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Slave Play - Wake Forest mention

jaybone

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I went to see Slave Play this weekend in the City and was surprised to find a significant Wake Forest storyline. Did not necessarily paint Wake in a good light, but not horrific either.

Really interesting play and I'll let you google it, but the character was a lightish-skinned black guy. The gist of it is that he doesn't consider himself black so much as just the hot guy everybody wants. Until at incident at college ...

I'm curious how the playwright came to understand Wake or whether he just chose it because of our history as quasi elitist southern institution for white upper class students.

I nearly came out of my seat though because I had just been explaining to my wife Matt James' Not-for-Profit organization he started in Manhattan (ABC Food Tours) for underprivileged kids and I noted to myself the actor in Slave Play was a passing resemblance to Matt James (square jawed, tall).

Really crazy play ...
 
did not know about this play, but a google says the writer grew up not far from Winston in Martinsville, VA

after skimming the wikipedia page, it looks pretty interesting -- what was your take away?
 
It was pretty intense. It was a fantastically creative way to deconstruct black - white coupling. It was way funnier than I expected, and then bam, it suddenly gets very intense again (starts and ends intensely). There are so many ways this play could have fallen on its face had the writing not been so spot on - from therapy speak to elitism to racist stuff obviously, sexuality.

I thought it spoke as much about control - who controls which part of the relationship within a couple; when that changes, how time plays into that - that the content is relate-able regardless of whether you are in a black-white relationship or not.

I have gone to see a handful of plays, usually dragged to them by my wife, that are supposed to be transcendental, that turn the Broadway play on its ear, and most have been a disappointment (Fun Home comes to mind). This was the real deal to me. It actually delivers the goods.
 
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