2013 NEW COMMISSIONS
PEOPLE’S LIGHT AND THEATER COMPANY AND THE AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATER
WILD WITH HAPPY
explores the surreal, bizarre and outrageous comedy that lies in everyone’s search for answers as they try to deal with death and healing when a young man named Gil plans to scatter his mother’s ashes in the place where she was the most happy. Directed by the Obie Award winning director Robert O’Hara. World Premiered at The Public Theater October 2012 and West Coast Premiere at Theatreworks in Palo Alto in June 2013.
SWEET, FUNNY, AND CARTOON-BRIGHT! Colman Domingo is magnetic. Giving a breakout performance, the ferociously funny Sharon Washington blazes brightly.”– The New York Times
“UPLIFTING, CAMPY AND FUN – Colman Domingo has a huge heart.” – New York Post
“ADVENTURESOME AND OVER-THE-TOP! Watching Colman Domingo can leave you wildly happy.” – New York Observer
“Strap on your bibbidi-bobbidi-boo and fire up the fairy dust for this IRREVERENT AND FAST-MOVING COMEDY that satirizes organized religion, Disneyworld, the American funeral industry and 21st century burial rituals. – Associated Press
“Colman Domingo is EXTRAVAGANTLY TALENTED!” – Entertainment Weekly
“Inspired pieces of comic writing!”
-Variety
“Mourning becomes electric and curiously amusing!”
-New York Daily News
“Loud, Dark and Fun”
-New Yorker
“Hitch a ride with Domingo’s rollicking funeral cortege”
-New York Magazine
“Real Bounce and Farcical euphoria”
-Time Out
“A Freewheeling, witty ,and heartfelt new play”
-Am New York
“Don’t tell God, but for some people pop culture not even a century old can provide the same kind of spiritual inspiration and comfort as the ancient texts and traditions of organized religion. Just ask Adelaide, the central character of Colman Domingo’s wonderfully joyous, sweet and funny adventure, Wild With Happy. No, wait, you can’t. Because she’s dead when the play starts.
Adelaide was the mother of Gil, played by Domingo himself, a smartly sardonic New York Yalie who hasn’t set foot in church since he was ten years old and Adelaide, after finding her boyfriend cheating on her the night before, woke her sleepy boy one Sunday morning determined that they had to “get up and get us some Jesus!”
But this isn’t a play about grieving. It’s a bit more about how examining the life of someone who’s gone can affect you own life for the better. But that message only creeps in toward the end of director Robert O’Hara’s clever and imaginative production, when the series of sometimes farcical/sometimes sitcomy scenes start blending into something of heartwarming sentimentality.
Frustrated by the responsibility of having to make funeral arrangements – not to mention the flirtations and sales pitches of the attractive funeral director, Terry (Korey Jackson) – Gil considers cremation, to the horror of his sassy-tongued, traditional Aunt Glo. (“Black people don’t do that! You don’t do that unless a person was burned or mutilated or too fat to fit in a coffin!”) Sharon Washington doubles up on the female roles, projecting radiance as Adelaide in flashback moments and acting hilariously over-the-top as her domineering sister.
When Gil’s diva-ish friend Mo (Maurice McRae) learns of Adelaide’s past fascination with the Walt Disney version of Cinderella, he kidnaps his pal on an impromptu road trip to Orlando (with Terry and Aunt Glo hot in pursuit), finally settling into the room that Gil’s mother always dreamed of, Disney World’s Cinderella Suite.
Set and costume designer Clint Ramos, who spends much of the play dreaming up fun and unexpected ways to turn coffins into set pieces, presents a perfect interpretation of the Cinderella Suite as a cathedral of wonder, bringing out Domingo’s themes of faith and fantasy, spirituality and the magic of human imagination.
Wild With Happy is a delicious charmer about finding the heaven that’s right for you and forever keeping it in your heart.” -BROADWAYWORLD
A BOY AND HIS SOUL
winner of the 2010 Lucille Lortel Award for Best Solo Show Off Broadway, GLAAD Media Award for Best Production in New York. Drama Desk, Drama League and Audelco Nominations for Best Performance.
“WONDERFUL! THEATRICAL GOLD!
Great humor and warmth, and stirringly poignant.
A tour de force! A play with so much heart
…and soul.”
Roma Torre, NY1
“’A BOY AND HIS SOUL’ CAPTIVATES!
A marvelous tragicomedy, told by one astonishing actor.
Wicked, tender, outrageous and profound!”
Linda Winer, Newsday
“A BLAZINGLY CHARISMATIC PERFORMER!
Remarkable range and dexterity. ‘A Boy and
His Soul’ is lively, likable and funny!
Charles Isherwood, The New York Times
“A KNOCKOUT!
Michael Alan Connelly, NY Magazine
“A VIBRANT MEMOIR!
Domingo’s contagious enthusiasm is commanding
and endearing — he has the touch of a poet!”
Joe Dziemianowicz, NY Daily News
“EXHILARATING! I WAS HOOKED!”
Frank Scheck, NY Post
Where do you get soul? From the kitchen rotary phone cord your sister stretched out nine feet? From never learning the real secrets of your crazy cousin until you were older? From the broken Easy Bake oven your brother used to torment your sister’s Barbie dolls? Or from the memory of watching your parents sell the house you grew up in?
Maybe you get soul from listening to the music on WDAS FM with your mother in the backyard at midnight on a hot summer evening. From Stevie, Aretha, Marvin, Chaka, Barry, Gladys…and Colman.
