Word: script
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...Black equality in the 1960s. To Be Young, Gifted, and Black tells her story in the context of the growing Civil Rights movement. But to its credit, this play also explores Hansberry's life from feminist and artistic perspectives. Although director Katrina Merritt's staging is conventional, the intriguing script and powerful cast ensure that our interest in Hansberry and the works she created will linger after the lights have faded...
Another strong feature of To Be Young, Gifted, and Black is its refusal to view Hansberry's life entirely through the prism of race relations. As the script convincingly demonstrates, problems of sexuality and artistic integrity occupy the Playwright's work as frequently as racial issues. The tension between her role as Black spokesperson and her individual identity is exposed in one scene in which characters from Hansberry's past encircle her and silence her voice with their own shouts...
Cross-casting is a recent and noble ideal. When a director or producer cross-casts, he or she casts a role disregarding the script's proscription of race or gender. On one level, it is an appealingly democratic notion; it suggests that anyone can play any role, and that despite our socialization, characteristics such as sex and race are supremely superficial...
...American society today, is misleading. Cross-casting is inherently a political act, theater's own brand of revisionist history. If we locate drama in its proper place in the canon of Western literature, we are forced to acknowledge its bias toward European males. In the past, drama has scripted few if any roles for minorities and few full or flattering roles for women. And as most high-school English teachers will tell you, even the roles written for women were until recently played by men. So in a progressive world, the argument follows, we learn to disregard a script...
...book or TV show, the plot is hard to get involved in, especially in the breakneck opening minutes. The love scenes, although competently acted, are so flatly written that they lack emotional intensity, a defect that the lush, quasi-operatic score only partly makes up for. In the script's soap-opera view of life, sexual passion and jealousy drive even political revolutions. And there are echoes of the worst musical of the 1980s, the Shroud of Turin howler Into the Light, in the finale: red-and-gold-robed chorines try to explain the Asian religious concept of karma...