Chicago Adult Entertainment: NY Review: ‘The Scottsboro Boys’

… The Scottsboro Boys” is based on a monstrous transgression of justice in Alabama in 1931, when nine young black men riding the rails were falsely accused of gang rape by two white prostitutes. The promising concept is to tell the story as a minstrel show. This once highly popular form of entertainment was, of course, also severely racist. Letting African-American characters appropriate it to tell a story of injustice could be seriously subversive. In Thompson’s hands, however, the conflict between the black performers, who want to tell the truth, and the white Interlocutor, who wants a traditional presentation, is underutilized, and Stroman’s direction compounds the problem by underplaying it. The writing for the two end men, who portray a gallery of racist power holders, is merely obvious rather than scabrously humorous. Most damaging, we don’t know why the story is being told. Nothing new is being said about the South’s racist history, at least not until that failed skin graft of an ending.

See the full article from “Back Stage”