Salamishah Tillet

Almost immediately, rumors spread that an ambulance, privately run by the Hasidim, had taken the driver and his fellow passengers to the hospital, while the young black children lay bleeding on the ground.

That night, a group of young black men retaliated by stabbing Yankel Rosenbaum, a 29-year-old Orthodox Jewish scholar from Australia, who eventually died in the same hospital as Gavin. Over the next three days, a race riot erupted, in which black residents protested the police, stormed the Lubavitcher headquarters, and targeted Jewish businesses. Hasidic patrols sought to defend their community by attacking their black neighbors.

Shortly afterward, the playwright and actress Anna Deavere Smith began interviewing black and Jewish residents of Crown Heights, as well as creative artists and community leaders. She managed to talk to those most personally affected by the tragedies, too, including Yankel Rosenbaum’s brother, Norman, and Gavin Cato’s father, Carmel.

“Fires in the Mirror,” a one-woman show based on the interviews, was set to premiere at the Public Theater on April 30, 1992. But the day before, when a mostly white jury acquitted the four Los Angeles police officers who beat Rodney King, the Public briefly closed over fears of racial violence.

In May, “Fires in the Mirror,” which had Smith playing nearly 30 real-life characters, debuted to rave reviews. What makes the show “so moving and provocative, so remarkably free of cant and polemics,” Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times, “is its creator’s ability to find the unexpected and unguarded in nearly each speaker and her objective grasp of the troubling big picture.”

In subsequent versions, even the one filmed in 1993 for “American Playhouse” on PBS, Smith changed the sequencing but continued to do the performance as a one-woman show.

Opening on Nov. 11 at the Signature Theater Company, “Fires in the Mirror” stars Michael Benjamin Washington (“The Boys in the Band”), the first solo actor besides Smith to take on this multifaceted role. Saheem Ali (“The Rolling Stone”) is the director.

The production kicks off Smith’s Signature residency; her “Twilight: Los Angeles 1992,” on the riots there, will be revived later in its season.

In a lively interview at the theater last week, Smith and Washington talked about what a male actor brings to the play, his appreciation for the fluidity of her characters and what the play still has to teach us about race and American identity. An edited version of the conversation follows.

Q: Anna, I read an interview in which you described being disappointed when a man came up to you after an early performance and told you, “I wish that a male actor had been cast.” How did that impact how you approached this revival?

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: This was when it was at the Public Theater. This brother came over and said: “You know, I’m just curious. Didn’t you meet any strong, black man that you wanted to include?” I was like: “Strong black men? Well, how about Mr. Cato? How about Conrad Muhammad, whether you agree with him or not. You can’t say he’s not strong. How about Al Sharpton?” I thought, “Oh, for him, if he doesn’t see the black male body, he’s not seeing himself.” And so I don’t count either. There is this feeling that only a black man could be a black man. That’s not philosophically where I live.

When we went looking for an individual who was going to play this part, everyone assumed it was going to be a woman. But I wanted to see if it makes a difference to have the presence of a black male body onstage. So I campaigned for them to see men as well as women in casting.

Q: Michael, you play so many characters — a Haitian teenage girl, an anonymous Lubavitcher woman, Angela Davis, and black and Jewish adolescent boys. Were you at all concerned with taking on so many different types at once?

MICHAEL BENJAMIN WASHINGTON: Not at all. Growing up in Dallas, Texas, “Fires in the Mirror” was a piece that we did on the circuit of our high school speech and debate competitions in 1994 and 1995. It was part of our training to become as fluid as possible, to play men and women and different races and ethnicities and religions and sexual orientations. So when I got this part, it was like a return home.

Q: Back then, it was considered part-journalism, part-theater. Now can we just call it a play?

SMITH: I’m happy to hear you call it a play. I’ve always wanted other actors to do this work. My early work had 20 actors in a group, and I was working toward having an acting troupe that would go around America and mirror cities and their incidents. What you see now came out of that process.

WASHINGTON: Dramaturgically, it’s one of the soundest plays I’ve ever read. Every time I read it, which is every morning and every night, I find another thread in the tapestry that connects the themes. And since I didn’t have access to all the tape recordings, because some of them no longer exist, I get to use my imagination. What’s important to remember is that she was able to write it down on the page in poem form. If you follow the line breaks, which is following the logic of the thought, you can hear the person come alive.

