Sunset Baby – Location, Tickets, Reviews
Guns are drawn in Dominique Morisseau’s new play, Sunset Baby, but it’s not the fear of a firefight that grips you. Instead, it’s the tense war of words between Nina and her father Kenyatta, a former civil rights revolutionary, that makes the heart pound and occasionally ache at the LAByrinth Theater Company.
Kenyatta (the excellent John Earl Jelks), now a reserved man who shows few signs of his old life as a firebrand Black Power legend, shows up at Nina’s drab apartment to ask for some letters Nina’s recently deceased mother wrote to him. But Nina smells an ulterior motive and can’t look at her father with anything but hate – she still resents Kenyatta for choosing his revolution over Nina’s mother, which triggered the depression and drug addiction that led to her death.
Morisseau is a poetic writer who plumbed the depths of racial unrest in Detroit ’67 at the Public last year. Here she offers a story that mines its beauty from simple familial struggles – ideas of legacy, what it means to be a father, the things we say to wound the ones we love, and the things we hide to protect them. Sunset Baby is as funny and observant as Morisseau’s earlier work, but it’s also the most elegant and restrained story she has penned thus far.
LOCATION
LAByrinth Theater Company
155 Bank Street
New York City
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RUNNING TIME
1 hour and 30 minutes, no intermission
TICKETS
$35.00 (click here for tickets)
DATES
Extended through December 15, 2013
NEWS & REVIEWS
Reviews
New York Times
Yes, Survival’s Important – But Then What?
Theater Mania
Playwright Dominique Morisseau brings a unique perspective on black America to Labyrinth Theater Company.
StageBuddy
Do yourself a favor, put on a coat, and head downtown and catch “Sunset Baby”
News
The Brooklyn Rail
The Past and Future Sunsets of Dominique Morisseau
CAST & CREW
(partial list)
Written by Dominique Morisseau
Directed by Kamilah Forbes
Featuring John Earl Jelks, Harvey Gardner Moore, DeWanda Wise