An all-too-realistic new play by Kimber Lee makes its New York debut at LCT3

Tray is an 18-year-old African-American kid from the projects who doesn’t let his circumstances get him down. He’s a boxer-in-training with big dreams for success. He’s working on his college essay. He’s a statistic. Tray is dead at the start of Kimber Lee’s brownsville song (b-side for tray), and his grandmother and little sister are picking up the pieces of a promising life cut short by gun violence. In this New York premiere at LCT3’s Claire Tow Theater, Lee showcases an authentic look at an all-too-common occurrence, plus the ways a family with nothing but one another copes with a loss of seismic proportions. Uncompromising in its examination of grief and big-hearted in its belief in forgiveness, brownsville song sings with the rhythms of an often-misrepresented community, following in the footsteps of Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson. Like their plays, by its end brownsville song gets a tad unwieldy. But the gut punch of Patricia McGregor’s staging makes up for any dramaturgical flaws.