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Sunset Baby’s Troubled Children of the Revolution
Dominique Morisseau’s play looks at the time after revolutionary fire is reduced to a simmer.
Its story deals with competing poles of activism and cynicism — the grave risks of both softness and hardness in the lives of a former leader in the Black Power movement, his estranged daughter, and her boyfriend — but the combination of Morisseau’s straightforward text and Steve H. Broadnax III’s even-keeled direction renders up a production that’s less theatrical than it is rhetorical. … You didn’t come here cuz you … wanna put your hands on them tens of thousands that my mama’s worth now that she’s dead?” Nina’s cynicism, and the rest of her armor, have been forged by a childhood struggling with her brilliant mother’s descent into addiction, which has at last ended in death. These are meaty, complex questions and intriguing to ponder — Morisseau’s plays often sit atop fascinating historical strata, even if their dramatic construction tends to stick to the middle of the road.
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