Q: This play was performed at a really contentious moment in American history. How do you think it stands today?

SMITH: My theory about race in this country is it goes up and down. We have this period — “Oh, post-racial” — and then all of a sudden: “Oh, no. We’re not!” But I think it’s always there. When Richard Green [the former director of the Crown Heights Youth Collective] says, “These kids are running to cops with nothing in their hands,” that distinct image makes me think of right now.

WASHINGTON: Yeah. I would usually have a breakdown at that moment in the rehearsal room, and I was like, “Nope, you’ve got to keep going because these men lived it.”

SMITH: It breaks your heart. Right?

WASHINGTON: It does. But they would fight through that emotionality and go into action. Even Mr. Cato at the very end, he’s telling his story, but you can tell that he is not going to be victimized. He’s going to figure out what he has to do to overcome.

SMITH: I also think the Jewish people have to always be on guard. Anti-Semitism could appear any time.

WASHINGTON: It was really spooky last Tuesday night [the show is currently in previews]. There was a voice-over of Clarence Thomas talking about being a victim of “high-tech lynching,” and the audience collectively gasped because Trump’s own lynching comment was trending.

Q: We rarely get to hear such a wide range of people disagreeing with each other at the same time. What are you saying about democracy?

WASHINGTON: We’re putting characters on a stage that just aren’t there normally, people who aren't given voices. And that was 25 years ago. That was so revolutionary. And it still is.

SMITH: I revere difference. How do we meet the stranger? With hatred or kindness? Do we all become the same? I say no.

This article originally appeared in

NEW YORK — On Aug. 19, 1991, in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, a car in the motorcade of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, leader of the Lubavitch Hasidic movement, sped through a red light, struck another car, swerved onto the sidewalk and hit and killed Gavin Cato, a 7-year-old black boy from Guyana, while severely injuring his cousin Angela.

New Face for 30 Real-Life Characters

As a result of his tragic end, fans and friends, especially those unaware of his diagnosis as a paranoid schizophrenic, publicly speculated whether his death was an accident, even though it was ruled a suicide.

No such tension exist in “Twisted Melodies,” the one-man show about Hathaway that begins a five-day run at the Apollo Theater on May 30.

Set in the Essex House hotel room on that fateful night, the play — written by and starring Kelvin Roston Jr. — explores the stirring sounds of Hathaway’s voice and his struggle with his mental health.

The play captures these contradictions by weaving Hathaway’s songs in and out of his deterioration, and through thoughtful set design that allows the audience to see the room, and thus the world, through Hathaway’s troubled eyes.

Roston originally conceived of a show that would feature Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder and Hathaway. He was working as an intern at The Black Rep, a professional African American theater company in St. Louis, and quickly realized that he had to whittle it down to a single character.

“There’s no way I would be able to adequately cover all three of them,” Roston said. “Once I started doing the research, it actually was the mental illness of Donny Hathaway that pulled me in his direction.”

Hathaway was a prodigy, showing signs of preternatural musicianship as early as 3 years old. Raised in a religious St. Louis household by his grandmother, he honed his voice and piano skills in their church’s choir. He studied classical music at Howard University, where he formed a jazz trio with drummer Ric Powell and met singer Roberta Flack, a future collaborator and lifetime friend.

He left Howard early and quickly landed work as a producer and arranger for the likes of Aretha Franklin and the Staple Singers. A year after signing with Atlantic, Rolling Stone magazine dubbed him “a major new force in soul music.” His hits included “This Christmas,” “Someday We’ll All Be Free” and “A Song for You.” His duet with Flack, “Where is the Love?,” won them a Grammy Award in 1973.

The breadth of Hathaway’s musical interests made adapting his story no easy feat. First produced in 2015 at Chicago’s Congo Square Theater, where Roston was an artistic associate, the play moved to Baltimore Center Stage in 2015, and was revived there in early May. The Apollo run is a coproduction among the three theaters in association with Washington’s Mosaic Theater Company, where it will run from June 19-July 21.

Derrick Sanders, the founding artistic director of Congo Square, came on board to direct during its first Baltimore run.

