Six Short Plays by Black Women, at Katselas Theatre Company

She's encircled by an ensemble of female mourners (Michelle Flowers, Perrine, Lee Sherman and Tamika Simpkins) who recite the imagined anguish of black mothers who lost their sons to the ravages of bigotry and/or police violence: from Emmett Till to Amadou Diallo to Trayvon Martin.

Penelope Lowder's The Follicle Prison War unfolds in a hair salon during civil unrest in L.A. — circumstances that restrict the time during which movie star Dawn Fantasta (Lee Sherman) can purchase hair extensions that do what ethnically black hair doesn't: flow to one side or another when one tosses one's head. The store's Mephistophelian proprietor, Melanie Hawker (Kitu), also is trying to fob skin-whitening cream onto poor, war-torn Dawn. The war actually is being fought in Dawn's soul between urges to be black and urges to boost her career by being "racially ambiguous."

PHOTOS COURTESY OF BWSOTU

Michelle Flowers, left, Lee Sherman and Tamika Simpkins in Ritual by Tanya Alexander-Henderson

Lony'e Perrine, left, and Kila Kitu in Evolutionary

Location Info

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Skylight Theater

1816 1/2 N. Vermont Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90027

Category: Theaters

Region: Los Feliz

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More About

• Penelope Lowder
• Lony'e Perrine
• Lee Sherman
• Racial Issues
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

The former urge is reinforced by a trio of black-identity-goading Goddesses (Flowers, Perrine and Simpkins). The production's delight, in Cahrr's staging, is seeing Sherman's Dawn so comedically, emotionally and physically wrenched between the nobility of being black and the temptation of washing that black right out of her skin. Her eyes follow that little jar of skin whitener, like manna from heaven, while the rest of her body tears against it in the cartoon tug and pull of a woman versus herself.

The bill also includes Sigrid Gilmer's Black Simulacra, a very funny parody of black "types" found in movies, and Tanya Alexander-Henderson's poetical-meditative Ritual.

Despite living in one of the most multicultural cities in the nation, we remain woefully segregated, and that segregation was evident in the theater, where I was one of the few white people in attendance. Equally woeful is how our misunderstanding of each other comes from prepackaged media images.

The beauty of this effort is how it comes at you without packaging. In poetry and sketch comedy, it serves up the raw anxieties and psyches of lives being lived. And that's terribly important to see and to feel in a living space like the theater, if we want to know anything at all about our city and the people who occupy it.

BLACK WOMEN: STATE OF THE UNION — TAKING FLIGHT | Plays by Sigrid Gilmer, Lisa B. Thompson, Kellie Dantzler, Tanya Alexander-Henderson and Penelope Lowder | Presented by Katselas Theatre Company and BWSOTU at Skylight Theatre, 1816 Vermont Ave., Hlywd. | Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; through Nov. 18 | (702) 582-8587 | ktctickets.com