The subjects of the play are black, queer women. The performers include (clockwise from lower left) Jalayna Carter, Kamari Bright, Naa Akua, Simone Dawson, and Ebo Barton. JAYCEE HOLMES
Early in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, the narrator—an unidentified black man—describes a brutal encounter on a street. The narrator bumps into a stranger, and the stranger, who is white, and tall, with blue eyes and blond hair, curses him. The narrator then seizes the “tall blond man,” head-butts him, kicks him, and demands an apology. But the white man refuses to apologize. And just before the narrator slits the man’s throat with a knife, he stops and realizes that the beaten and bleeding man can’t apologize because he can’t see him. Recognition was not mutual. It only went one way: from black man to white man. The white man cannot see the black man because he is socially invisible. He is a nobody.
