These three short plays that make up the collection BROTHERS, MOTHERS & OTHERS, spilled out quickly. They were written between 1987-89, in the height of the crack era in NYC. My generation in particular was caught off guard by crack. We the “party-hearty people”, used drugs recreationally and to increase the fun. Crack was not about fun. We didn’t see it coming. It was a devastating drug that consumed many people I knew. AFTER THE MARCHING STOPPED and A BROTHERS KISS are both steeped in crack era NYC.
I grew up in an integrated neighborhood and I gravitated towards the black and latino kids. I took on the affectation, the slang, the double knits and AJ’s, I walked with a diddy-bop, I did my best to turn my curls into an afro (It was the 70’s) I did “the Hustle” and all the other dances, I told anyone who’d listen that I was half Puerto Rican. It was a rarified experience.
I was privy to the inside of homes, the food, the banter, the dramas of my friends who came from very different cultures than mine. These experiences have informed all my writing but THE BLACKEYED BROTHERS and AFTER THE MARCHING STOPPED especially speak to the experience of being the minority among groups that are labeled “minorities”.
THE BLACKEYED BROTHERS was my first production and it won the Samuel French Short Play Award. It is set in the early 1970’s at a fresh air fund adjacent summer camp. Anybody who grew up in my neighborhood or a neighborhood like mine, will recognize the spiritual descendants of the DEAD END KIDS who star in this play.
Handball
Tensions in a rapidly gentrifying NYC on a sultry, summer night in 2005. Nine characters, from all walks of life, inhabit a neighborhood Handball Park. Lovers love, players play and dreamers dream. Their fates tied inexorably to the fate of this place. Change is afoot and everyone can feel it. The shifting of power forces one's hand to shocking effect. They say some secrets ought never be told.
THE WRITING ON THE WALL
Starting in probably fifth grade we started learning graffiti lettering in school. It was the superman "S" that was the first graffiti letter that I learned. You needed a moniker and my first one was "Scorpio 94" which was a pretty cool name in 1973. 94 represented my block and Scorpio my sign. There was older Scorpio in the neighborhood and when he found out that I was writing Scorpio as well, he politely asked me to stop and so I did. I started writing SET 94 in Junior high. We'd spend hours with black covered graffiti books and design markers practicing our style. On the streets we used PILOT MARKERS and wide tipped markers known as UNI-WIDES. We would fill them with Flo-Master ink. We wrote on the walls with spray paint, Krylon and Red Devil, that we stole from hardware stores and anyplace else we could. I was into the details of graffiti. I followed the clandestine world of graffiti artists the same way I followed the mets or the Knicks. I'd be excited to see a new piece on the one line by CLIFF 159 or MOSES 147. I actually knew MOSES's brother PATCH 147. These guys were faceless heroes. Eventually I started to meet some of them at NOGA (Nation of Graffiti Artists), a storefront graffiti workshop in my neighborhood. I was lucky enough that in 8th grade a guy who wrote SE 3 was in my junior high school class. He was and is an incredible artist and I wrote SET and he wrote SE so he'd make up styles for me. I was never a virtuoso when it came to graffiti, I wasn't a complete toy but I was more of a graffiti fanboy than a true artist. I never got up like some of my friends. I did go to the train yards and the 1 tunnel and the ghost station but I was still much more enamored with the guys writing COMET and PHASE and STITCH and STAN and STAYHIGH and TRACY and when I'd meet them it was like meeting a rockstar. My throat would tighten, I'd lose the ability to speak, these dudes were legends. By time I got into high school my interest in graffiti waned. By 1975 or so my obsessions became disco music, girls and basketball. I'm not sure why but I lost the graffiti bug. I still play around with letters to this day and to the guys who really did it and still do it I have enormous respect for the craft and also the immense danger that everyone went through to GET UP. THE WRITING ON THE WALL is my first play and it's an attempt at writing about a family that resembled mine and yet really didn’t. It was also an attempt to get underneath the psychology of young graffiti artist. To try and understand the motivation for writing on walls. The first draft was completed in 1985 and to my mind it was the first theater piece that dealt with graffiti. One of the first to deal with any of the hip hop elements. New Line Cinema bought the film rights and I'm still waiting for them to make the film. I have finally published it and it's available here.
Everythings Turning into Beautiful
This play with music takes place late one Christmas Eve in lonely New York City, when a couple of down-on-their-luck songwriting partners, hitless, loveless, and facing their forties, come together for a night of composing and soul-searching. This “musical story” finds Sam and Brenda facing the light of a new day and confronting a practical matter: they don’t want to mess up their friendship or their working relationship. But, when Sam shows up on Brenda’s doorstep wanting to take things to the next level, their partnership is put to the test.
The Flatted Fifth
A would be Jewish film maker searches for love, identity and his Jewish roots in this fast paced look at modern relationships in a multicultural world that was first produced Off Broadway. Now in his twenties and a veteran of street violence and jail, Sonny has an explosive reunion with his childhood friend Ray Diaz, a Puerto Rican poet in drug rehab. With their girlfriends, an African American author of children's books and a sultry English/African trumpet player, Sonny and Ray embark on a B'nai B'rith trip for artists to Israel. They encounter hostile soldiers, sympathetic guides, a nightmarish talk show host, a Hebrew hip hop bartender, Masada, the Wailing Wall and, most poignantly of all, themselves. The last leg of their journey changes each of them forever.
Servy -n- Bernice 4Ever
Bernice, a young black model living in Boston, has fabricated a splendid new background for herself. Having been beaten by a former boyfriend, she sends an urgent message for help to the lover she has not seen in years Servy, a white kid who grew up with her amid the projects around New York's Alphabet City. Servy, fresh out of prison, breaks parole by visiting Bernice. He brings his black friend Scotty with him, and Scotty has a sex fling with Bernice's white roommate Caria. Servy and Bernice's search to rediscover the first innocence of love is complicated by Servy's criminality and Bernice's need to reinvent herself. When they travel back to New York they are each forced to face their demons.