this week in theater

CULLUD WATTAH

A tight-knit family of five women battle the Flint water crisis in world premiere at the Public (photo by Joan Marcus)

CULLUD WATTAH
Martinson Theater, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Tuesday through Sunday through December 12, $40-$150
212-539-8500
publictheater.org

“You are free to bear collective witness & be collectively witnessed,” Erika Dickerson-Despenza writes in a program note to her extraordinary Cullud Wattah, continuing through December 12 at the Public’s Martinson Theater. The play is a powerful call to action inside a harrowing drama about one of humanity’s most basic needs: clean water. As you enter the space, you are met by hundreds of plastic bottles filled with dirty brown water, lining the stage and hanging from the ceiling, a forest of sickness that resembles a mass lynching.

Nine-year-old Plum (Alicia Pilgrim) is adding tally marks in chalk to the wall, tracking how many days it’s been since the city of Flint, Michigan, has been without clean drinking water. For years, their water has been tainted by lead, which Michigan governor Rick Snyder and GM were well aware of — but both government and corporation chose profit over public health. Plum makes her way into a bathtub at the front of the stage as she is joined by her mother, Marion (Crystal Dickinson), her seventeen-year-old sister, Reesee (Lauren F. Walker), her aunt, Ainee (Andrea Patterson), and her grandmother, Big Ma (Lizan Mitchell). The five women, four dressed in white, looking like ghosts, sing a spiritual while gathering in a type of ritual procession: “lead/ in thuh wattah/ lead/ in thuh wattah cheeldrun/ lead/ in thuh wattah/ snyder playin god/ with wattah.”

The play is set in Michigan’s fifth ward, Genessee County, in the fall of 2016, five years ago to the day. It takes place in the home of the Coopers, their house suggested by a set with no walls and only a partial ceiling. (The stunning design is by Adam Rigg, the costumes by Kara Harmon.) In the script, Dickerson-Despenza explains that the form and structure “are fundamental components of an artistic aesthetic & political instrument the playwright calls ‘jook joint writing’: a radical, subversive practice that dis/orders linguistic (neo)colonialism & imperialism, building vernacular without walls.” The characters move throughout the space with a rhythm that the outside world forbids.

Playwright Erika Dickerson-Despenza, director Candis C. Jones, and actress Crystal Dickinson rehearse Cullud Wattah (photo by Joan Marcus)

Marion is a widowed third-generation assembly-line worker at GM, trying to keep her job amid layoffs. Her older sister, Ainee, an addict survivor who is prepared to fight for change, is thirty-four weeks pregnant and worried that she will lose this baby as she has several before. Reesee wants to be a doula and a dancer and is immersed in Yoruba culture. Plum is battling illness, concerned for her immediate future. And Big Ma is trying to hold it all together. “White folks’ll take this house n flip it for a million once this whole lead thing is ovah,” she says. As word of a potential strike at the plant spreads, Marion and Ainee are at odds that could cause a rift in this tight-knit family of strong women.

Although Cullud Wattah is not part of Susan Smith Blackburn Prize winner Dickerson-Despenza’s planned ten-play Katrina Cycle, which includes the superb [hieroglyph] and the compelling radio play shadow/land, it features similar themes, exploring the intersection between water, race, and politics. References to liquids as a life-giving (and life-taking) force abound throughout the play. Ainee says that the baby in her womb is “doin wattah aerobics.” Reesee prays to Yemoja, the Yoruba water deity. Blood and piss figure prominently. The title itself can be read in several ways, from referring to the color of the water in the bottles to foul water that has been served to Black families.

Elegantly directed by Candis C. Jones (Pipeline, shadow/land), Cullud Wattah might specifically be about the Flint lead crisis but also recalls the history of whites-only water fountains and segregated pools in America; racism and colonialism are embedded in the play’s bones without Dickerson-Despenza having to stress them. Inspired by the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Ntozake Shange, and Suzan-Lori Parks, the playwright keeps the audience on edge for all 110 minutes, with a stellar cast led by Dickinson (Why Would I Dare: The Trial of Crystal Mason, You Can’t Take It with You, The Low Road) as a widowed mother willing to go to extreme lengths to support her family and Mitchell (Here Is Future: The Transformed Returns, Passage, shadow/land) as the matriarch who says exactly what she thinks.

