Rep Stage Continues 19th Season with Yellowman

Rep Stage, the professional Equity theatre in residence at Howard Community College (HCC), continues its 19th season with "Yellowman," Dael Orlandersmith's tragic, beautifully drawn love story about two childhood friends who struggle with issues of race, class and family loyalties in the complex and idiosyncratic Gullah community in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Helen Hayes Award winner Kasi Campbell directs Rep newcomers Kelly Renee Armstrong (Alma) and Jon Odom (Eugene) in this compelling and poetic story, which was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Alma and Eugene have known each other since they were young children. As their friendship blossoms into love, Alma struggles to free herself from her mother's poverty and alcoholism, while Eugene must contend with the legacy of being "yellow" - lighter-skinned than Alma - and his brutal and unforgiving father. Alternately joyous and harrowing, the play emerges as a powerful examination of the racial tensions that fracture communities and individual lives. "Yellowman" opens February 8 with a limited run through February 26, 2012, in the Studio Theatre of the Horowitz Visual and Performing Arts Center (HVPA) on the campus of HCC.

"'Yellowman' tackles the subject of received intra-racial prejudices not through the lens of social/political agenda, but through the lens of the heart," says director Kasi Campbell. "And it is all the more powerful in its exploration of the painful legacy of 'colorism' because the young people in the love story burst with passion, baring their souls so directly to the audience."

"My mother was from South Carolina, and 'Yellowman' is very, very, loosely based on a family down there," said Orlandersmith in an interview with Kentucky Public Television's "American Life." "When I was a kid my mother would send me down in the summer. And there was this family that used to interbreed to keep the light skin going. Yellow - 'high yellow' - was a nasty term for lighter-skinned black people. When the '60s rolled around, the Black Power movement started in this particular region in the South and in other places as well. I remember people who were extremely dark and extremely light getting together simply because it was a taboo, and you could not do it before. 'Yellowman' is loosely based on this community, on this family, when the '60s rolled around. There was a bust-out of stuff. It became a catalyst for me to look at internal racism - the rift between light-skinned people and dark-skinned people, which has its roots in slavery."

In his review of "Yellowman," New York Times writer Ben Brantley called the play a "hard and piercing drama" with "a poet's gift for building imagery by stealthy repetition. Her use of sensory detail - in describing the swing of a walk, the lilt of a laugh, the shimmer of sweat on flesh - is especially incisive, befitting a play in which the term 'skin deep' takes on new resonance."