“My initial approach to the piece was that Hathaway was an American ‘Amadeus’ story,” he said, referring to Peter Shaffer’s award-winning play about Mozart. “Like Amadeus, he was a musical genius, but he was a tortured and lost soul.”

Yet while it was important to tell a story about mental illness in the black community, Sanders said that the show needed to be entertaining as well. “One thing I know is that people don’t want to sit here and listen unless you can do Donny’s music,” he explained.

Fortunately, Roston who was also musically trained in the Baptist church, is such a gifted singer that he is able to channel the Hathaway’s artistry without distracting from the momentum of the story or the integrity of Hathaway’s own musical legacy.

To date, Hathaway has been the subject of two poetry collections, a quasi-biography and a documentary, and this month he was honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, to coincide with the 40th anniversary of his death.

His appeal appears to stem from the timelessness of his songs and the timeliness of his persona.

“Hathaway was not flashy like Sly Stone nor sexy like Marvin Gaye or some of the other soul men of that moment,” said Emily J. Lordi, the author of “Donny Hathaway Live.” “But what I think makes him so enduring is that he performed black masculinity in a really different way. He wasn’t the kind of classic macho soul man.”

Hathaway, Lordi said, deserves to be contextualized in the era of the Black Power movement. “There is a greater interest in telling the untold stories of soul by recuperating and illuminating some of those previously marginalized artists that haven’t neatly fit into the narrow frameworks that we’ve had for that political and artistic moment,” she explained.

Diagnosed at his professional peak in the early 1970s, Hathaway spent that decade in and out of hospitals, eventually separating from his wife, Eulaulah Hathaway, and their two daughters and going five years without recording a song.

When he did perform, band members, not to mention critics, often found him erratic. Yet in 1979, he was on his way to a comeback. That year, Flack released their chart-topping duet “The Closer I Get to You,” and they spent many hours together in the recording studio on the day that he died.

“Twisted Melodies” considers Hathaway’s ability to push beyond the sonic boundaries of “time and space,” to quote one of his most famous songs. But it also seeks to deconstruct popular conceptions about madness and music — the myth that suffering is only the path to great art.

Rather than romanticize Hathaway’s fate, the play demands that we see him as both marvelous and morally complicated, a man who had to fight himself in order to be heard.

“Knowing that he was mentally ill means that we don’t get angry at people when their performances are not up to their usual standards because of some crisis they may be going through,” said Guthrie Ramsey, a music professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has written about jazz pianist Bud Powell’s schizophrenia.

“Conversely, we shouldn’t think that it’s because of their mental illness they have some great artistic power,” Ramsey added. “We should simply put it into context, like we do other aspects of their upbringing, rather than making it some mysterious gift that they seem to be bestowed.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="1a0198bb-c2da-35e5-af81-417100c01c0e" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/theater/twisted-melodies-donny-hathaway.html">The New York Times</a>.

BALTIMORE — A reporter once asked soul singer Donny Hathaway, “What would you be if you were not a musician?” His answer: “Dead.” So ends Ebony magazine’s posthumous April 1979 profile of Hathaway, appearing just two months after he was found lifeless on the sidewalk outside a Manhattan hotel where he was staying.

One fateful night with Donny Hathaway

“To make the screen version of a novel into which I had put so much of myself was a dream which I had long hugged to my heart,” Richard Wright told the Portuguese magazine “Revista Branca” in 1950.

The story of a young African American man from the South Side of Chicago, trapped by the stigma and the stifling conditions of racism, has in fact lent itself to film dramatization more than once. A 1951 feature, starring a 45-year-old Wright after actor Canada Lee dropped out, was a commercial and critical disaster — it didn’t help that the film, made in Argentina, was extensively edited by American censors. A 1986 version made by Jerrold Freedman and starring Elizabeth McGovern, Oprah Winfrey, Ving Rhames and Matt Dillon did not fare any better.

But it was Wright’s words on the page, and not its cinematic offspring, that inspired visual artist Rashid Johnson to make his own “Native Son” adaptation — his feature directorial debut — premiering Saturday on HBO.

