Gary Perkins as Bliss and Imami Branch as Dream in Theatre Alliance’s “The Blackest Battle.” Photo courtesy of Theatre Alliance.
Psalmayene 24’s latest production is “The Blackest Battle,” a parable set to a love story set in the near future where America has gone through a second civil war after reparations were finally made to Black people. Black people live in a territory called Chief County where they fight against the cascading effects of slavery — Black-on-Black gun violence, rivalries, and a drug called Hope, which is psychologically addictive (it’s some combination of technology and plant-based which seems to take hold through music).
Go to the Theatre Alliance website and buy a ticket. Psalmayene 24 has given us entrée into a world we need to see and hear and feel — now.
Psalmayene 24 has built his story on the bones of “Romeo & Juliet,” with a hearty nod to “West Side Story.” At one point, even under the hip-hop background, I could hear echoes of “Gee Officer Krupe” in the dialogue. It is a clever homage.
Only in Chief County, our two rival gangs are two rival music entrepreneurs, vying for top billing and away out of gun dealing, and more. In this stripped-down, fast-paced version, the action coalesces when Dream (Imami Branch) meets Bliss (Gary Perkins) and he persuades her to spend a couple of hours with him while he shows her the underpass and introduces her to Hope.
The one thing her posse won’t allow is using Hope — the leader of their group’s mother died from it. But when Dream tries it with Bliss, she sees a world of possibility for Black people to move forward and unleash their creativity, minds, and souls.
Unfortunately, life isn’t that kind. While Bliss and Dream sit under the Underpass (Branch and Perkins have a delectable chemistry together), they see a wall of names painted in little white-rimmed rectangles — the names of everyone dead by gun violence for that year. The names are actually of those who have died by gun violence in Washington, DC this past year, and it’s a harsh, unescapable reality. In “The Blackest Battle,” someone will die of gun violence between the rival groups, but it won’t be Bliss or Dream. It will be basically a bystander, an innocent who came upon them and offered some advice.
Tightly directed by Raymond O. Caldwell, the production team does a masterful job of blending the graphic art (Wesley Clark, Camilla King and Maliah Stokes), background art (Rodney “Buck” Herring), props (Amy Kellett), lighting (Dylan Uremovich), sound (Matthew M. Nielson), and photography (Kelly Colburn, who also did the video editing). Animation by Jeremy Bennett, Deja Collins, Dylan Uremovich, and Visual FX artists Kelly Colburn, Deja Collins, Jonathan Dahm Robertson, and Dylan Uremovich bring visual verve and punch to the music, dance, and dialogue.
But it’s not cartoonish, in the sense of being cute or at a safe remove. This is a visceral show that demands the audience acknowledge and think about the deleterious and on-going effects of centuries of abuse, cruelty, and dehumanization that have led to names on an underpass. The show makes these points with force and vigor because these people have basically died in a war, but where is the memorial honoring their sacrifices?
Go to the Theatre Alliance website and buy a ticket. Psalmayene 24 has given us entrée into a world we need to see and hear and feel — now.
This is an ambitious show, and I’m sorry I didn’t see the original conception when it was presented at the Kennedy Center’s “Page to Stage.”
Running Time: Approximately 90 minutes without intermission.
Advisory: Adult language and drug use. For mature teens and older.
“The Blackest Battle” streams through the end of August 2021 from Theatre Alliance, Washington, DC. For more information, please click here.
Read the full article by Mary Ann Johnson from MD Theatre Guide here.
Sit back relax and put ya programs away … If ya ignant You gon learn today
—The Ring Master in The Blackest Battle
Psalmayene 24
Raymond O. Caldwell’s realization of Psalmayene 24’s The Blackest Battle — a graphic novel come to life as a hip-hop musical — is a feast of virtuosity. Whereas some have been frustrated with not having access to live theater, Theater Alliance has taken this opportunity to offer something that some of us might not sit still for in the usual sanctum sanctorum of live theater. In fact, the point of this production is kind of to make us not be able to (or want to) sit still or sit back. The Blackest Battle presents theater that more fully engages the potential of hip-hop than is often possible in “legit” stages where traditional audiences may come with curated expectations and sometimes merely tolerate the hip-hop form and keep its power at a distance.
