Ed Rampell – Hollywood Progressive
The Robey Theatre Company’s production of Leslie Lee’s circa 1983 “Colored People’s Time, A History Play” recounts 100 years in the life of African Americans. Through a series of 13 vignettes presented more or less in chronological order, Lee traces the evolution of Blacks from the 1850s to the 1950s, as they strive to survive and thrive in the racist cauldron that is AmeriKKKa. The scenes are sandwiched in between prologues and epilogues featuring a kind of narrator philosophically ruminating on the nature and passage of time, accentuated by the amplified ticking of a clock. The cast of nine perform on a mostly bare, two-level stage, intermittently enlivened by some projections, with different thesps in each scene (the dramatis personae never appear together en masse onstage, except during the proverbial curtain call). Read more…