Devario D. Simmons Archives - TheaterScene.net

Devario D. Simmons

Thoughts of a Colored Man

October 20, 2021

Keenan Scott II’s engrossing Broadway debut play, Thought of a Colored Man, appears to be a masculine version of Ntozake Shange’s 1976 "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf" updated to 2021. Both plays have seven unnamed characters all the same gender, take place in 20 scenes, and mix poetry, prose and dialogue. However, Scott’s play develops characters that each have a through line and they encounter each other as members of the same Brooklyn community. Set on one Friday from 6 AM to 1 AM the next morning in a Brooklyn community experiencing gentrification, we meet seven African American men in various combinations each given a monologue addressed directly at the audience to tell us part of their stories. In the final scene, they announce their names (Love, Happiness, Wisdom, Lust, Passion, Depression and Anger) but by then most of these appellations have become obvious. [more]

Between the Bars

October 1, 2021

Benjamin Viertel directs "Between the Bars" brilliantly finding the balance between theatricality and reality. Each character emerges as distinct and multidimensional, even the guards who sit passively until they show their savage sides. This is a cast of fine actors who communicate both the indignities of confinement and its ultimate tragic toll just feet away from the audience. [more]

Tumacho

March 5, 2020

To review dramatist/lyricist/composer Ethan Lipton's "Tumacho" almost feels like missing the point of this endearingly oddball "play with songs," a comic pastiche of Western and horror tropes that is essentially the theatrical equivalent of an old Hollywood B-movie. Its major goal is to shamelessly please the audience, something it largely achieves through top-notch performances and an abiding strangeness, if not necessarily a consistent quality of jokes or characterizations or plotting. Obviously, all of the latter should matter, but the fact that it doesn't only attests to the show's bizarre charm. [more]