‘The Realness’ Captures Hip Hop Scene

Cambryelle Getter and Joseph Brown in The Realness. Photo by Jenny Plevin.

The third annual Milwaukee Black Theatre Festival runs through Aug. 25 at the Marcus Performing Arts Center, bursting with panels and full productions that demonstrate community activity and vitality. I signaled out for reviewer attention something brand new and unknown, The Realness: A Break Beat Play by Idris Goodwin, whose work has been done before here.

Perhaps because of limited budget or the hangover from COVID-19 that all theater is suffering from, this play drew only a pitiful small crowd opening night Thursday. The hip-hop rhythms, the acrobatic arm flails and other evocative gestures demand audience reaction, even participation, and the physicality and contemporary humor within the production need a lively audience regardless of color who recognize the feelings and sounds of the last decades in America.

Goodwin is also a thinking author and playwright consumed with the story opportunities of hip-hop music, movement and language from the 1990s on, with its lasting impact on world culture.

The theatre festival is also doing some historically established work, such as the dramatic prose poem from 1976 that became a celebrated theatrical hit, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf.

But while that is going on through Aug. 25 at the PAC’s Vogel Hall, next door at the Todd Wehr Theater (most familiar as the one-time home of the Milwaukee Rep and the current home of First Stage children’s theater), Goodwin’s The Realness exists as a hip-hop love story bracketed by the assassinations of rap legends Tupac and The Notorious B.I.G. The play is hardly faultless and the cast becomes too wrapped up in the style, but the sense of purpose, energy and self-education drives our attention.

The main character is a would-be writer from the 1990s suburbs who calls himself T.O., rather than the mundane (and easily ridiculed in the black community) Tom. He lies heavily to ingratiate himself into the urban aura and particularly lies to an awesome woman rapper he covets, Prima. The story drags in some other ghetto characters, who spew the gangsta manners and movements of the times, along with serving as amusing stagehands.

Who said hip-hop doesn’t have a sense of humor? Director Denzel Taylor and cast are having grand fun along with some clever meaning in orchestrating these poses and postures. Some in the cast dig deeper than mannerisms to make an impression, but these are engaging mannerisms – and some well-timed music effects in the bargain.

Standing out as Prima in her sassiness and vulnerability is Cambryelle Getter. It is a volcano of a performance that also captures key flamboyant moments of the character’s contradictory nature. Joseph Brown as T.O. has to carry too much of the exposition. He has physical dexterity in his movements and the little boy naivete to carry the love story. But playwright Goodwin thrives in the wry humor of observation (and he sure seems to be most like T.O.) while Brown, in trying to push the story forward, races through many observations that need breathing room. The actor is carrying too much weight and survives because we recognize the pretender in all of us.

Plays like this may have problems, but the ideas need a larger audience. Goodwin’s insights into how hip-hop has evolved since its heyday in the 1990s should speak to a high school audience as well as to the current parents and grandparents who lived through those times.

The Realness: A Break Beat Play is 90 minutes long and runs at 7:30 p.m. Friday to Sunday through Aug. 25 at the Todd Wehr Theater. Related information can be found at the Marcus Center website.

Dominique Paul Noth served for decades as film and drama critic, later senior editor for features at the Milwaukee Journal. You’ll find his blog here and here.