Discussing the loss of Marion’s husband in the Afghanistan war, Big Mama says, “He provided for his family by any means necessary/ there’s money in war,” to which Marion responds, “There are wars in money mama/ too many to count.” As the play reminds us at the very end, there’s still a war going on in Flint over money and water, swiftly approaching its twenty-eight-hundredth day.

[Note: For more on the play, you can watch a conversation between Dickerson-Despenza and Jones here.]

APPROVAL JUNKIE

Faith Salie shares her quest for approval in one-woman show (photo by Daniel Rader)

APPROVAL JUNKIE
Audible Theatre’s Minetta Lane Theatre
18 Minetta Lane between Sixth Ave. and MacDougal St.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 12, $46-$56
www.audible.com

In her one-woman show, Approval Junkie, actress, author, and television and radio correspondent Faith Salie explains that when she would share a personal or professional success with her father, he would say, “I’m impressed, but not surprised.” I was impressed and surprised by how much I enjoyed the monologue, in which Salie details her lifelong quest for approval, from being an anorexic Georgia high school beauty and talent show contestant to auditioning for acting parts to getting married and wanting to have children. She also admits to being an applause junkie. “I’m half a century old, and I give a ton of fucks that you’re sitting at my feet,” she tells the audience. “Y’all came to the theater. And I’m pretty sure you’re wearing pants. And I hope you’re smiling behind those masks.”

Salie, an Emmy winner who appears regularly on NPR’s Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! and CBS Sunday Morning, is charming and likable — and brutally honest. She talks about some intensely private moments, but as much as she’s after our approval, she takes a humble, self-deprecating approach, telling a story that, in many ways, could be about any woman, although she acknowledges her significant privilege. She doesn’t brag about her accomplishments or look for sympathy for her failures; she just wants us to enjoy ourselves and, hopefully, learn about how we don’t need to search for approval ourselves around every corner.

Faith Salie accepts approval on opening night of Approval Junkie (photo by Daniel Rader)

The show is adapted from her book of the same name, which has two different subtitles: Adventures in Caring Too Much for the hardcover, My Heartfelt (and Occasionally Inappropriate) Quest to Please Just About Everyone, and Ultimately Myself for the paperback and ebook. For ninety minutes, Salie, in a lovely dark blue jumpsuit and beige heels (the costume is by Ivan Ingermann), walks across Jack Magaw’s spare set, which features a central platform, two small speakers where she sometimes sits, and a stained-glass-like backdrop of abstract geometric shapes on which video and animation are occasionally projected. Salie shares funny and moving stories about going to an Ayurvedic Healing Center in a Sarasota, Florida, strip mall to exorcise the darkness out of her in order to please her wasband (what she calls her ex-husband); being retweeted by Hillary Clinton and Mandy Patinkin; her desperation to look good at her divorce hearing; and attempting to be a hit on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox program. She remembers that early in her career, she took vocal lessons from acting coach Lesly Kahn, who asked her, “Why aren’t you as pretty as I want you to be?” She answers now, “I don’t know — I’m not as pretty as I want me to be.”

Directed by actor and producer Amanda Watkins, the play — which continues at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre through December 12, after which an Audible audio recording will be available — has a warm, welcoming atmosphere. Even when lines fall flat, and a bunch do, Salie proceeds, okay with that momentary lack of approval. Except for the animation at the beginning and end, the projections are random and inconsistent; you’ll find yourself time and again thinking something will be shown when nothing is. And that’s okay too.

It’s all bookended by tales about Shel Silverstein’s classic children’s book The Giving Tree (Salie calls the titular tree “the ultimate woodland approval junkie”) and Salie’s friendship with 104-year-old Ruth Rosner, a journey from childhood to old age. Describing Rosner’s sudden fame from Salie’s television profile of her, Salie says, “We all want to sit at the feet of someone with a century of wisdom and hear that once you get old enough, you stop striving, you figure it all out. You have, as the kids say, ‘zero fucks to give.’ But it doesn’t work that way. It feels too good to take a bow.” In this case, Salie has our approval, and she can take a well-deserved bow. (Salie will be taking part in an Audible Theater online 92Y conversation about Approval Junkie with writer and comic Josh Gondelman on November 30 at 7:00.)

