Titles don’t get much more provocative than that of Marc Anthony Thompson’s new show at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre, “The Ni¿¿er Lovers.”
“I’ve been reticent to actually draw that connection myself, because we’ve taken just the kernel of that story, and we use it as a jumping-off point to talk about gender, race then, race now, birth control, women’s rights, race relations and colorism, with the shock and awe of how little has changed since 1850,” Thompson says. “It’s a play based on a true story that we’ve taken complete license with, and it’s kind of combination of history and magic realism and absurdist theater.
“It’s all the same discipline to me,” Thompson says. “I’m storyteller as a songwriter, and I do sound design and I score films. I figure anything that comes out of two speakers, that’s what I do. It wasn’t like all of a sudden I woke up and a light bulb went off and I went, ‘Oh my God, my next thing is I’m going to write a play with songs.’ It seemed a pretty natural progression.”
Elsewhere in San Francisco, 42nd Street Moon is doing another musical that draws heavily upon minstrel-show tropes and features an all-Black cast except one. “The original production employed blackface, and we have decided not to use actual blackface,” says director Brandon Jackson. “I think the beauty of not doing it is that we get to explore and interrogate and deconstruct the many other elements of how this performance art takes gross stereotypes and really cements them into the psyche of at the time largely white audiences. The blackface was probably the least dangerous aspect of what minstrelsy was set up to do.
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