This production, though onscreen, is an immersive experience. Whereas much theater keeps technology in the background, so as not to disturb the illusion it is intending to produce, this production puts technology center stage, using it to reflect the way we use technology in our daily lives. It is delightful and enticing in its form and it is harrowing in its emotional impact. It’s a monumental accomplishment. And it is not to be missed.
Kelsey Delemar as the Ring Master in ‘The Blackest Battle.’ Photo courtesy of Theater Alliance.
Many people experience Shakespeare as someone literally on a pedestal to be worshipped and his works memorized. However, some people have been able to experience him as an innovator of language and form. That innovation of language and form seems to be something that this show resonates with, treating Shakespeare more like a warrior on the same battlefield with some of the same goals, whose work is to be relied upon, appreciated, and inspired by rather than someone out of reach. When a segment of Romeo and Juliet is read by Dream (Imani Branch), a member of the rap crew Key Enterprises, it doesn’t even seem out of place with the hip-hop universe. Take a look.
From Romeo and Juliet:
For beauty starved with her severity Cuts beauty off from all posterity. She is too fair, too wise, wisely too fair, To merit bliss by making me despair: She hath forsworn to love and in that vow Do I live dead, that live to tell it now.
Bonita, from The Blackest Battle:
The reality is that I was born with my sexuality And I refuse to be a casualty of your brutality I know that I’m charged up now like a new battery But that’s cause the situation’s rotten like a cavity I’m talkin’ bout the judgment and discrimination Cuzz I’ll never have husband some folks stay hatin’
Battle uses Romeo and Juliet for its plot structure. Through that structure the show addresses the ongoing struggle of African Americans to survive the pressures put on them by this country.
In a future, described by our narrator, The Ring Master (portrayed with sensual confidence by Kelsey Delemar), as being “distant enough to feel remote, but close enough to be familiar,” the United States has experienced a second Civil War and reparations to descendants of enslaved Africans have been made. It is well known that in Chief County, a reparations settlement that is run and controlled by Black folks, Black people in this enclave often kill each other.
The Capulets and the Montagues in Chief County are the two rap crews Lock Music and Key Enterprises. Do or Die (a formidable and wily Louis Davis), the leader of Key Enterprises, insists that his group’s music remind its audience of the situations they are living in so that they can organize themselves to address those situations. He is fiercely opposed to his group members using Hope, the drug of choice in Chief County. He fires group member Bonita (the indomitable Jade Jones), who has reneged on her promise to stop using it. Dream (Imani Branch, living up to her character’s name) is Do or Die’s cousin and a member of the group. She defends Bonita, pointing out that they need someone to supply beats for this evening’s Fourth of July rent party.
Jade Jones as Bonita and Louis Davis as Do or Die, members of rap crew Key Enterprises; Bayou Elom as Sgt. Pepper and Emmanuel Kyei-baffour as Ty, members of rap crew Lock Music, in ‘The Blackest Battle.’ Photo courtesy of Theater Alliance.
On the other side of town, Sgt. Pepper (an eager, trigger-happy party animal, Bayou Elom), the leader of Lock Music, is determined to provide joy for his audiences, relief from the pressures they are living under. Group member Bliss (Gary Perkins, living up to his character’s name) is the soft-spoken, innovative poet, and Ty (a forceful and trustworthy Emmanuel Kyei-baffour) is the group’s dress-wearing DJ, who needs to upgrade his skills in order for the group to move to the next level and meet the challenge of opening for the top-rated group in the county.
At the set-up for the rent party, Bliss and Dream make eye contact across a crowded room and fall in love at first sight. They slip away to watch the fireworks from the pier. The pier — which is the dividing line between East and West Chief County, a place where the soothing presence of a body of water can be experienced, and the place where, in the past, cargoes of enslaved Africans were delivered — has become an unofficial safe zone.