MORNING’S AT SEVEN

Alley Mills, Lindsay Crouse, Patty McCormack, and Alma Cuervo play four sisters in Morning’s at Seven (photo by Maria Baranova)

Theatre at St. Clement’s
423 West Forty-Sixth St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Through December 5, $44
www.morningsat7.com

It’s a shame that Dan Wackerman’s warm and cozy adaptation of Paul Osborn’s 1939 family comedy, Morning’s at Seven, is ending its run a month earlier than planned at the Theatre at St. Clement’s, closing on December 5 instead of January 9. It certainly can’t be because of the overall quality of the show, which is first-rate, with an outstanding cast and a terrific set. Perhaps it’s the space itself; over the last nine years, I’ve seen only one other play at the theater that I’ve heartily recommended (although I was in the minority); this is the second.

The three-act, 135-minute show (including one intermission) is set in an unnamed middle America small town in 1922, in a quaint backyard shared by an extended family. In one house, Cora (Lindsay Crouse) and her husband, Thor (Dan Lauria), live with one of Cora’s sisters, the single Arry (Alley Mills). Next door, another sister, Ida (Alma Cuervo), lives with her husband, Carl (John Rubinstein), and their forty-year-old nerdy son, Homer (Jonathan Spivey). The fourth and oldest sister, Esty (Patty McCormack), lives a few blocks away with her condescending professor husband, David (Tony Roberts), who thinks her relatives are a bunch of morons. Everyone (except David) is all atwitter that Homer is finally bringing home his girlfriend, Myrtle (Keri Safran), after dating her for twelve years. The general expectation is that Homer will finally marry Myrtle and move into the nearby house on Sycamore Drive that his father Carl built for them, off in the distance as if a beacon of hope. (The homey, comfortable set is by Harry Feiner, with modest, unembellished period costumes by Barbara A. Bell.)

But all is not a Thomas Kinkade / Norman Rockwell scene. Carl has what at the time would be called “a nervous condition,” suffering from vaguely existential spells in which he thinks he is a failure and asks himself, “Where am I?” When the supercilious David finds Esty visiting her family against his wishes, he declares her to be a “free agent” and banishes her to the second floor of their house while he plans to live on the first, barely interacting with her. It soon becomes evident that Arry is no mere old maid but has been in love with Thor for decades. And Cora dreams of at last being alone with her husband, a considerate, likable man who smokes a pipe and prefers to avoid controversy.

Dan Lauria and Alley Mills of The Wonder Years reunite in John Osborne revival (photo by Maria Baranova)

“Cora’s made a couple of awful funny remarks lately about me living by myself. She’s got some bee in her bonnet. She’s up to something,” Arry tells Thor. “Oh, she isn’t either,” Thor says. “Well, she hadn’t better be, that’s all I say,” Arry adds. “Now, your home’s right here with us, Arry. Just as long as you want it,” Thor promises. Arry replies, “Well, don’t you forget it either.” Of course, Cora is up to something, and this long-suffering sister is plotting to take home all the pie, as it were.

Over the course of less than twenty-four hours, long-held secrets, and new ones, emerge as a nine people take stock of their lives, asking themselves, “Where am I?” And they’re not always satisfied with the answer to a question that the audience itself can relate to. It’s probably one of the reasons why the play has been so successful on the rare occasions it has been mounted, earning a slew of Tony awards and nominations for its 1980 and 2002 Broadway revivals, for example.

David (Tony Roberts) has some pointed advice for Carl (John Rubinstein) in Morning’s at Seven (photo by Maria Baranova)

It’s also a treat to watch a play starring seven wonderful actors in their seventies and eighties, at the top of their game. Lauria (Lombardi, A Christmas Story The Musical) and Mills (The Bold and the Beautiful, Bad Habits with her late husband Orson Bean) rekindle the chemistry they had as the father and mother on The Wonder Years from the 1980s; Mills ably stepped in when Judith Ivey tore a tendon during previews. Obie winner and Emmy and Grammy nominee Crouse (The Homecoming, Places in the Heart) is touching as the woman caught between them.