Johnson, who was first given the book as a teenager living in Chicago by his mother and history professor, Cheryl Johnson-Odim, describes having long been “obsessed” with “Native Son.” “I think it is everything that is right and wrong with the existential journey,” he said. “I think the book sits in the pantheon of literary narratives that have evolved to help us understand the black experience today, which isn’t a monolithic one. Not every black story fosters a sense of success or optimism.”

This newest version of “Native Son,” adapted by playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, remains set in Chicago but in the present day and with notable tweaks. (Spoilers follow for anyone unfamiliar with the story.)

Bigger Thomas (a subtly charismatic Ashton Sanders), is a 20-year-old bicycle messenger who finds a job driving for Will Dalton, a wealthy white businessman, and his family. Bigger dons green hair and black studded jackets, is a metal and classical music fan and steadfastly refuses “stereotypical Negro (expletive)”; he aspires to be more than a driver, a drug dealer or social delinquent.

His mother (Sanaa Lathan), a striving law student, and his girlfriend Bessie (a vibrant KiKi Layne) nurture his ambitions alongside their own, while he becomes friends with Dalton’s “woke” white daughter Mary (Margaret Qualley) and her boyfriend Jan (Nick Robinson). Midway through the story that inherits its tripartite structure of “Fear,” “Flight” and “Fate” from the novel, Bigger accidentally suffocates Mary to death, which sends him on the run and his family and friends into a tailspin.

Wright intended for readers to see Bigger as a product of “the moral ... horror of Negro life in the United States.” The novel opens with Bigger brutally killing a rat that has infested his family’s one-room South Side apartment, which is owned by his slumlord employer, Dalton. (In the book, the character is Henry Dalton, not Will.)Later he kisses the inebriated and unconscious Mary, and then smothers her to keep her quiet when her blind mother enters the bedroom. On the run, an unhinged Bigger rapes and kills Bessie before the police eventually catch him, put him on trial and execute him.

Several generations of African Americans artists, particularly those who came of age in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, have praised “Native Son,” with its bold and bloody take on American race relations, as the ultimate protest novel.

Others received it differently. In 1949, James Baldwin, a young writer who Wright had championed and mentored, published an essay titled “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” which critiqued “Native Son” for continuing to perpetuate the racial stereotypes that “it was written to destroy.” For Baldwin, Bigger’s true tragedy was not being poor or black or American, but that “he has accepted a theology that denies him life, that he admits the possibility of his being subhuman and feels constrained, therefore, to battle for his humanity according to those brutal criteria bequeathed to him at his birth.”

Rather than avoid Baldwin’s insights, like the earlier adaptations did, Johnson’s movie leans into them. “Baldwin’s criticism is unavoidable,” Johnson conceded. “I mean, now, Wright and Baldwin are so matched together, that it would be foolish and disingenuous to tell the story without taking into account what we know.”

In his quest to contend with these two conflicting artistic visions, Johnson believed Parks was the only writer up to the task: Having been a former student of Baldwin’s and a playwright whose complex depictions of black masculinity in such works as the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Topdog/Underdog” and, more recently, “White Noise,” made her the ideal person to update Bigger for a contemporary audience.

With permission from Wright’s literary estate, Parks’ vision diverges largely from the original plot, excising the long trial scene at the end in which Max, a white communist lawyer unsuccessfully defends Bigger. “Rather than spend 30 minutes of the film in scenes that debate Bigger’s innocence or his guilt, we got to use our dramatic moments and extra minute on the front end showing Big’s friendship with Mary and Jan and Bessie,” Parks said.

By further establishing Bigger’s intimate relationships, the audience, for the first time, sees the depth of his interior life.

“The idea of a multidimensional Bigger was so compelling. That is our biggest difference,” she continued. “Wright created him intentionally as a character that’s driven by his circumstance, so to make him fleshed out and fully formed is an extraordinary move and really our way of recognizing how far we have come.”

Though indebted to Baldwin and Wright, the film’s distinctive aesthetics reflect Johnson’s background as an experimental photographer and Parks’ flair for avant-garde dialogue. In their beautifully constructed cinematic world, Bigger is not maniacal (he does not rape or murder Bessie) and is more sympathetic. But he is also so self-aware that his meta-commentary includes quoting W.E.B. DuBois’ famous passage on African-Americans’ “double consciousness” from “The Souls of Black Folk.”