MISSION OF A SAINT
A ten minute short play that was written for The Movement Theater Group’s August Wilson Revised. Based on a theatrically unseen moment in August Wilson’s Fences. Troy’s brother Gabriel visit’s St. Peter 1.5 miles from the pearly gates after he is shot in the back of the head during WWII. 2 African American men. 20′s and 50′s.
UP JUMPED SPRINGTIME
Colman Domingo’s first play is a a collection of adaptations and short writings about growing up black and gay in america. 3 actor multicharacter play premiered at Theater Rhinoceros in San Francisco in 1998 to glowing reviews.
Robert Hurwitt of the San Francisco Chronicle’s review of Up Jumped Springtime:
SASSY, HIP, flip, thoughtful, mildly confrontational, coolly upbeat, genuinely moving and very funny, “Up Jumped Springtime” is a breath of fresh air at the end of a generally lackluster season at Theatre Rhinoceros. It’s a fast-paced collage of dramatized short stories, poems and memoirs about being black and gay. And, yes, it’s got snap and a healthy dash of rhythm and soul.
It’s also a minor triumph for Colman Domingo, who conceived and wrote the show, and for Danny Scheie, whose crisp directorial hand is evident throughout. Borrowing a page from the lively literary adaptations of Word for Word, Domingo has built “Springtime” around seven short pieces from Essex Hemphill and Dorothy Beam’s anthology “Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men.”
He also wrote introductory and closing poems and created three more pieces with fellow Afrobluesoulpower members Da’Mon Vann and Brian Yates. He reworked the material with dramaturgical input from Campo Santo’s Sean San Jose, Rhino playwright Doug Holsclaw and Domingo’s Afrobluesoulpower co-founder June Lomena.
“Springtime” was presented in a workshop last year, and premiered Saturday in a Rhino co-production with Afrobluesoulpower.
As good as the material is, it certainly helps to have three performers of the caliber of Domingo, Yates and Vann. But there’s also no question that presentation makes up a large part of the evening’s success.
Scheie doesn’t segue, and he has zero tolerance for dead stage time. Each piece jumps in on top of the last, building upon the dramatic or comic momentum. Scene shifts are as startling and irresistible as the blast of the Jackson 5′s “ABC” that slams into a jazz reverie in Bruno Ybarra’s sound design, or as smooth, simple and unremarkable as two performers swiveling around on bar stools, leaving the third to face the audience alone.
Jon Wai-keung Lowe’s set creates a theater of infinite possibilities. The stage is stripped to its rear walls, painted black and white, and filled with an odd lot of small and large forms covered with white sheets. Scheie opens with Domingo, solo, in the stark glare of a bare lightbulb, reciting his poem of the “flame of fabulousness,” “Fire,” as Jason Fuges’ lights slowly flame into a red glow behind him.
With deft, subdued shifts of attitude and voice placement, Domingo is suddenly the 11-year-old African American child of Charles Henry Fuller’s “The Jazz Singer,” caught by a horrified father (Vann) dressing up as Lena Horne in the attic. Domingo’s childishly awkward dress-up play-acting is sublimely mirrored by Yates’ graceful drag act, framed in an open doorway in one of Chris Aysta’s more glamorous costumes.
The remainder of the first act consists of Charles R.P. Pouncy’s “A First Affair.” The urban coming-of-age story features Domingo as Stanley, a delightfully naive teen from a strict, “sanctified” family, sneaking out to his first gay party. Yates is hilariously tough and arch as a proud teen queen and the versatile Vann turns in sharp cameos as an eagle-eyed, Bible-thumping mom, the party’s bohemian hostess and the shy, compatibly bookish boy Stanley meets there.
The second act rarely settles in for one scene nearly as long. There are short, sharp poems celebrating and / or sardonically examining black gay life. Domingo delivers Don Charles’ “Comfort” and Yates performs Cary Alan Johnson’s “Hey Brother What’s Happening?” – different takes on the vagaries of shifting styles of sexual preference ( “Everybody wants to be the boy next door and have the boy next door” ).
All three participate in a high-energy reverie on black gay bars filled with “old queens” and young toughs (who
“open their mouths and a string of pearls and a purse falls out” ). Vann revels in the rhythmic satire of Marvin K. White’s Ntozake Shange lampoon, “For Colored Boys Who Have Considered S-curls When the Hot Comb Was Enough.”
There’s comic high camp in three very different drag approaches to Diana Ross, as Yates’ dignified diva casts a disbelieving eye on Vann’s muscular lip-synching to
“Upside Down.” There’s the sweet comedy of a family falling all over itself to be accepting when a young man comes out in the ensemble “Jay’s Story.” There’s the delicate, affirmative sentiment of Melvin Dixon’s “Aunt Ida Pieces a Quilt,” in Domingo’s gentle portrait of an aged woman working on her nephew’s segment of the AIDS quilt.
Scheie frames each sharp characterization beautifully, sometimes in a spotlit still moment center stage, sometimes spilling out into the aisles or bursting through the doors at each side of the theater. The infectious energy amplifies the beguiling humor and helps illuminate the eloquent imagery.
“Can you see me?” Domingo asks – not for himself but for all gay black men – as the show returns to the quiet of that single lightbulb at the end. “Springtime” makes the vision not only inevitable but a pleasure.
CONTACT KATE NAVIN AT THE GERSH AGENCY FOR INQUIRY. GO TO THE CONTACT PAGE.