Oscar nominee McCormack’s (The Bad Seed, Frost/Nixon) Esty is just the right foil for two-time Tony nominee Roberts’s (The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, Play It Again, Sam) ornery and persnickety David, while Obie winner Cuervo (Uncommon Women and Others, On Your Feet!) is appropriately motherly to everyone, especially Tony winner Rubinstein’s (Pippin, Children of a Lesser God) Carl, who is a lost little boy except when he has his manly tools. Safran (Typhoid Mary) and Spivey (The Front Page) hold their own in such talented company as the naive, somewhat simpleminded young couple trying to figure out how to start their life together while the others are closer to reaching the end of theirs.

Obie winner Wackerman (Rocket to the Moon, Ten Chimneys), of the Peccadillo Theater Company, makes the audience feel like it’s a part of this small community, investing in the gossip and intimate drama of a family that unknowingly hides behind false modesty and a self-imposed politeness. They live in their own bubble; they don’t talk about politics, or the economy, or war, which is refreshing. Oscar and Tony winner Osborne, who wrote such hard-hitting plays as Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer, and Luther, took a lighter approach with Morning’s at Seven, and it works wonderfully in this version. Catch it while you can at this theater of doom.

JOHN SIMS RESIDENCY — 2020: (DI)VISIONS OF AMERICA

John Sims speaks out in multimedia presentations at La MaMa

Who: John Sims
What: Five-day multidisciplinary residency
Where: The Ellen Stewart Theatre, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
When: December 1-5, pay what you can $10-$60
Why: Conceptual artist and activist John Sims has been working on the multimedia project Recoloration Proclamation for two decades; it is now ready to be unveiled at La Mama, where the Detroit native is the 2021 artist-in-residence. From December 1 to 5, Sims will present six programs hitting on topical issues involving race, slavery, the Confederacy, police brutality, and inequalities that came to light during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The residency kicks off December 1 at 7:00 with an installation viewing and artist talk featuring the AfroDixieRemixes Listening Session — fourteen different Black versions of “Dixie” — and the world’s largest AfroConfederate flag, followed December 2 at 7:00 (and December 5 at 2:00) with a film screening of Recoloration Proclamation. On December 3, 4, and 5 at 7:00, Sims will take part in live performances of 2020: (Di)Visions of America. It all forms a unique self-portrait of the artist as well as a multidisciplinary look at the mind-set of contemporary America as Sims seeks redemption and rebirth through peace, liberty, and justice.

THE MOOD ROOM

Big Dance Theater’s The Mood Room explores Reagan-era consumerism and more (photo by Maria Baranova)

THE MOOD ROOM
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
November 30 – December 7, $35–$55
www.bam.org
www.bigdancetheater.org

Tickets are going fast for Big Dance Theater’s The Mood Room, coming to BAM Fisher’s Fishman Space November 30 to December 7. The sixty-minute world premiere, presented in association with the Kitchen, combines music, dance, theater, opera, and text, adapted from Guy de Cointet’s 1982 play The Five Sisters and Anton Chekhov’s 1900 classic The Three Sisters. In a program note, BDT cofounder, choreographer, and director Annie-B Parson explains, “Sometimes you find an artistic soul mate in the simple act of opening a book. This is what happened to me when I read the late 20th c. ‘plays’ of visual artist Guy de Cointet. You see, they are not really plays, they are visual events with texts that bask in the hot mess of the non-narrative posing as narrative — a state I would call living! Here is where de Cointet and I intersect: he is devoted to detours, departures, tonal shifts, and the unconfirmed. An atmosphere of codes, exits, and non-results permeate the writing. He quotes without substantiation or reason, he is a-historic, is liberated from achieving even a glimmer of resolution, and his authorial voice is intentionally cracking. His theater is both textual and visually based, without any hierarchy for language, truth, or the answer — and the physical objects in the texts have no stable meaning throughout the play. No one changes; no one learns anything.”

The multimedia piece takes place in Los Angeles in the Reagan 1980s of rampant consumerism and trickle-down economics. Elizabeth DeMent, Theda Hammel, Kate Moran, Myssi Robinson, and Michelle Sui portray the five sisters, with an experimental score by Holly Herndon, sound and recomposition by Mark degli Antoni, set design by Lauren Machen, costumes by Baille Younkman and Samantha Mcelrath, lighting by Joe Levasseur, and video by Keith Skretch. You should always expect the unexpected with BDT, whose previous works include Comme Toujours Here I Stand, Antigonick, and Short Form, and it sounds like The Mood Room will be no different.

