Art

Les Deux Noirs Premieres At Mosaic Theater

THE AFRO — For a dedicated group of audience goers the theater presents that communal experience, and unlike film, offers a unique performance each time the actors step out on stage. Theater offers whoever sits in the plush chairs an opportunity to engage in a larger conversation. And you don’t have to search for people to talk to about the subject, everyone is in the room with you.

Published

6 years ago

April 28, 2019

Oakland Post

By George Kevin Jordan

This past Sunday HBO presented the season premiere of final episodes of “Game of Thrones.” It could arguably be one of the last communal television watching experiences in our lifetime. It’s the last of the water cooler subjects. As more and more people splinter off into their own microcosms of conversation and viewing habits, trying to pull a topic everyone can grapple with together is getting harder and harder.

Why do people go to the theater?

For a dedicated group of audience goers the theater presents that communal experience, and unlike film, offers a unique performance each time the actors step out on stage. Theater offers whoever sits in the plush chairs an opportunity to engage in a larger conversation. And you don’t have to search for people to talk to about the subject, everyone is in the room with you.

Good theater does even more. It subverts your expectations and plays at the mediums strengths, live performance, engaging the imagination in real time. Pushing boundaries or language and reality.

This week the Mosaic Theater Company presented “Les Deux Noirs: Notes on Notes of A Native Son,” written by Psalmayene 24 and directed by Raymond O. Caldwell, a fast paced musically and poetically charged play based on the a meeting of three literary giants, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Chester Himes in a Paris Cafe in 1953. In this interpretation of the encounter, the playwright focused on Wright and Baldwin and their fraught relationship brought to a steaming angry froth thanks to Baldwin’s scathing reviews of Wright’s 1940 novel “Native Son.”

The situation and the play that encompasses the situation are both specific to Black life and age old at the same time. Baldwin committed the ultimate “no-no,” which is to publicly chastise another Black person, to downgrade or ridicule their work. But in the more general sense, he did what every young writer did to their heroes, they kicked them right off the pedestal. Everyone wanted to be like Ernest Hemingway, until they didn’t. So many writers lived by Joan Didion’s complex writing, but the next generation critiqued her style.

This tradition of the next generation challenging their predecessors was taken to new heights in the hand of Psalmayene 24 who took the heart of most writers, a glob of narcissism, ego,and insecurity, and wrapped it into genuine emotions and care. You felt for Richard Wright, played by James J. Johnson, as he navigated hurt feeling and betrayal at the hands of a young up and comer he tried to support. And yet you also feel for Baldwin, played by Jeremy Hunter, who’s critiques of Wright’s work had some validity and rang true in many ways.

Psalmayene 24 used the filter of battle raps to fully convey the battle of old and new young and old, rising star, and established act. During the performance there are literal dance-offs, bouts of words and near microphone drops as each artist proports their skills and their rationale for being king.

Both Johnson and Hunter seem to relish their roles filling them with swagger, intelligence and heart. Baldwin, for many, has a much more prominent place in our subconscious with many YOUTUBE archived battles Baldwins has conducted. We have a short hand in our minds of who we think Baldwin may be, so on stage it resonates. Wright’s work seems to stand out in the mind more than him as a flesh and blood character in literary society, so Johnson has reign to create how we see the author.

The point of the play and the experience to me is less of what transpired. Facts are not as relevant as the larger literary truth. What I saw was two Black men, fighting for their right to exist to be, in and of themselves, but also in conjunction with one another. They are brothers whether divided by ideology, age, temperament or financial circumstances. And it is a sight to see them laugh, fight and love their way through greatness.

The play is full of surprises, none of which I will spoil, but needless to say the cast serves the writing, and the writing serves the cast. RJ Pavel and Musa Gurnis round out the cast. Les Duex runs through April 27th at the Mosaic Theater’s Atlas Performing Arts Center at 1333 H Street NE. For more information please go to https://www.mosaictheater.org/

This article originally appeared in The Afro.

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Activism

Griot Theater Company Presents August Wilson’s Work at Annual Oratorical Featuring Black Authors

The performance explores the legacy of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson whose 10-play Century Cycle chronicles the African American experience across the 20th century, with each play set in a different decade. “Half a Century” journeys through the final five plays of this monumental cycle, bringing Wilson’s richly woven stories to life in a way that celebrates history, resilience, and the human spirit.

Published

1 month ago

February 17, 2025

Oakland Post

Late playwright August Wilson. Wikipedia photo.

By Godfrey Lee

Griot Theater Company will present their Fifth Annual Oratorical with August Wilson’s “Half a Century,” at the Belrose on 1415 Fifth Ave., in San Rafael near the San Rafael Public Library.

The performance explores the legacy of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson whose 10-play Century Cycle chronicles the African American experience across the 20^th century, with each play set in a different decade. “Half a Century” journeys through the final five plays of this monumental cycle, bringing Wilson’s richly woven stories to life in a way that celebrates history, resilience, and the human spirit.