It starts to rain and Dream and Bliss take shelter under The Bridge, the underside of which is covered with the names of people who have been killed in Chief County. They are joined there by the Ringmaster who affirms the rightness of their efforts to be open to loving each other. Shortly thereafter the other members of Lock Music and Key Enterprises show up, having decided to settle their rivalry “the Darwinian way.” They demand that Bliss and Dream separate from each other and rejoin their respective teams. Gunshots are fired and the Ring Master is killed. The remaining people leave the scene while the Ringmaster speaks a posthumous plea:
The Ring Master:
Spittin to you from the other side You just caught a glimpse of the way that I died … Hush sweet darlin’ don’t you cry This is just fiction, a slum village lullaby But it’s also an alarm clock Meant to wake you up like a five a.m. gunshot It’s just a function of the play’s plot … A last-ditch effort, what the hell and the blood claat Maybe we should burn down all the gun shops Cuz come the fire or the flood, the violence it must stop It must stop, it must stop, it must stop
This production reminded me of the technological achievements of Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse: there is more here than you can possibly take in on a single viewing. Visually we are, from the beginning, in more than one place at once. We are in this present pandemic and in this future calamity. We are in a hyperpoetic theater space, a graphic novel space, but also in a naturalistic film space and an animated space.
But where Spiderman was clearly a movie, with a fourth wall, Battle still feels like theater (with a kind of Dr. Who-ish flavor). In The Blackest Battle the sets are colored backdrops or projections that shift shape and formation the way a frame does in a graphic novel or comic strip. Characters’ phone controls light up on their fingers (thanks to finger-cap touchscreen technology developed by Preston Bezos, illegitimate son of Jeff Bezos, “a real microchip off the old block”) and the text or video of conversations is projected on screens that the audience can see through and read, if they’re fast enough. It’s an environment that the audience gets to imagine living in and that it discovers along with the cast.
Gary Perkins as Lock Crew member Bliss and Imani Branch as Key Enterprises member Dream in in ‘The Blackest Battle.’ Photo courtesy of Theater Alliance.
This multi-visual, technologically overcharged world onstage reflects the world we all live in offstage — a highly surrealistic world — made so largely by the contradictory dictates of white supremacy upon our lives. A world in which the words that come out of your mouth and the plot turns that your life takes can sound like a “corny movie from the 1980s or some sappy Elizabethan play.”
In Battle, Psalmayene 24 wrestles with inherited, dictated, and curated forms of theater the way Jacob wrestled with the angel in the Hebrew scriptures. The Blackest Battle is definitely a musical. I’m 70 years old, raised in mid-20th-century COGIC culture. I used to be concerned about not being able to relate to hip-hop. But experiencing The Blackest Battle, I found I no more needed to understand hip-hop to be lifted and carried away by the integrity and earnest and steadfast warriorship it offers than I need to understand Viennese operetta to be engaged with Showboat.
What can you say about the love story? It’s delightful. Surely no one has ever been this young, zestful, and beautiful. Which is why they are named Dream and Bliss, I guess: and why the main lyrics to their love song are “Da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da.” Imani Branch and Gary Perkins invest a sincerity and a disciplined craftsperson’s respect for and faith in their material. They neither short-change nor rush anything. Wow, does that investment ever pay off!
Two scenes were notably thought-provoking for me: the interruption of the love scene The Ringmaster makes in order to ensure that we understand what the drug Hope is, and the animated, historical accounting of African American mistreatment that Dream and Bliss experience while under the influence of the drug Hope.
Effects of the drug Hope in ‘The Blackest Battle.’ Photo courtesy of Theater Alliance.