As much as this latest depiction of Bigger Thomas emerges as an archetype of black millennial ambition and angst, he remains, despite his greatest desires, unable to outrun or outsmart the ways in which his black life matters so little to those police officers with whom he has his fatal encounter. In a final scene that is eerily reminiscent of the video footage of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald’s killing by the Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke in 2014, this “Native Son” does not feel like a movie making up for lost time, but rather one that we know too well, played on repeat, with limited justice in sight.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/arts/television/native-son-hbo-james-baldwin-suzan-lori-parks.html" id="3d4e2e6e-fe60-3a7a-a38a-205c48356120">The New York Times</a>.

A 'Native Son' Reimagined, With James Baldwin in Mind

In its earliest conception, Richard Wright’s best-seller “Native Son” was envisioned for the screen.

The movie, Reginald Hudlin’s follow-up to his hit comedy “House Party,” arrived in an era defined by social realist films like “Boyz N the Hood” (1991), “New Jack City (1991)” and “Juice” (1992). These taut, violent dramas couldn’t have felt more removed from the black elite advertising world of “Boomerang” and its inhabitants: smooth-talking, tuxedo-wearing executive Marcus Graham (Eddie Murphy); his friends, Gerard (David Alan Grier) and Tyler (Martin Lawrence); and his colleagues and love interests, Jacqueline (Robin Givens) and Angela (Halle Berry).

Many mainstream critics panned the film (The New York Times said that it appeared to be set in a “strangely retrograde Fantasyland”). But for many of us who came into adulthood with “Boomerang” (it debuted the summer before my first year of college), it made the fantastical feel within our reach. Jacqueline, the hyper-ambitious, glamorous workaholic, and Angela, the graceful, down-to-earth artist, felt like women we were in the process of becoming, or could be.

Rewatching the film now, those characters are too restrictive, the script is too heterosexist and Marcus’ workplace sexual antics are out of step with the current push to increase gender equality in the boardroom and the bedroom. And yet, I still find myself charmed by the beauty and charisma of its ensemble.

In a similar spirit of reverence and revision, Lena Waithe, the Emmy-winning writer and actor (“Master of None”), is producing a 10-episode TV comedy sequel, debuting Tuesday on BET. Also titled “Boomerang,” the series follows Marcus and Angela’s daughter Simone (Tetona Jackson) and Jacqueline’s son Bryson (Tequan Richmond) as they carve out spaces for themselves professionally within their parents’ world of advertising and in the larger social landscape of Atlanta. Berry joined Waithe, who was only 8 when “Boomerang” came out in 1992, as an executive producer.

Unlike the movie, the series has both a male and female lead, while also offering more nuanced stories about religion, mental illness and sexuality. In this way, the new “Boomerang” is more in line with modern black millennial comedies like “Insecure” or “Atlanta,” but with Waithe’s experimental aesthetic familiar to fans of “Master of None” and her Showtime drama “The Chi.”

In a phone interview, Waithe, who wrote the pilot with showrunner Ben Cory Jones (“Underground,” “Insecure”), talked about the 1990s as a particularly inspiring age of African-American comedy, her instinct to protect the legacy of “Boomerang” and her desire to revel in the heterogeneity of black identity. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: Why did you decide to put your own stamp on this really canonical movie from the 1990s?

A: I heard through the grapevine that Paramount and BET greenlit 10 half-hour episodes, with no writers attached. I couldn’t think of anything more basic or simple than that. So I tried to be the opposite and I said to myself, “Why not do something fresh and interesting?”

Q: Is that when Halle Berry got involved?

A: That’s when the stars aligned. I was already thinking about “Boomerang” when I went to the GLADD (Media) Awards and Halle Berry presented me with an award for the “Thanksgiving” episode (of “Masters of None”; Waithe also won an Emmy for writing that episode). So we talked backstage about them making it into a TV show. I told her “I’m thinking about raising my hand to make sure this doesn’t get messed up,” and I asked if she would be down to executive produce to make sure it was legit. She said, “Yeah, I’d love to work with you.” When we jumped on the phone later, she told me “Don’t try to remake what we did. You can’t do that. That was a miracle. You guys have to create a new miracle.”

Q: So how did you go about doing that?

