Sonny Kelly: The Talk
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Durham Fruit Company 305 S Dillard St, Durham, North Carolina 27701
Design by Natalie Nobles
The Talk poster
Many white Americans didn’t know “the talk” existed until Eric Holder mentioned it in a 2013 NAACP speech. The then-Attorney General talked about sitting his own fifteen-year-old son down, after the death of Trayvon Martin, for a conversation that would increase his odds of survival if he were ever stopped by the police. “This was a father-son tradition I hoped would not need to be handed down,” Holder said. ”But as a father who loves his son and who is more knowing in the ways of the world, I had to do this to protect my boy.” In Sonny Kelly’s new one-person show, a coproduction of Bulldog Ensemble Theater and StreetSigns Center for Literature and Performance, the playwright, performer, and dad finds that the information his son needs to survive has radically expanded. It includes the historical, cultural, theoretical, and autobiographical contexts that ground the identity of a person who might otherwise be reduced to a screen on which prejudices, fears, and hatreds are projected. After a three-week run at The Fruit, the show closes with a week at Historic Playmakers Theatre in Chapel Hill. —Byron Woods
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