Donald Brown Photos
Burnett, Nelson, and Singleton.
On a recent rainy night, I arrived at the packed parking lot at Erector Square, then waited outside a glass door to be admitted to hallways and stairs. Two people led me to a double door on the second floor, and the rehearsal and performance space of Collective Consciousness Theatre. My guides were Production Stage Manager Brionna Ingraham and Assistant Stage Manager Eddie Chase. I entered and walked into a down-at-heels bedroom. Cracked plaster, a bed, a mirror, some wall art. A big chair. Jamie Burnett was on a ladder, hanging lights.
It was David Sepulveda’s set for the first CCT production of the new season: Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog, a play described as “two brothers in a room.” It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002, making Parks the first African-American author to win that award.
CCT’s production of Topdog/Underdog runs Nov. 2 to Nov. 19.
Terrence Riggins, who played Martin Luther King, Jr. in CCT’s recent production of The Mountaintop, was there, putting snacks into a tray. This time he plays one of the brothers, named Lincoln. The other brother, named Booth, will be played by Tenisi Davis.
“The brothers were given the names Lincoln and Booth as a joke,” Dexter J. Singleton, CCT’s Executive Director, told me.
Singleton will direct the play, which he saw in its New York debut in 2002 starring Jeffrey Wright and Mos Def. It has “always been on a list” of top plays he wanted to direct at some point, he said. He called the play “timely, definitely relatable to things going on in the world.”
This season, CCT’s fourth at Erector Square, consists of Topdog/Underdog as well as Dominique Morisseau’s Sunset Baby, which Associate Director Jenny Nelson will direct in the spring. In June there will also be Fresh Works, a festival of new, unpublished plays selected from submissions from all over the country.
CCT is always looking for plays that explore issues in race, class, and culture. They like plays that can work in a small playing space. The set and the audience configuration changes with each play. This season, Nelson noted, both plays have themes of “family identity, and what makes someone family.”
Parks, one of the most celebrated authors of her generation, is a good choice this season. A more recent play of hers, Father Comes Home from the Wars, will be produced at the Yale Repertory Theatre in the spring, meaning New Haven theatergoers have a chance to see two major plays from this important contemporary playwright this season.
Detail of set.
Singleton said that doing a play from 2002 “is a little old for us,” as CCT tends to favor plays from the last five years, in many cases producing plays that haven’t been seen in Connecticut or New Haven before. But Parks’s play remains relevant and not at all dated. In its tale of two brothers,
Topdog/Underdog investigates the legacy of Lincoln and, as Nelson said, “it’s not that things have changed but that they haven’t changed enough.” Parks’s play initially appeared before Obama’s presidency; now we are nearly a year after its end. Singleton also mentioned how the attention to police brutality and gun violence toward young black men has become a major issue in the time since Topdog/Underdog’s original run. The prevalence of cell phones makes documentation go viral and puts pressure on police departments, through Black Lives Matter and greater awareness in recent years.
But the question of “how black men are seen and how they cope” remains and is a dramatic element of the play, Singleton said. As CCT sees it, plays that ask questions about U.S. society remain relevant until “we address the problems” the plays confront.
CCT wants “people leaving its shows to be asking questions,” Singelton said. The theater has talk backs to promote proactive responses to plays that address real issues in the lives of the audience, and provide resources people can turn to for information and action. The audience is comprised both of people who subscribe to big area theaters like Yale Rep and Long Wharf as well as people who may be seeing a play for the first time. The group prices its tickets for everyone: standard tickets are $25, but there are also student discounts of $10 and group rates. And the Thursday shows are “pay what you want, which can be anything from a $1 million to nothing,” Nelson said. CCT prides itself on its outreach to a very diverse audience and, as Singleton said, for having “found a solid crop of actors of color not tapped into locally.”
For its first six years the group was a touring collective of theater artists, putting on workshops and original plays in schools and other community programs. Eventually they decided to turn their rehearsal space into a performance space.
“All you need is a black box,” Nelson said. He said CCT has worked with a fairly stable group of artists, including their “technical wizards” Jamie Burnett and David Sepulveda, who have met every staging challenge with skill and ingenuity.
Terence Riggins and Tenisi Davis were in costume, wearing sharp-looking suits. It was time to rehearse.
Topdog/Underdog runs at Collective Consciousness Theater in Erector Square, 315 Peck St., from Nov. 2 to Nov. 19. Click here for tickets and more information.
