Yellow Man & My Red Hand/My Black Hand
by Dael Orlandersmith
(at the Library)
April 17-18, 2010 SATURDAY & SUNDAY 7:30 pm
“Yellow Man” & “My Red Hand/My Black Hand”
By Dael Orlandersmith
Directed by Fred Saas
Yellowman explores how the mystique of ethnic diversity can tear families apart. In My Red Hand/My Black Hand, ethnic diversity is celebrated as a source of pride.
Yellowman is not for younger or more sensitive audiences.
"Yellowman," a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2002, is the story of a man and a woman trying to carve out a normal life for themselves
amidst domestic violence and racial prejudice. It's is a multi-character memory play about an African-American Woman who dreams of life beyond the confines of her small-town Southern upbringing and the light-skinned man whose fate is tragically intertwined with hers. The play explores the negative associations surrounding male blackness as well as the effect these racial stereotypes have on black women.
CAST: Judy A. Young, Brenda Fantroy-Johnson and Fred Nicholson.
"...a battle cry for humanity and its possibilities" --The New York Times
From a CurtainUp review by Kathryn Osenlund (New York performance):
Yellowman isn't the first play to take off on bigotry and self-hatred within a prejudiced against group. Long before black became beautiful and Negroes renamed themselves Blacks and then African-Americans, the term "high yellow" served to deepen the gulf between people of dark and lighter skin colors. Other fictional characters have struggled with issues of skin color (e.g., Tony Morrison's first novel The Bluest Eyes, in which a black woman obsesses about her desire to be white, dates back 30 years). But Yellowman is a unique theatrical experience, not because it covers never before written about territory but because its still controversial theme is explored without putting the actors on a soap box. It gathers its impact from truly lyrical writing. Yes, Yellowman is uncomfortable and its ending a bit too extreme in its darkness but we live in dark, extreme times.