The Ring Master presents us with a corporate-slick promotional announcement for Hope in which all the researchers, clients, and manufacturers shown in clean, well-lighted rooms are white. And they look suspiciously like professional actors hired to do an industrial film. While whenever Hope is being actively used by consumers, or sold in shadowy street locations, it is in the bodies and hands of Black folks. The presentation of Hope as a drug and the suggestion that Black folks could be addicted to it is disturbing (remember the quick announcement of forgiveness for Dylan Roof?). How does one live without it? What does one put in its place?
The Blackest Battle is a thrilling experience that is guaranteed to entertain, challenge, and inspire its audience.
Running Time: Approximately 90 minutes.
The Blackest Battlepremiered July 31, 2021, and will be available for scheduled online streams through the month of August. Tickets (General Admission, $25 – $30; Seniors/Students/Military, $20 – $25; Radical Neighboring, $15) are available onlineor by calling 202-241-2539.
Read the full article by Gregory Ford for DC Metro Theater Arts here.
A Milestone for Broadway as ‘Pass Over’ Begins Performances
Anne Grossman
Anne Grossman and Jennifer Rockwood hustled into Broadway’s August Wilson Theater shortly before 8 p.m. Wednesday and, beneath their face masks, smiled.
They had shown their proof of vaccination, passed through metal detectors, and, as they stepped down into the lobby, marveled at being back inside a theater. “It’s thrilling” Grossman said, “and a little unsettling.”
The two women, both 58-year-old New Yorkers, were among 1,055 people who braved concerns about the highly contagious Delta variant in order to, once again, see a play on Broadway. It was the first performance of “Pass Over,” by Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, which is the first play staged on Broadway since the coronavirus pandemic shuttered theaters in March of 2020.
“I wanted to be part of the restart of live theater.” Rockwood said.
The play, both comedic and challenging, is about two Black men trapped under a streetlight, afraid that if they dare to leave their corner, they could be killed by a police officer.
The crowd, vaccinated and masked but not socially distanced, was rapturous, greeting Nwandu’s arrival with a standing ovation, and another when she and the play’s director, Danya Taymor, walked onstage after the play to hug the three actors.
Those attending the play were required to show proof of vaccination to enter, and to wear masks while inside the theater.Credit…Jeenah Moon for The New York Times
The night was significant, not only as Broadway seeks to rebound from a shutdown of historic length, but also as it seeks to respond to renewed concerns about racial equity that have been raised over the last year. “Pass Over” is one of seven plays by Black writers slated to be staged on Broadway this season, and, like many of them, it grapples directly with issues of race and racism.
“Thank you for celebrating Black joy!” the playwright, Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, told celebrants at an afterparty on West 52nd Street, outside the theater.Credit…Jeenah Moon for The New York Times
Read the full article by Michael Paulson for the New York Times here.
Washington, DC, July 28, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Mosaic Theater Company of DC is proud to announce the opening production of the 2022-23 season, Ifa Bayeza’s long-anticipated three-play cycle, THE TILL TRILOGY, exploring the life, death, and legacy of Emmett Till. Simultaneously epic and intimate, the three plays – The Ballad of Emmett Till, on the journey of the boy, Benevolence, on the story of his killers and That Summer in Sumner on the quest for justice – will be presented in rotating repertory, starting in August and running through November 2022. This world premiere staging of the full cycle, the first time all three plays will be presented together, is made possible by a grant from The Roy Cockrum Foundation.
The lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 became a catalyst for the modern Civil Rights movement and remains a flashpoint in the racial reckoning of this country. “I have always seen the story of Emmett Till as a national allegory, a modern myth of our struggle to come to grips with the terrible legacy of enslavement,” Bayeza said. “The killing of black men and boys has become so frequent and ubiquitous that it is hard to fathom. I am humbled that THE TILL TRILOGY is making its debut at Mosaic Theater Company in the nation’s Capital – and hopeful that the inspiration of his extraordinary life will buoy us once again in these difficult times.”
