That was in 2009, and the play was an early version of “Thoughts of a Colored Man.” Melding poetry and dialogue, it traces a day in the lives of seven men in Bed-Stuy, where Scott now lives, with his wife and daughter.
#Thoughts of a colored man tickets full#
We can be ourselves, and we can be full in our Blackness.” He staged the play in a black-box theatre and sold all the tickets within two hours, at the rec center. He read Shakespeare, Mamet, Ibsen, but “I didn’t see myself reflected in the plays.” In his sophomore year, he said to a friend, “I’m going to write us something, so we don’t have to change how we speak. “I thought, I’ll break in with acting, then people will find out that I can write, too,” he said.
He had just been cut from the basketball team, so he filled his new free time at slams, competing against adults and “sharpening my sword.”īy the time he got to Frostburg State University, in Maryland, he had decided to study theatre. This can’t be my one-and-done!” A teacher told him to study “Def Poetry Jam,” and months later he returned to the club scene. “Then that competitive nature kicked in-the athlete came out. I forgot my poem onstage.” He told himself that he was done with poetry. When he was fifteen, his older sister’s boyfriend invited him to a poetry slam. As an adolescent living in the Pomonok housing project, he started writing poetry “as an escape,” he recalled. He had just left a rehearsal in midtown and was lurching through traffic in a black S.U.V., wearing green Nikes and a denim jacket with a pin that read “ BLACK GENIUS.”
“It’s hard to invite people to spaces where they don’t see themselves.” Now that he’s a newly minted Broadway playwright-his play “Thoughts of a Colored Man” opened last week, at the Golden-Scott is trying to change that. “It did not occur to me that stuff on Broadway was for me,” he said the other day. The show was “Wicked,” and the ticket was a birthday gift. Keenan Scott II grew up in Flushing, Queens, but didn’t see his first Broadway show until he was in his twenties. Keenan Scott II Illustration by João Fazenda
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