Previous performance highlighting essential Black American authors included Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry with Langston Hughes.

The play will be performed at 3:00. p.m. on Feb. 20, 21, 22, 27, and 28 at 7:00 p.m., and on Feb. 23 at 3:00 p.m.

For more information, go to griottheatercompany.squarespace.com/productions-v2

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Activism

MLK Day of Service Volunteers Make Blankets and Art for Locals in Need

“Everyone has an opportunity to participate,” said Glenda Roberts, kinship support care program manager at CCYSB. “Our nonprofit organization and participants recognize how important it is to give back to the community and this is serving. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stated, ‘Everybody can be great…because anybody can serve.’”

Published

2 months ago

January 18, 2025

Oakland Post

Photo courtesy of the nonprofit.

By Kathy Chouteau
The Richmond Standard

The Contra Costa Youth Service Bureau (CCYSB) and Bethlehem Missionary Baptist Church (BMBC) are collaborating with a team of volunteers for a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service, Monday, Jan. 20 that will wrap the community’s most vulnerable people in warm blankets and provide them with an uplifting gift of art.

Volunteers will kick off their activities at BMBC at 11 a.m., making blankets for the unhoused people served by the Greater Richmond Interfaith Program (GRIP) and art for those in convalescence in Richmond.

Others will get to work preparing a lunch of chili, salad, a veggie tray, and water for participants, offered courtesy of CCYSB, while supplies last.

“People of all ages are welcome to participate in the MLK Day of Service,” said Roberts. Volunteers can RSVP via phone to Glenda Roberts at 510-215-4670, ext. 125.

CCYSB Boardmember Jackie Marston and her friends donated the materials and supplies to make the blankets and art projects. The nonprofit is also providing the day’s complimentary lunch, as well as employees to volunteer, under the direction of CCYSB Executive Director Marena Brown.

BMBC, led by Rev. Dr. Carole McKindley-Alvarez, is providing the facility for the event and volunteers from the church, which is located at 684 Juliga Woods St. in Richmond.

Located in Richmond, CCYSB is a nonprofit youth advocacy organization that serves eligible children, youth, and low-income families with a variety of wraparound services so they can thrive. Programs include academic achievement, youth mentorship, truancy prevention and direct response.

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Art

Vandalism at Richmond Ferry Terminal Saddens Residents

Residents have been lamenting the destruction online. Ellen Seskin posted photos of the vandalism to the Facebook group, Everybody’s Richmond, on Jan. 12, saying she encountered it while out on a walk. “It was on the sidewalk, the street, the doors to the ferry, even in the art installation and the ‘stone’ benches,” she said. “I reported it but knowing how slow they are about getting things done — I just know that the longer you leave graffiti, the more likely they are to spray it again.”

Published

2 months ago

January 18, 2025

Oakland Post

Graffiti mars the walkway at the Richmond Ferry Terminal. Photo by Kathy Chouteau, The Richmond Standard.

The Richmond Standard

“This is why we can’t have nice things,” stated the post on NextDoor.

The post referenced images of graffiti at the Richmond Ferry Terminal. Not just on the terminal, but also on public artwork, on trail signs, on public benches and the boardwalk.

On Wednesday, the Standard stopped by to see it for ourselves. The good news was that it appears the graffiti on the terminal and on the artwork, called Changing Tide, have been cleaned for the most part. But graffiti remained abundant in the area around the relatively new ferry terminal, which opened to the public just six years ago.

Graffiti artists tagged benches and the boardwalk. Cars that had done doughnuts in the street marked the cul-de-sac just outside the historic Craneway Pavilion.

A ferry worker told us the graffiti had been there since before he started working for the ferry service about a week ago.

A member of the Army Corps of Engineers who did not want to be named in this report called the scene “sad,” as “they’d done such a nice job fixing it up.”

“It’s sad that all this money has been spent and hoodlums just don’t care and are destroying stuff,” he said.

It wasn’t immediately clear how soon the graffiti would be removed. The Standard reported the graffiti to the city’s graffiti abatement hotline. We were prompted to leave a message reporting the address and location of the graffiti.

“It was on the sidewalk, the street, the doors to the ferry, even in the art installation and the ‘stone’ benches,” she said. “I reported it but knowing how slow they are about getting things done — I just know that the longer you leave graffiti, the more likely they are to spray it again.”

In the comment section responding to Seskin’s post, local attorney Daniel Butt questioned why there aren’t cameras in the area.

On Nextdoor, one resident suggested searching to see if the tags match any accounts on Instagram, hoping to identify the perpetrator.

On its website, the City of Richmond says residents should graffiti immediately call Public Works graffiti removal and/or Code Enforcement at 510-965-4905.

Kathy Chouteau contributed to this report.