Written by Tanya Barfield, Directed by Darryl V. Jones, Prod. by Aurora Theatre Company.
Intimate. Intrepid. Inspired.
Tanya Barfield’s two-man play puts Lewis, a high-achieving Black mathematics professor, in conversation with three generations of his ancestors over the course of a fevered dream or night of sleepless delusion as he wrestles with his own sense of self and cultural identity. Estranged from his white wife, who accuses him of being out of touch with his heritage for refusing to attend the Million Man March, Lewis must journey through the past in order to determine his future. The ancestral visitations he receives call upon joy and pain, suffering and resiliency, music and song to situate Lewis in a long lineage of Black men in America from enslavement and Jim Crow to Black Power.
Sound Design by Ray Archie of Brooklyn Sound Lab
REVIEWS:
- “Aurora Theatre’s provocative, sensitive ‘Blue Door’ details a Black man’s struggles” – Local News Matters
- ‘Blue Door’ opens onto Black men’s complex life – 48 Hills
- Rousing, sensitive ‘Blue Door’ details a Black man’s struggles – Piedmont Exedra
- ‘Blue Door’ brilliantly worms out the mundane intricacies of Black self-hatred — 48 Hills
- “BLUE DOOR” ASKS “WHO AM I?” & FINDS OUT — Theatrius
- An African American math professor struggles with alienation from his familial and racial heritage in ‘Blue Door’ — Berkeleyside
- accentuated by dramatic underscoring in Ray Archie’s sound design — Mercury News
