Too Heavy For Your Pocket
Opening Night: October 5, 2017
Closing: November 19, 2017
Theater: Black Box Theatre at The Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
Roundabout Underground hosts the premiere of 2016 Yale School of Drama graduate Jiréh Breon Holder’s award-winning work. Tennessee-born Holder takes us back to Nashville in the summer of 1961. The Freedom Riders are embarking on a courageous journey into the Deep South. When 20-year-old Bowzie Brandon gives up a life-changing college scholarship to join the movement, he’ll have to convince his loved ones—and himself—that shaping his country’s future might be worth jeopardizing his own.
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October 5, 2017
On the evidence of his play “Too Heavy for Your Pocket,” Jiréh Breon Holder either didn’t get the message or decided to pay it no heed.
The message I mean is the one George C. Wolfe delivered so memorably in his 1986 satire “The Colored Museum.” After that blistering takedown of African-American theatrical clichés, what writer would dare attempt a sincere “Mama on the couch” play or anything smacking of collards, church or “Mr. Boss Man”?
Maybe one who wasn’t born yet. Mr. Holder, who is 27 and a recent drama school graduate, has some distinctly post-ironic ideals. “Theater is the new church,” he has said, “where we go to experience clarity and refreshment as a society.”
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