NOLLYWOOD DREAMS

Sisters Ayamma (Sandra Okuboyejo) and Dede (Nana Mensah) are about to have a superstar travel into their lives in Nollywood Dreams (photo by Daniel J. Vasquez)

Newman Mills Theater, the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space
511 West 52nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 28, $39-$88 (use code MCC)
mcctheater.org

“When your spirit is sad and you’ve given up / and you don’t know where to go / Don’t get down, turn around / Pick up that remote and tune into your favorite show!” So goes the theme song to the popular Adenikeh! talk show in Jocelyn Bioh’s Nollywood Dreams. The same can be said for the play itself, an appealingly sweet comedy continuing at MCC through November 28.

Nollywood Dreams is set in Lagos, Nigeria, in the early 1990s, during the rise of the Nigerian film industry, what would come to be known as Nollywood, named after Hollywood and Bollywood. Gbenga Ezie (Charlie Hudson III), who studied in New York City before becoming Nigeria’s most popular filmmaker, is holding an open casting call for his new movie, The Comfort Zone, looking for an actress to play the love interest of superstar celebrity and all-around hottie Wale Owusu (Ade Otukoya), a blend of Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, George Clooney, and Will Smith.

Ayamma Okafor (Sandra Okuboyejo), a young woman who works in her parents’ travel agency, is determined to get the part despite her lack of experience. “This is my calling,” she tells her gossipy older sister, Dede (Nana Mensah), who works with her and believes that Wale is destined to be her future husband. When Ayamma arrives at Gbenga’s Nollywood Dreams Studios, she faces off against her main competition, established star Fayola Ogunleye (Emana Rachelle), the “Nigerian Halle Berry with Tina Turner legs,” who is willing to go to extreme lengths in order to get the role. But Ayamma is not going to just sit back and let that happen.

Director Gbenga Ezie (Charlie Hudson III) gossips with popular talk show host Adenikeh (Abena) in Nollywood Dreams (photo by Daniel J. Vasquez)

“Ah, I am so silly! How could I not see — you are perfect for the role of Comfort’s mother!” Ayamma snarkily says. After they read together, Ayamma tells Fayola, “I will never forget this day for the rest of my life,” to which Fayola responds, “That is nice. At least one of us will remember it.” When Ayamma later meets Wale, sparks fly, complicating Gbenga’s ultimate decision, as the movie-within-the-play is a ridiculously soapy tale that just might be based on Gbenga’s real life, echoing the relationship between him, Fayola, Wale, and Ayamma, which serves as fodder for Adenikeh (Abena) and her show.

Arnulfo Maldonado’s set switches back and forth between the travel agency, which features two old floppy-disk computers and posters of vacations to African nations, and Gbenga’s studio, which shares some of the same furniture while the walls are plastered with silly movie posters. The stage morphs into Adenikeh’s program several times, the central couch and chair moving forward toward the audience, with a backdrop where Alex Basco Koch’s projections play. (The mystery of the quick set changes is eventually revealed.) Abena is a blast as the talk show host, part Oprah Winfrey, part Wendy Williams, pronouncing her words very carefully — especially “Nigeria” — while wearing ornate African finery by award-winning costumer Dede Ayite.

Director Saheem Ali, who also helmed Bioh’s terrific School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play and overrated Shakespeare in the Park presentation Merry Wives, in addition to Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror at the Signature, Chris Urch’s The Rolling Stone at Lincoln Center, and Donja R. Love’s Fireflies at the Atlantic, takes just the right approach with the clever material, mixing slapstick comedy with sweet romantic flourishes. Bioh, who has appeared in such plays as Suzan-Lori Parks’s In the Blood, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Everybody and An Octoroon, and Jaclyn Backhaus’s Men on Boats, explores not only celebrity culture and Nigerian film but class differences and ethnocentrism in Nollywood Dreams. After explaining to a phone caller that the Serengeti is not in Nigeria, Ayamma says to Dede, “These white people.” Her sister adds, “Africa is a country to them, you know that.”

In a script note, Bioh, an MCC playwright in residence who was born in New York City to Ghanaian parents and grew up watching low-budget Nollywood movies as a child in Washington Heights, writes, “Many of the themes of these [Nollywood] films dealt with love or family issues but were layered in subtext about the political strife/temperature of the country . . . telling the story of the sad duality that existed in Nigeria at the time: live like the rich or suffer like the poor — there is no middle. One could say the same about America, but I digress.”

