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Eugenia J. Sweeney's Collards & Caviar theater company serves up a provocative Nashville premiere for its first 2009 offering. It's New York City in the 1980s, where an African-American police officer collars a white car thief who tries to befriend, then bribe, his captor. When those gambits fail, the thug unleashes a barrage of intense and sickeningly offensive racial epithets, which push the cop fatally beyond the boundaries of his duty. Some 20 years ago, the New York Times called Dennis McIntyre's play "inflammatory and flawed," while praising its author as a "white playwright who can write...piercingly of black rage and injustice." McIntyre, the creator of other controversial stage dramas plus the 1990 film State of Grace--which probed gritty criminality via noteworthy if extreme performances by Sean Penn, Ed Harris and Gary Oldman--died prematurely that same year at the age of 47. Director Sweeney's cast features Matt Bolton, Latoya Gardner, Tobyus L. Green, Elliott Robinson, John Wiggins and Bret Wilson.
Fri., June 12; Sat., June 13; Sun., June 14, 2009
Fri., June 12; Sat., June 13; Sun., June 14, 2009
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