African-American Marc Bamuthi Joseph, who wrote and performs the break/s, the fourth full-length play at this year's 32nd annual Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theater of Louisville, sets out to tell us what hip-hop is. He does this through a dramatically delivered but disjointed account of his own life as he bounces around the wooden platform that is his stage, sensationally contorting his body and propelling himself hypnotically to the monotonous beat. The man is a mesmerizing dancer. "Hip-hop's story," he says at one point, "is the choice to commit to one side or the other, to get so close to the edge you can smell the after death. In hip-hop, it smells like crisco and sulfur because if you don't commit to spinnin' on yo' head, you will break your neck. I keep dreamin' of being held up by white lines getting high off the wrong man's respect." Certainly, the edginess is there in Joseph's stage gyrations.
Viewpoints will surely differ, but for this reviewer, the large claims made for the importance of this urban ghetto phenomenon seems inflated. And Joseph's personal history -- a teaching career that has taken him throughout the world, his fathering a son who's half Chinese, his fear of commitment to a white girlfriend who wants to marry him, a drug-addled interview with rapper jay-z in Atlanta when Joseph was an entertainment reporter, and a surreal encounter in Minneapolis with Prince that includes the Mona Lisa -- is not exactly riveting. The mundane is not transformed into the exotic.
