 Welcome to my inner monologue. You mean dialogue? Ah, fuck. That's not a very nice way to greet yourself. You know how I feel about you. You should probably talk to someone about that. What do you want? You shouldn't be doing this. I wish I agreed with you. You need to stop injecting a perspective into the hashtag discourse that basically by definition has nothing to add to it. Look in a mirror. I'm doing that right now. You have nothing useful to say about a play called Thoughts of a Colored Man. Why don't you review Squid Game or something? You constantly brag about your above average for a white guy knowledge of Korean cinema. And that video would be guaranteed to get views at least from your subscribers, even if you never showed up in anyone else's search results. This won't even get them. And your numbers have been pretty dire lately. You could use the boost. You're right. But here we are. Here we are. Why? I don't have that much to say about Squid Game. It's a generally fine season of television that was kind of like an extended version of Takashi Miike's As the Gods Will with fewer dead kids, more anti-capitalism, and an even worse ending. Huang Dong-Hui's 2011 film, Silenced, is one of the most emotionally devastating things I have ever seen. But Squid Game? I don't know. I felt like Todd in the shadows hearing Driver's License for the first time. You know, it's good, but really, that's the biggest Netflix debut in history? I mean, Sour is better than Squid Game for sure. On that, we agree. But to the subject at hand, have you ever not done a review because you understood it wasn't your place? I've avoided specific themes and ideas in works that I felt unqualified to address, but I couldn't give you an example of something I didn't talk about at all. But I don't think that's inherently a bad thing. Even if I'm not the best person to speak about something, I take doing so seriously and try really hard not to fuck it up. But even if I do, I think more voices pushing people towards interesting art is good. And in any case, it's kind of irrelevant here because Dots of a Color Man isn't really for the people it's about, it's for people who look like me. Of course you'd say that. The lead fucking producer said it. The man who brought it to Broadway, Brian Morlin, said it is a show about the capacity to love, to forgive, to understand and learn about the black man you may have seen at your corporate office, country club, subway, or grocery store. Which frankly, I found kind of depressing. Why? That seems like a fairly noble goal. Because it's just a plea for basic human empathy and the fact that he thinks he knows he needs to. The fact that he knows he needs to do that is just sad. But you acknowledge that he needs to. So what's the problem? I don't get it. Wow. What amazing insight. Thanks for sharing. No, like I understand what the show is trying to do, but I don't understand how it hopes to do it. This is Broadway. Tickets start at $50 for the nosebleeds and go all the way to $225 for that sweet, sweet center orchestra before ticketing platforms and scalpers add their greedy fucking multipliers. So are you saying that Broadway audiences are not racist and don't need to learn empathy? Of course not. They're a bunch of old, affluent, white folks whose disinterest in diversity can be measured by how white Broadway has always been. There were three seasons before the pandemic had two, one, and zero plays from black writers respectively. And obviously there's a chicken and egg problem there, but I think that producers were largely correct that said old, affluent, white folks want to see shows that don't challenge their sensibilities. But if that's true, what are the chances they're going to pay for a show called Thoughts of a Colored Man? Who is going to see this show that doesn't already accept that a black man is a complex individual? In that sense, I think this show is much more likely to expand an audience than deepen it. Why are you saying that like it's a bad thing? I'm not. If Broadway is going to stay relevant, it needs to cultivate an audience of people seeking out diverse experiences for their own sake. That's great. But I don't really know what the show has to offer those people. It doesn't tell a cohesive story or have any real kind of narrative. The production design is bare-bones, serviceable, but hardly commendable. It's a group of seven black men, each of whom represents a different aspect of both personality and experience, asking that we see them as they are. And I don't know, if we're talking about getting attention, I have learned a lot more from people who are happy to leave me on the dock than people who are waiting for me to get on board. It's a cute line, but since when? Even if we accept that the show is an exception, you still talk when you should listen because you're terrified that someone might be really trying to shut you up. Like, maybe you get it now enough that the show doesn't offer much, but wouldn't you from ten years ago, or maybe even five, have gotten something out of it? Maybe, but I don't think I would have heard it. In an op-ed, the writer of this play, Kenan Scott II, penned for American Theater Magazine about its conception called racism shouldn't have to be my muse. He said, I was flooded with emotion that I could no longer contain for the benefit of white society, but I didn't know where to channel the ocean of rage and sorrow that suddenly drowned me. And where was that? Where was the man who was passed toning down his rage and sorrow for white society? I wanted some bite to this production that just didn't come. I know that Slave Play is quite controversial, and I'm sure it says something that many black creators don't seem to particularly like the show, let alone love it the way that I did, but it is impossible to deny the visceral effect that it has, literally setting a mirror at the back of the stage that constantly reminds the audience of their complicity. But if Slave Play is a mirror, Dots of a Colored Man is a fishbowl. No reflection, just observation. And those observations might be meaningful and occasionally thought-provoking, but I don't think anyone is going to come out of this a changed person. But does it need to change people? Why can't it just be interesting on its own terms? It doesn't have to, but it clearly wants to, or maybe it just wants to be thought-provoking, and you acknowledge that it is. It seems like you want this to be something more than it wants to be. This play called itself Dots of a Colored Man, and so you see it as a stand-in for all black theater, and because it doesn't meet your ridiculous standard, it's somehow a failure. That's bullshit, man. Like, why not let the play exist and celebrate it for what it is? It's got talented performers saying words that Scott, who is a poet and damn sure well knows it, has infused with a unique rhythm and even rhyme that is unlike anything you've ever heard on Broadway. It is really cool. I mean, the spin on the play of Allegiance was a little cringy. Fuck you. You complain about the lack of rage, but ignore how much time is given to positive emotions, love, happiness, passion. When was the last time you got to see that from a black person on stage? Isn't getting to experience that way more meaningful than just getting yelled at for a hundred minutes? Sure, sure. Fine. Yes, I liked seeing all that. Then why are you being so fucking negative? Because the stuff I liked about it was mostly found in moments and not in the bigger picture. For example, I think the use of Paris Baguette as a marker of gentrification is so much more specific and real than just another Whole Foods joke. And I loved that, even if Whole Foods is a punchline of sorts too. But it doesn't have anything to do with the play other than that I had prior to Curtin decided to go to Paris Baguette afterwards to get one of those lemon croissant donuts that are really the only good things that they serve there. To Le Jour is obviously the far superior French Korean bakery. Again, we agree, but there's so much less prevalent so I have to go with the Paris Baguette Crohnut knockoff. Anyways, I ended up getting there just after it had closed and I watched as the workers were just pouring pastries into a trash bag. And it was incredibly frustrating to watch on an avenue that over the past 18 months has seen its visible homeless population increase dramatically. I cannot forget when that guy I went to high school with got fired from an Upper West Side cafe for putting out the remaining baked goods at the end of the day instead of throwing them away. But when a photo of him doing that cool thing got traction on Instagram, the place implemented it as official policy and used the photo of the guy that they fired to promote the thing they fired him for doing, it's so fucked up. But also, what community does the Upper West Side really have? Just because you don't see it and aren't a part of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. But when I lived in Harlem or visited friends in Washington Heights, they felt like places where people actually lived instead of just ate and slept. And obviously this is a key subject of the show, but the ideas just don't always cohere and not even scene to scene, sometimes minute to minute. Like there's this big ensemble scene in the barbershop where the newest entrant into the neighborhood comes in, he is wealthy and lives in the fancy new building that all of the other guys hate and is happy to see the Paris Baguette and whole foods and et cetera. This makes for some potentially interesting tension. And then we learn that he is gay because one of the other guys at the barbershop, a type who loves cat calling women, says something derogatory towards gay men. And you expect it to go badly and he expects it to go badly because he is so used to things going badly, but then everyone else says, hey, don't say that. And that's cool. It would be if it didn't come like two minutes after the man proudly proclaimed that his dog uses they pronouns, which is followed by a long pause for an audience laugh. You can't use the fact that people prefer different pronouns as a punch line. And then in the next breath, make some big proclamation that everyone is valuable and no one should be made to feel uncomfortable for who they are. And I don't think Scott was being malicious in this moment, but it's a really fucking weird choice and it feels so forced and unnatural and it really lays out the construction of the whole thing. I mean, I'm not going to defend that choice specifically, but why does it matter if the situations don't feel exactly real? This is theater. It's seven men's on a bare bone stage in front of a giant projection screen. They don't need to speak like real people. They're not real people. They're ideas, emotions personified by archetypes, and they present themselves as such. The dialogue adds depth in a way that monologues really can't. Take the run-in at Whole Foods between the rich man and one of the other barbershop guys who, it turns out, works there. Apparently he was a genius, MIT ready and all that. But then he had to put his life on hold to take care of his family. And then that hold became something sadly more permanent. This creates a genuinely interesting dialogue about money, class, community, responsibility. And sure, you can guess where Scott's ultimate feelings lie, but I don't think it's so cut and dried. Yeah, but I also think that's the only time where there appears to be genuine conflict on the part of the writer, where both sides of the argument have something worth saying and it doesn't feel like a lecture with extra steps. Is that a pointed remark? Kind of. I don't believe that there are two sides to everything or that all subjects are worthy of discussion. But if something isn't worth discussing, don't make it a discussion. Like Scott clearly knows this because a lot of this play is straight monologue. They are often powerful, sermonesque at times, but even they can be undercut by weird choices. Like towards the end, there is a shooting. Of course, there's a shooting. You can't tell the story of the black man in America without a shooting, especially considering that this whole thing was inspired by a 23-year-old Sean Bell's death at the hands of police in 2006. Though, unlike that, this isn't police related. But isn't that a good thing, though? Guns are an epidemic in this country. Less than two months ago, 16 people were shot in Brooklyn and Queens over a 90 minute period and another 28 that same weekend, nearly all of them in their teens and 20s. We focus a lot on police brutality because it's easy to see how evil it is and it garners tons of media attention. But the body count is so much higher than that. We don't see their faces plastered on social media or their crying families on the news, but that doesn't mean their lives weren't every bit as important or meaningful. Involving the police would make this moment about the cop instead of the victim, and that would both muddy the waters of the message and diminish the impact of the moment. It's fair enough. But what you said about all of those victims in Brooklyn and Queens being kids, that's what this monologue that follows the event is about too. The danger that black boys in particular face as they try to survive long enough to become black men. It hits hard and you can tell that it came from a place of pain for both writer and performer. But the guy in the play who got shot wasn't a boy. He was a grown man. There were boys, but they're not the ones who get shot. And that's bad too, but it feels so disconnected from what the show is explicitly saying about the potential that is destroyed by these senseless acts. And it's not to say that a man in his 30s or 40s doesn't have potential, but it's not what they're talking about. So why did they do it that way? Maybe they just don't want to show another dead kid, even abstracted. Maybe, but it took me out of the moment and not in a useful way. It was just another frustrating choice that robbed the moment of at least some of its power. And it's interesting to me that it seems to have hit so many actual theater critics so hard. Like I'm not going to try reading into the fact that six of the seven critics whose praise scrolls across the top of thoughts of a colored man's website are white. My gut says that there's some performativity in there, but I think it's mostly a function of the general diversity problems in criticism that I have no doubt are even worse in theatrical criticism specifically. But I can't help thinking about the apparent divide in the audience. I sat between two black couples in the theater, one of which was having a great time, while the other clearly not. At the end, the former cheered and stood up for the standing ovation while the latter barely clapped, and they weren't the only ones. And I kind of wonder if this is part of something I said much earlier about the expansion of the audience. You know, given that this was one of the most diverse crowds I have ever seen on Broadway, it is quite likely that some of those were people who don't go to the theater all that much or maybe at all. And they come into a show like this very different than someone whose livelihood is based on seeing Broadway shows. Like The New York Times Review is written by editor at large, Maya Phillips, and it does not glow the way that Broadway critic Greg Evans is does for deadline. And maybe race factors into that difference somewhat. But Linda Armstrong is a black woman who's been reviewing Broadway productions for longer than I have been alive. And she claims that this is the most important play of the 21st century. She would certainly know better than you. Right. And I would like to believe that these critics are exaggerating a bit or just to have bad opinions. But the scariest possibility is that maybe they're right. And this is one of the best shows in ages and the most important of this century. But if they are right, that's not praise for thoughts of a colored man. It is a scathing indictment of theater itself. Well, that's a bleak way to end this. Yeah, classic Alec. Six point zero out of ten. Thanks so much for watching. And thank you particularly to my patrons, my mom, Hammer and Marco, Kat Saracota, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Magnolia Denton, Elliott Fowler, Greg Lucina, Kojo, Phil Bates, Liam Knype, Willow, I am the sword, Riley Zimmerman, Jacob Alexander, and the folks who'd rather be read than said. If you like this video, that's great. If you want to see more, not going to be like this. I hope to see you in the next one.