Thoughts of a Colored Man Returns Home

For the second and final show of the Spring 2023 semester, Frostburg State University’s Department of Theatre and Dance is proud to announce that Thoughts of a Colored Man will be returning back to its roots.

Keenan Scott II is a Frostburg alumnus that graduated in 2009. He’s a poet, a playwright, an actor, a director, and a producer of original work. He started working on Thoughts of a Colored Man while taking Modern American Drama as a sophomore on campus, a poet trying to be a playwright who lived in Frederick Hall. According to Scott when speaking to a class of students who currently take Modern American Playwrights (the renamed class the alumnus took years ago), not a lot of people knew what he had in the works. One of the first plays that were announced to take the Broadway stage when the lights came back up after the Covid-19 pandemic, Scott claims that he was inspired by Shakespeare’s literature and Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf. 

“I was already coming from a background and being a lover of hip-hop where I always heard my community represented. I always saw my community when it came to the hip-hop culture,” he explained to the class. “All I saw was myself or my family. But when it came to plays, it wasn’t quite the same.” This became the origin of the rough drafts for Thoughts of a Colored Man.

Sam Appiah (Love) isn’t the only cast member that believes that everyone should come out to see this show. When questioned as to why people should take time to actually see the production, he said, “People should come see the show because of the mad talented cast we have, mad talented crew, and to just make yourself aware of some of the issues we’re going to talk about.” Brandon Chase (Depression), a 2018 alum of Frostburg and Scott’s protegé followed up by saying, “Seeing seven different men on stage and then realizing that they are actually one person–that we all experience these things–it’s easier to see that. So I believe that people should come and see that our experiences are no different than their own.” 

Though the title of the play may suggest otherwise to some, all the members agree that there is no exact target audience, but rather an audience who is willing to learn and educate themselves. “Something like this (Scott’s play) isn’t often seen on stage and also the interaction we have with the audience is a very refreshing take on the subject matter,” Tekle Ghebremeschel (Happiness) answers the question about a target audience. “It’s also a very powerful subject matter to be addressing.” Jacob Bryant (Lust) says that the target audience is “black men that feel all kinds of emotions. But it’s more just a show to understand how we all think, and I think that’s probably what the target and the goal is: it’s to get people to understand how we think and how we feel as people. So it’s not really just about as black men, you’ll see a lot of women in the audience, a lot of guys in the audience and they may not be of color but they’ll relate to it.”

“At the end of the day, we all bleed red,” Bryant states, “and we are all the same inside. We all feel these emotions, we all feel all seven of these emotions. I’m really excited for people to understand it.”

Tickets are available at https://frostburgtix.universitytickets.com/?cid=169 or by calling the FSU Department of Theatre and Dance at (301)687-4145, Monday through Friday from 8:30 am-3:30 pm. Show dates include April 14th, 15th, 20th, 21st, and 22nd at 7:30 pm with a matinee showing on April 15th at 2:00 pm.