This month's GC Advocate includes my thoughts on Lemon Andersen's County of Kings and Colman Domingo's A Boy and His Soul.

Excerpt:

Neither Andersen’s story nor Domingo’s is entirely unfamiliar. Looking over my descriptions above I see how mere plot [summaries] are almost irrelevant. The power of these stories is in how personal they are for the performers, and for segments of the audience. At each show, audience members here and there would laugh or shout out with recognition when the performer mentioned a place they knew from their own child hoods, or a personality that could have been their uncle or, most powerfully, a song that had always made them want to dance. Both of these remark­able performers are valuable in part because they bring distinctive talents and perspectives to the often too-homogenous stages of New York’s institutional theatres. They are also valuable because they attract to these the­atres the kinds of audiences whom are not normally accustomed to seeing themselves reflected on stage. My favorite moments in these shows were those to which I couldn’t relate, but to which many of the people around me obviously could.

After each of the performances, I saw audience members texting and calling friends and family members to tell them what they’d seen. And during the intermission for County of Kings the women behind me talked about buying their nephew a ticket to the show. “He should see this. He could do this.” 

Full review here.