Freight
Opening Night: July 25, 2015
Closing: August 9, 2015
Theater: HERE Arts Center
Freight: The Five Incarnations of Abel Green tells the story of an African American male who exists in five dimensions of the same universe at different points in American history. In each incarnation- minstrel, cult leader, FBI informant, struggling actor, out-of-work mortgage broker- Abel finds himself stuck somewhere between the American dream and the American nightmare. We witness the trials of a simple man trying to make decisions that will allow him to survive in what the great African American poet Claude McKay referred to as “this cultured hell that tests my youth.” First New York outing.
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August 3, 2015
Abel Green arrives out of breath from running for the train. It is the 1910s, and he is an actor hopping a boxcar on his way to a minstrel show. But performing is something he’s done since long before he ever was paid for it. “See, all Negroes are actors by necessity,” he tells us conversationally, getting dressed out of the suitcase he’s brought along. “The script is passed down generation to generation. The Negroes who know they lines tend to live longer than the Negroes that don’t, generally speaking, as it pertains to dealing with white folks.” America’s constricting racial framework is ever-present in Howard L. Craft’s century-spanning “Freight: The Five Incarnations of Abel Green,” at Here, yet this rich and thoughtful solo play is most concerned with a more intimate self-examination: how to be good to one another within black culture, when the larger culture rewards complicity.
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