THE SHINE CHALLENGE 2025 at Theater for the New City

Playwright Ishmael Reed explains why he wrote The Shine Challenge 2025: “Like members of most ethnic groups, the purpose of our schooling was to have us fit into the Anglo mainstream. At home and on the playground, other story-telling traditions were available, handed down through the generations as part of an oral tradition. The Bible might be the only book in the house. But there was a story-telling tradition that we kept from our parents because of the bad words. They were “toasts” and “the dozens,” which had endless variations.

“In my great uncle’s house, the only painting on the wall was that of the Titanic. The sinking of the Titanic challenged the boasts of white supremacy. From the collective imagination of the Black streets came the “toast” of “Shine,” who warns the first-class passengers that the ship, thought to be invincible, was taking water. One might consider Shine to be the grassroots nominee for a member of the Black prophetic tradition.”      

Ishmael Reed has lengthened the 40 or so lines of the typical Shine rap into a 100-page script in which he expands on the issues addressed in the original toast: race, class, immigration, engineering, and Edwardian morality by putting Shine on trial in which he is both the accused and his own defense attorney.

One of the reasons Reed wrote the play was because he found that members of three generations of Blacks had never heard the story of Shine. He calls the play The Shine Challenge, 2025 since he expects that a future playwright will expand upon what he has accomplished. During a time when there is a crackdown on Black culture under the banner of Woke, whose definition has been twisted by our enemies, every possible effort must be made to maintain Black, Brown, Native American and Asian American traditions. Our writers can be like the monks who protected the sacred texts from barbarians.

Directed by Rome Neal, The Shine Challenge 2025 cast includes Jordan Barringer, Jesse Bueno, Maurice Carlton, Roz Fox, Rob Fulton, Emil Guillermo, Malika Iman, Joy Reneé LeBlanc, Rome Neal, Carman Noelia, Monisha Shiva, Audrey Shon, and Brian Simmons as Shine.