A: The only thing I could think of to not rehash it was to go with their children. I kept thinking about Marcus and Angela as they walk into the sunset at the end of the movie to that great (Babyface and) Toni Braxton song, “Give You My Heart,” and I was like “What happens to them?” They get married, have a kid, live the American Dream so to speak. And then I was like, “Who was that kid? Who does that kid grow up to be?”

I started to go deeper into what it means to be young and black and all that goes with that. And I also thought of Jacqueline’s kid, but we don’t know who the father is because she was a rolling stone. The thing about those characters, Jacqueline and Angela but specifically Marcus, is that all the things that make them iconic also make them not such great parents. Marcus Graham is a narcissist. Jacqueline was kind of crazy. Angela was this girl chasing rainbows.

Rather than idolize the characters, why not look at them through a realistic lens, so to speak? Then I realized my characters would be 26 years old — that’s how long ago the movie came out. You are kind of distancing yourself from your parents at 26 and trying to figure out who you are, and also rejecting everything that your parents told you that you are, that you would be. But by the time you get to the second episode, you also realize that these are just young black people trying to figure out their lives, which is really what we wanted to go for. So even if you’ve never seen the movie, you can appreciate the show and see the subtle nuances through which we pay tribute to the original. But we are also trying to create our own lane.

Q: How did you differentiate your show from the other TV comedies on now that also focus on black millennials, like “Atlanta,” “Dear White People” and “Insecure”?

A: I think the movie was smart to have characters from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Marcus is making good money, but Tyler isn’t. They are homies and represent different kinds of black men. The same for Angela; her apartment is hippie, but we imagine that Jacqueline’s place is probably cold, quiet and empty. So I really want to draw from those characters, create interesting ones around their children, and show variations of black identity. I was very much informed by “Atlanta.” I think a lot of us are. And “Master of None,” where we also will go into dark places. The “Thanksgiving” episode definitely goes in and out of that, but also is comedic.

Q: But your version of Atlanta feels so different than Donald Glover’s.

A: I can’t ignore the fact that Simone grew up with a little bit of money in her pocket. We’re not going into the neighborhood Earn and Paper Boi go into. But Simone’s friend Tia (Lala Milan did not (have money) and she’s someone who’s going to have to hustle. And then there’s Crystal (Brittany Inge, who is also from a working class family and resents Simone a little in terms of how things are given to her. But at the end of the day, they’re all black women and are all facing the same issues. My favorite character is Ari (Leland Martin), who is fluid and sometimes dates girls, sometimes deals with guys. And we don’t force the issue — there are no PSAs happening. He’s just a guy who’s masculine and also not afraid to take risks, in terms of his fashion and lifestyle.

Some people will say, “That’s not my version of Atlanta.” That’s fair, everybody has a different experience of their city. But Atlanta is so fresh and so vibrant, and while filming there, I saw young black people making their own way. They’re not asking permission. So we really tried to capture the young, black, professional version of Atlanta, and be respectful of that.

Q: What aspects unique to their generation were you trying to show?

A: As a 34-year-old, I’m not that much older than a 26-year-old. But they still grew up with pressures that I didn’t have to deal with — have a stranger attack a choice that you make, or judge you if they saw something you said on Twitter. They also feel like their lives are in even more in danger. Police have always been brutal to African-Americans, but I think it’s even more blatant for this generation. It’s a fear they have when they walk out their door every day. But also a determination that says, “Let me see the world before I die.” That’s more present in this generation, even more so than mine. It’s stressful to be young and black.

Q: Any cameos? Are we going to see Halle or Robin?

A: I won’t say “No.” But I don’t (want viewers to) look for that. If you are, I didn’t do my job well.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/arts/television/boomerang-bet-lena-waithe.html" id="97414246-8238-35a9-ae9e-aa797abcc530">The New York Times</a>.

When “Boomerang” came out in 1992, it was both an anomaly and a bit of a relief.

'Boomerang' Returns, as a BET Comedy

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Salamishah Tillet

Articles written by the author

New Face for 30 Real-Life Characters

One fateful night with Donny Hathaway

A 'Native Son' Reimagined, With James Baldwin in Mind

'Boomerang' Returns, as a BET Comedy