by Tanya Barfield
Directed by Bobby Bermea
Profile Theatre, April 2016
As Interim Artistic Director, Lauren served as the line producer for this production. She was responsible for attending production meetings, working closely with the Production Manager to balance artistic vision with budgetary realities, attending rehearsals to monitor progress on the production, as well as offering outside artistic perspective and feedback to the Director. She also worked with the Director to manage the creative team through the tech and dress process, ultimately helping all of the artists come together and realize their complex artistic vision. The production was met with both critical acclaim and ardent audience response.
Tanya Barfield’s expansive script presents a balancing act of threads, histories, and ideas that director Bobby Bermea and team field with impressive grace.
– Joshua Amerson, Portland Mercury
Under Bobby Bermea’s taut direction, Mack and Rue create intense and vital drama from this argumentative cultural construct. Mack creates a conflicted character through a slow seethe, embracing the nuances of self-repression and its varieties of expression, from sardonic humor to clipped cadence to occasional revelations of genuine anguish. Rue is his agile alter ego, his memory-bank, his rawer and more honest emotional self, the stirring in the blood that Lewis can’t extinguish. He is a ghost, and in a sense the realest part of Lewis: his foundation and his anchor.
– Bob Hicks, ArtsWatch
Barfield has crafted a play so honed and refined that every word is set perfectly in place and leads to the next grouping logically, like long-form poetry or a symphony.
-Meg Curell, edge media
This play was beyond impactful for me. Witnessing the brilliant performances of actors, Victor Mack and Seth Rue, directed by Bobby Bermea, grapple with the complex issues that racism ensnares in all of us – oppressed and oppressor – moved me toward a clearer understanding of racism and internalized racism than I have ever encountered
-Patron Email
Lauren Bloom Hanover 