August 27, 2004 :: Mama, hold my mule!

I went to see the most ghettoest play in DC last night... "A House Is Not A Home". For those few of you who may not be familiar, it is one of those cheaply written and produced black Gospel plays with familiar themes... cheatin, betrayal, and preaching. I don't know how I got suckered into this one, but I did.

It was supposed to be starring Allen Payne, Miki Howard and Chico DeBarge. We spent the whole play trying to figure out (from the balcony) who was Miki Howard... had she lost a bunch of weight? maybe we forgot what she looked like. Turned out she wasn't even in the damn thing... they had some other random woman playing her part. I should have asked for a refund, they didn't have any signs announcing the understudy or anything. Typical black folk.

The play itself centered around a typical, somewhat fractured black family, with a man and wife and a babymama and a 15 year old daughter who gets pregnant. They included the usual stereotype characters: the ultra loud, ultra ghetto friend of the wife who gets saved at the end, the even louder more ghetto and country friend of the husband who acts the buffoon but is really wise, and the cross dressing dude who plays the uncouth granny. The whole show was so predictable that my companion was literally calling out lines and events before they would happen on the stage. The performers couldn't even keep a straight face through some of the scenes, because they were laughing at the stupidity just as much as the audience.

The part that pissed me off the most, though, was toward the end when another one of the husband's friends went off on a 15 minute tangent that had nothing to do with the story and everything to do with preaching to the audience. I don't know about you, but I don't usually pay.... well, I'm ashamed to admit how much I paid for the ticket, but I said I'll be damned if they start passin around collection plates too! Seemed like he was about to do an invitation to join the church, only it wasn't a church, it was the Lincoln Theater. I don't mind having religious themes, but if I want church, I'll go to church. Until then, let me be the heathen that I am.

posted by Rainmayun at 2:22 PM -