at Exit on Taylor
After a stellar presentation of Suzan-Lori Parks's "Pickling Jar" at its Risk Is This festival last year, Cutting Ball takes on her highly experimental and rarely performed full-length Death of the Last Black Man. Now, we can't figure out why we don't see more of Parks's work around here (Topdog/Underdog was her last play at Best of Broadway)--after all, Tony "Angels in America" Kushner calls her "the greatest playwright writing in the English language today," and "Pickling Jar" caught the attention of the city's top theater critics. So Death of the Last Black Man, which follows a black man who dies over and over again yet keeps returning to the woman he loves as a metaphor for the black experience (to put it very generally), has the potential to be one of the highlights of the fringe theater scene, presented by one of a small handful of companies that has the gumption to bring us truly groundbreaking work.
Playing through June 24

Photo of Myers Clark and Allison L. Payne by Rob Melrose.

The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World