"Seven women confront their hair and themselves" in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant in Supernatural: The Play, which launches an every-Sunday summer run July 13 at Los Angeles's Chromolume Theatre at the Attic, 5429 W. Washington Blvd.
Team-created by Audrey Kelley, Gilda Rogers and Candace Kelley, the play debuted at the Players Theater Off-Broadway last year with In Living Color's Kim Coles in the cast. It explores through seven characters the cultural dilemmas faced by black women confronting conflicting urges and pressures to style their hair naturally--and to do the opposite. Supernatural "takes you front and center to a natural hair meetup" where the women bare their souls and talk about how their "hair journeys" have helped make them who they are.
The event is no imaginative stretch. As of this writing, a Google search for "natural hair meetup" produces over a million results.
Five-time Emmy nominee Candace Kelley is a "(super)natural" for the project. A writer, TV reporter, documentarian, teacher of Natural Hair workshops, and author of the book Coif Cuisine: Natural Hair Recipes and Side Dishes for the Natural Hair & Now, Kelley spent years collecting the hair stories that inspired Supernatural. Previously she wrote and produced the film Missing and co-wrote and produced the film Kosher, about an Orthodox Jewish man who became a Pentecostal pastor of an African-American church in Manalapan, NJ.
Structured mostly as a series of monologues, the play takes place at a Brooklyn hair meetup where, as a Madame Noire reviewer Zahra put it, the women "laugh, lament, reminisce, and sashay" through stories of their personal journeys--racial identity, family, sexuality, a battle with cancer, and so on. "Ergo, this is not a thorny 'b!+ch session' or a melodramatic freedom fight."
Supernatural runs every Sunday from July 13 through September 28, 2014.
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