In her daily greeting, Adenikeh says, “Thank you for letting me bring love into your home.” With Nollywood Dreams, Bioh, Ali, and a cool cast have brought love into the theater, as we finally escape our homes and return to live shows, especially irresistible ones such as Nollywood Dreams.

IN THE SOUTHERN BREEZE

Four Black men from different times meet in unusual circumstances in Mansa Ra’s In the Southern Breeze

IN THE SOUTHERN BREEZE
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater
224 Waverly Pl.
Wednesday – Monday through December 12, $40 in person or livestreamed
www.rattlestick.org

The central section of Mansa Ra’s In the Southern Breeze, which opened last night at Rattlestick, is a compelling fever dream in which four Black men from different time periods meet in a kind of bardo, trying to make sense of their existential situation. Unfortunately, that narrative is framed by a moralizing, didactic story involving a contemporary Black man (Allan K. Washington) literally at the end of his rope, as he considers hanging himself, suffering from severe depression because of pandemic isolation and systemic racism in America.

“It’s so stressful being black. And I don’t mean in some hypothetical way,” he says. The confinement of lockdown is also getting to him. “I honestly have no idea what’s gonna happen anymore. It’s been a while since I’ve interacted with people. Like a super long time. I was already depressed before the ’rona. Everybody was freaking out about quarantine cooped up with nowhere to go. But I was glad. I finally had a real excuse for not leaving my apartment. I know a lot about isolation. It feels like the walls are closing in around you. All day. And all night.”

While he contemplates his fate (offstage), a barefoot man in tatters enters. Madison (Charles Browning) is a runaway slave, just trying to stay alive while looking for his wife. He is soon joined by Lazarus (Victor Williams), a sharecropper who wants to know where his family is. Next, a Black Panther named Hue (Biko Eisen-Martin) arrives, calling out desperately for his wife. And finally, gay activist Tony (Travis Raeburn) shows up fresh from a protest march. As a group they represent such societal ills as racism, homophobia, injustice, inequality, and disenfranchisement, in search of their identity, separated from their wives and children as so many Black men have been throughout the history of the United States. “Unnatural fo’ a man to be taken ’way from his family. Just unnatural,” Madison says. It is critical to note that there are no women in the play; they exist on the periphery, longed-for sources of strength and ancestral continuity. Emmie Finckel’s set is a series of ever-smaller white-framed doorways on lush green grass, the promise of freedom closing fast.

In the Southern Breeze looks at loneliness, depression, racism, and isolation

Earnestly directed by Christopher D. Betts, In the Southern Breeze’s frame story ends up feeling like a cliched diatribe of platitudes lacking dramatic nuance; what the man is experiencing is horrific, something that no one should have to endure, but it comes off as more of an intense therapy session. A rant about holes, from the noose to anal sex to the planet Saturn, feels forced and unnecessary. The body of the play is powerful; Mansa Ra (fka Jiréh Breon Holder) should have more faith in his audience. For example, there is a moment near the end that could have made a memorable conclusion, but instead the narrative extends with a coda that plots out too easy a path for what is a complicated future. One of the smartest choices is to never show an actual noose, serving as a potent metaphor for what has lurked dangerously for centuries.

In her essay “Moral Inhabitants,” which influenced Mansa Ra, Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison writes, “Our past is bleak. Our future dim. But I am not reasonable. A reasonable man adjusts to his environment. And unreasonable man does not. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man. I prefer not to adjust to my environment. I refuse the prison of ‘I’ and choose the open spaces of ‘we.’” In the Southern Breeze works best when it deals with the “we” as opposed to the “I.”

In conjunction with the seventy-five-minute play, which runs through December 12 (both at the theater and streaming live) and is presented in partnership with Black Boys Do Theater, the Boys’ Club of New York, the Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society, and the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Rattlestick is hosting a series of community talks, on November 22 at 5:00 (on Zoom, before the livestream, about safe and private spaces), November 28 at 4:00 (an in-person postshow discussion exploring the intersection of mental health and the political and social climate), and December 6 at 5:00 (on Zoom, before the livestream).