Kelechi (Mfoniso Udofia), a bestselling Pulitzer Prize finalist, returns home to Nigeria after a fifteen-year absence. Her father, Godwin (Oberon K.A. Adjepong), is dying, and her agent is haranguing her about the next book: maybe something about “war time in Africa”? Riddled with anxiety and depression—which is somehow linked to this place—she struggles through interactions […]
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The subtitle of Jocelyn Bioh’s School Girls is The African Mean Girls Play. In some ways, it’s a pretty fair comparison. This is a sharp and funny work about a group of girls at an elite Ghanian boarding school. While each prepares for a performance that could make them eligible for the 1986 Miss Global […]
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The title says it all: The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World aka The Negro Book of the Dead is about the death and burial of a character named only Black Man with Watermelon (Daniel J. Watts). His wife, Black Woman with Fried Drumstick (Roslyn Ruff), remains haunted by this death and […]
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I’m not an expert on Congolese music, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t sound like Spring Awakening—and this is essentially the problem with Brian Kulick’s staging of Mother Courage and Her Children, which ingeniously transplants Brecht’s play from seventeenth-century Europe to modern-day Congo but does little to establish the space beyond the vague gestures associated with the Africa of the American imagination. That […]
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