchant for the "slanguage" of 1955. Susan Gray maintains a prim conservatism throughout the play as Fanny, a young old-maid from the Midwest. Amanda Frye wields words well as Mary, a "passionate scientist" with a particularly obscure vocabulary and an inclination to corny eloquence...
...Usually, the president will not dissolve any government unless it has been beaten at the polls," Frye said. "In this case, apparently the president was influenced by either the opposition or, more likely, the military...