Review Young & Associates Pllc Gentry Drive Douglasville Ga
By David Greenham
Immature Nerds of Color feels like a bit of an experiment, and it is the kind of creative research that we should promise will keep.
Young Nerds of Colour, arranged by Melinda Lopez. Directed past Dawn M. Simmons. Original music composition by Nona Hendryx. Scenic design by Shelley Barish. Costume pattern by Rachel Padula-Shufelt. Lighting design by Andrea Sofia Sala. Produced as part of the Brit d'Arbeloff Catalyst Collaborative@MIT by Underground Railway Theater at Central Square Theater, Cambridge, through March 20.
The more than lx BIPOC scientists and mathematicians interviewed to create Immature Nerds of Color all agree on 1 thing: they all have heard some version of the annotate "You're non like the rest of them." Well-significant white people — and we know who we are — are inclined to effort to praise Black and Dark-brown individuals by lifting them out of their cultural context. Immunologist Ann-Harper Jones (Kortney Adams) emphatically wants to know just what "the rest of them" ways. "Do you mean my family?"
The implicit and explicit bias against Black and Brown people in mathematics and science is writ big in Melinda Lopez's compilation script.
Dr. DC Lopez (Daniel Rios Jr.) shares a code-switching story. He was preparing an important paper and, in the first sentence, nigh to place himself as a Colombian astrophysicist. His counselor recommended removing the identifier Colombian because it might trigger the reader's biases. That served as a turning point; he began to examine the "invisible forces" that kept him from succeeding in his subject field at the same pace as others.
National Medal of Scientific discipline winner Dr. Sylvester James Gates Jr. (James Ricardo Milord) recalls coming to MIT in 1969 because Boston was hailed equally an enlightened city: it had been deemed the Athens of America. Instead, the scientist found that information technology was "the near overtly racist identify I had ever lived, up to that bespeak in my life."
And it'due south not just white people who are the problem. Professor Portia Long (Lindsey McWhorter) tells the audience, "My … my mom still calls me and says, 'You lot sound too blackness on the phone, then, you know, you need to … change that upward a little chip.'"
At a time that lodge is being forced to confront so many of its biases in so many areas of our lives, information technology is valuable to be reminded of the prejudices that exist in science and mathematics. Long (McWhorter) asks, "Why is information technology that Blackness talent is always considered an anomaly and not the normal?" It'southward a primal question that science and math professionals should examine. Subsequently all, she adds, "Science makes the invisible visible."
Immature Nerds of Color takes an ambitious stride toward the start of a necessary and of import conversation. The company of half dozen actors — Karina Beleno Carney and Alison Yueming Qu, along with Adams, McWhorter, Milord, and Rios Jr. — accept on the roles of interviewees as well as sharing the ideas of others in the give-and-take.
Playwright/arranger Lopez has cleaved the evening's stories into virtually 15 thematically focused scenes. Composer Nona Hendryx (who some may know as a member of the funk/disco group Labelle) has created a hybrid soundscape that includes gospel, jazz, and funk. The performers sing equally they weave through their episodes.
While information technology's filled with interesting stories and some wonderful original music, Immature Nerds of Color struggles at times with its own theatrical identity. The structure (specially transitions) is blurry in places. There is no clear intellectual or emotional build to the stories or points of view as they accrue. Granted, the plot is non intended to be linear, simply it is sometimes a struggle to make sense of the shifting contexts, to comfortably follow each character's perspective.
Some of the lack of clarity must fall at the feet of director Dawn K. Simmons, who endeavors to proceed the actors moving — more like pulsating — through the space. She is intermittently successful at this: rushing performers about the stage is more than distracting than it is illuminating. However, Shelley Barish'south set design may also contribute to the staging's lack of clarity: there'due south a circular ramped platform and ii giant genome strands. It's visually interesting, but ambiguous. Where in the world are nosotros? The characters often refer to piece of work in "the lab," but in the play they exist in an abstract setting. The suggestion is that science floats free of whatever kind of concrete location. Thus Simmons is forced to come up with a course of conceptual choreography that works against the nuanced ebb and period that powerful storytelling demands.
Information technology must have been a Herculean — or given the subject matter, maybe Pythagorean — effort to sift through more threescore interviews and whittle all that cloth downward to a 75-minute play. Only, admirable as the effort is, Lopez hasn't managed to make Young Nerds of Colour a compelling dramatic feel. Information technology's content to be a phone call to action. Dealing with facts and figures is the currency of these characters' lives. They marvel at ganglion cells, supernovas, and pyrophoric materials.
They also marvel at the incongruity of information technology all. As Dr. D.J. Thomas, Milord says, "I just expect back on information technology and recognize that I think it was a sense of dissonance that this Black guy could be in the same room doing the aforementioned physics problem as them and doing it well."
And as Marvela Haynes, Adams even bites the hand that feeds her: "I know that the color of my peel has nothing to do with the ability to do mathematics, and nonetheless when I wait at the top mathematics departments in the Usa, I tin't help merely notice that MIT, Princeton, Stanford, Harvard, Caltech do non have a single African-American professor."
Immature Nerds of Color feels like a bit of an experiment, and information technology is the kind of creative enquiry that we should hope will go on. We all do good in the attempt — onstage and off- — to make invisible voices visible.
David Greenham is an adjunct lecturer of Drama at the University of Maine at Augusta, and is the executive director of the Maine Arts Commission. He has been a theater artist and arts ambassador in Maine for more than 30 years.
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Source: https://artsfuse.org/250253/theater-review-young-nerds-of-color-making-the-invisible-visible/
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