‘Thoughts of a Colored Man’ Review: A Welcome if Uneven Excavation of Black Masculinity on Broadway
7 / 10
A hope for the future arrives in the final moments of 'Thoughts of a Colored Man,' a dutiful and expansive cataloguing of its title subject by Keenan Scott II. 'I can't wait for the day when my skin isn't a novelty,' a man known as Happiness, played by Bryan Terrell Clark, tells the audience. It's as much a self-conscious commentary on the playwright's own project as on the broader experience of Black men in America. That's the sprawling, diffuse subject that Scott ambitiously inventories here, in a series of vignettes, run-ins and soliloquies set in a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood over the course of a single day. Under the able direction of Steve H. Broadnax III, Scott's poetic distillations gleam with insights and vulnerabilities of heart and mind.
