UMS Virtual Production and Post-show Conversation with Wendell Pierce, Charlie Robinson, James Anthony Tyler, and Joe Cacaci

FREE, Register to receive YouTube links

Berkshire Playwrights Lab and the Mahaiwe co-present a YouTube screening of James Anthony Tyler’s Some Old Black Man, starring Wendell Pierce and Charlie Robinson. The performance will be followed by a live conversation on YouTube with the actors, the playwright, and director Joe Cacaci. The production is made available through the University Musical Society (UMS), in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Some Old Black Man was first produced by Berkshire Playwrights Lab in 2015 as a staged reading at the Mahaiwe. In 2017 BPL gave the play a full production at St. James Place, which was subsequently staged at 59E59 Theaters in New York City in 2018.

Some Old Black Man frames racial prejudice with bold probity rarely confronted and dramatized. In the play, Calvin Jones (Pierce), a hip, coolly intellectual African-American college professor, moves his 82-year-old ailing but doggedly independent father, Donald Jones (Robinson), from Greenwald, Mississippi, into his Harlem penthouse. An argument over what to eat for breakfast turns into a generational clash over race, class, and opportunity.