Powered by Google
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
News
Music
Movies
Food
Life
Arts + Books
Rec Room
Moonsigns
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Personals
Adult Personals
Classifieds
Adult Classifieds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
stuff@night
FNX Radio
Band Guide
MassWeb Printing
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About Us
Contact Us
Advertise With Us
Work For Us
Newsletter
RSS Feeds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Webmaster
Archives



sponsored links
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
PassionShop.com
Sex Toys - Adult  DVDs - Sexy  Lingerie


Street theater
Kia Corthron on Breath, Boom
BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

Kia Corthron’s dramas might be the closest contemporary theater comes to the X Games. "I am most excited by theater that takes risks and takes us to worlds we don’t usually see and in thinking about things we don’t usually think about," the playwright points out. Breath, Boom, which gets its Boston premiere next Friday from the Huntington Theatre Company, indeed takes us to a world we don’t usually see: it’s a portrait of girl gang members behind bars and on the street.

"Partly because I would get bored, I can’t write plays where the audience can sit back and let it wash over them," says Corthron over the phone from Kentucky, where her latest, slide, glide the slippery slope, is getting its world premiere at the annual Humana Festival of New American Plays. "I think of it as writing a world and inviting the audience in. They have to actually participate and step into it. Anyone can come in, no matter where they’re from, but by the same token, you can cross your arms and say, ‘I don’t get it.’ You can decide you don’t want to accept the invitation." Corthron has been sending out a lot of her invitations lately. The Venus de Milo Is Armed, a play about land mines, is currently having its world premiere at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival.

Breath, Boom, which was commissioned by London’s Royal Court Theatre, where it premiered in 2000, chronicles the life of Prix, an African-American New Yorker. We meet her when she is just 16 and already an "original gangsta." Streetwise and brassy, Prix has endured trauma and disappointment, to say the least, at the hands of family and friends. But she possesses a poetic temperament that surfaces when she talks about her love for fireworks. It’s a fascination also felt by Corthron, who says that it allowed her to "fuse Prix with a passion."

For the most part, however, the play’s tough gals are based on inmates whom the 41-year-old Corthron met when she taught a playwriting workshop (she holds an MFA from Columbia) at Riker’s Island. "The misogyny of greater society is intensified in [prison]. They’re girls who have been, for lack of a better word, castrated from their power but who had a lot of power on the outside. What I found out is, they were complete bad-ass women, but if you said anything the least affectionate to them, they would completely melt into little girls." Corthron herself speaks in a disarmingly high-pitched voice and is prone to bursts of girlish giggling.

In addition to the time at Riker’s, the playwright developed her characters through diligent research, relying particularly on journalist Gini Sikes’s 8 Ball Chicks. "I often tell people that Breath, Boom is a Disney version. If I really wrote true reality, it would be so graphic that no one would be able to take it. But I’m still not going to make it comfortable for the audience. I’ve actually softened it, and by softening it there are a thousand issues in there. I created it so that the audience can hear it, but some still won’t listen because it’s too much. If I lose somebody and they walk out thinking differently, then I’ve actually been successful with that person."

Corthron has in fact been criticized for cramming too many issues into a single play, but it’s all part of her agenda. And she’s mindful to weave her socio-political concerns with a thread of optimism, a cue she takes from Brazilian director Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed. "He says if you leave an audience in despair, it’s hard for them to then act. They’re left feeling that there’s nothing they can do. I always try to leave off with some remnant of hope."

Breath, Boom will be presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre, 264 Huntington Avenue, March 7 through April 6. Tickets are $14 to $64, or "pay your age" for patrons 35 and under. Call (617) 266-0800.

Issue Date: February 27 - March 6, 2003

Back to the Editors' picks table of contents.

 









about the phoenix |  advertising info |  Webmaster |  work for us
Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group