Black Poetry Theatre: Tend to Your Own House

In 1968, Johnny Taylor, the famed “Philosopher of Soul,” pondered a musical question for the ages: “Who’s making love to your old lady / while you were out making love?” Though deceptively simple on its surface, the query reminds us that karma’s always watching, and that the low-down inevitably returns to its point of origin. In the latest of Black Poetry Theatre’s “Flip the Script” series of plays in progress, Lee Chapman, K.D. Lambert, Nakita Jay, and company co-founder Dasan Ahanu update a quartet of one-acts from 1904 to 1923. In them, gossip’s verbal swordplay, either in allegations of infidelity or infidelity in fact, amuses the wicked—until, that is, the blade turns in a different direction. Source material includes How He Lied to Her Husband, George Bernard Shaw’s brazen, self-penned satire of his own Candida, the character assassination in Chicago feminist Alice Gerstenberg’s He Said and She Said, and Ferenc Molnar’s study in subterfuge, A Matter of Husbands. Tickets are $15 at The ArtsCenter. —Byron Woods