“As theatres come to life across the country, The Roy Cockrum Foundation is honored to support the full world premiere of THE TILL TRILOGY on Mosaic’s stage,” Cockrum said. “In the months since theaters went dark, this work’s importance has been magnified a thousand-fold. The Foundation wholeheartedly supports this historic project with the fullness that the Emmett Till story demands and deserves. We wish the Mosaic family well as they finally move forward with this important work.”
THE TILL TRILOGY will be directed by Talvin Wilks, who also helmed Penumbra Theatre’s acclaimed productions of The Ballad of Emmett Till and Benevolence. Wilks’ and Bayeza’s collaboration on the third play, That Summer in Sumner, will be a world premiere. “We were all so disappointed when like so many other theatres our production was postponed due to COVID,” said Wilks. “The new date is even more poignant as our premiere coincides with the anniversary of this tragic and epic event – August 28th: the day of Emmett’s death, the March on Washington and Barack Obama’s acceptance of the nomination for President of the United States. In the worst of times, the triumph of faith and hope. Emmett’s arc, like Dr. King’s ‘arc of the moral universe, bends toward justice.’”
A month after his fourteenth birthday, a confident Chicago youth, a boy on the threshold of manhood, embarks on a summer trip to Mississippi. His saga changes the course of a nation . . . but what of his own journey? The story of a quest … for liberty . . . and . . . life! THE TILL TRILOGY, Ifa Bayeza’s acclaimed, award-winning trio of dramas captures the powerful truths at the heart of the story in a soaring work of music, poetry and theatricality.
In preparation for production, Mosaic has presented a series of streamed and recorded public programming events surrounding the political and social impact of the Emmett Till saga. Guests have included Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, Secretary of the Smithsonian Lonnie Bunch, preeminent Brandeis University scholar Isaiah Woodard, who is serving as dramaturg on the production, founder of Busboys and Poets Andy Shallal and Mosaic’s Andrew W. Mellon Playwright in Residence Psalmayene 24. All online events can be viewed here.
The Blackest Battle premieres on July 31, 2021 and will be available for scheduled online streams through the month of August.
As the final digital film of the theater season, Theater Alliance presents a world premiere production of acclaimed artist Psalmayene 24‘s The Blackest Battle. A love story that calls attention to Black-on-Black gun violence, the film is set in the future, when reparations have been made and youth get high on a drug called Hope.
With songs composed by Nick tha 1da and visual art from Wesley Clark, Camilla King, Maliah Stokes, and Rodney “Buck” Herring, the film is half music video, half graphic-novel-come-to-life, and utterly unlike any other work of digital theater that has come out of the past year.
“Working with Psalmayene 24 on this commission has been a tremendous gift,” says Raymond O. Caldwell, who directed the film. “Theater Alliance committed to this play four years ago – we knew then that it would be a powerful, dynamic, and significant work of theater, and it has become even stronger with every draft. Theater Alliance is proud to support and produce local playwrights like Psalm.”
The Blackest Battle was commissioned from Psalmayene 24 and Nick tha 1da in 2017. In the years since, it has been written, developed, workshopped, and revised through Theater Alliance’s Hothouse New Play Development program – with performances at the John F. Kennedy Center’s Page to Stage Festival, as well as the Word Becomes Action Festival. Originally slated for live performance in summer of 2020, the production has been reimagined for the screen.
“Our digital production team has grown in leaps and bounds over this season’s work,” says Caldwell. “It is thrilling to bring this film to audiences, knowing we are at the forefront of innovative storytelling – pushing the boundaries of what theater is and can do.”
The Blackest Battle premieres on July 31, 2021 and will be available for scheduled online streams through the month of August.
Under the guidance and expertise of photography director Kelly Colburn, as well as art director Jonathan Dahm Robertson, Theater Alliance has again recreated the intimate theatrical nature of its work for the camera. The production has been pre-recorded, utilizing stringent safety precautions.
This production is made possible through the support of the National Foundation for the Arts, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, the Revada Foundation, and the Arts Forward Fund. Season 18 at Theater Alliance is generously sponsored by David and Jean Heilman Grier.
