![]() ![]() At first resentful and lost, Yolanda gradually gets drawn into five women's wellsprings of millinery self-expression, as her aunt and friends go to church and remember their own mothers and grandmothers. Her mother sends Yolanda south to live with her aunt, Mother Shaw, a hat-wearing, church-going pillar of the community. She gets in with a rough crowd, and her beloved brother ends up dead. Rap-dancing Yolanda, played with urban sass by pretty Chandra Thomas, lives in Brooklyn with her mother and older brother. ![]() Her storyline might be slight, but the spirit of this joyful evening is mighty. Taylor adapted Crowns from Michael Cunningham and Craig Marberry's book of photographs, "Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats," and her play is deeply rooted in black history and the necessity to crown oneself in an inclement world. High hats and low hats, wide hats and show hats - hats to sing in, to frown or flirt in and, above all, hats to praise the Lord in they're all there and then some on the Guthrie stage in Regina Taylor's Crowns, a gloriously celebratory collage of character, culture and gospel. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |