Adesola Osakalumi

The Wash

June 7, 2025

Smith’s script, which is heartily laden with day-to-day chatter and feels slightly long, still finds perfect opportunities to divulge important messages about friendship, love, empowerment, loyalty, dignity, and perseverance. The play's conclusion is heartwarming, although there is a missed opportunity for rejoicing, when the ultimate success of the strike is written to occur between scenes. Director Awoye Timpo and dramaturg Arminda Thomas expertly weave the energy of the actors and their keenly intentional listening into a compelling tapestry. Though minimal, the opening choreography by Adesola Osakalumi and Jill M. Vallery is striking; this, and the few instances of singing spur the imagination with thoughts of what a great musical could be born from this material. [more]

Skeleton Crew

January 29, 2022

Set in the breakroom of a stamping plant in 2008, Ms. Morisseau achieves a high level of dramatic writing with this well observed exploration of Black working-class life. Each of the short scenes is perfectly crafted, imparting exposition, plot points and narrative momentum. Morisseau also has created four vivid, appealing and humane characters who speak her authentically rich dialogue and who are majestically performed. [more]

Cullud Wattah

November 27, 2021

All of us are probably aware of the problems of polluted water in Flint, Michigan, owing to civic neglect. However, it might shock you to know that it is still going on. Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s 2021 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize winning play, "Cullud Wattah," takes on this crisis through the prism of one family of three generations of Black women living in the same house. The material is powerful and explosive. We learn a great deal about the crisis as well as see how it personally affects all five of these women in one family. Director Candis C. Jones has obtained the kind of performances from her ensemble cast that makes you feel that these actresses have lived and worked together for years when they may have never met before now. [more]

runboyrun & In Old Age

October 9, 2019

Despite the fine writing and acting, these two plays do not stand alone: we are given no backstory to understand the context for these relationships in the longer saga; both plays dealing with a character’s depression, they are too similar in the theme of being haunted by the past; and thirdly, as they are basically two-character plays, both are too long for the limited story and plot lines they contain. Unlike the first two plays, these use two different directors (Loretta Greco for "runboyrun," and Awoye Timpo for "In Old Age"), ironically making them seem quite similar in style. [more]