Brown Boy Mad

Sekou Writes was one of three writer-performers in a spoken word theater production that was featured in the 2003 New York International Fringe Festival. After that journey ended, Sekou wrote a derivative script for a one-man show, but he never produced it and the project was shelved.

In November of 2019, after seeing the return of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf at The Public Theater, Sekou unearthed the script, rewrote it, renamed it BROWN BOY MAD, and introduced it to Blackboard Plays, a New York-based nonprofit which connects playwrights with actors who can breathe life into their work. Encouraged, Sekou rewrote the script again and brought it with him to Nashville.

In January of 2020, after Sekou completed a couple of lectures about Internal Alchemy (converting racial rage into creative energy) at Fisk University, Professor Persephone Felder-Fentress granted him permission to become an unofficial artist-in-residence at Fisk to develop his play with the help of the Fisk University Stagecrafters.

The result was a staged reading of BROWN BOY MAD in Fisk University’s Little Theater on Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2020 — the same day and month that Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012.

Best described as a choreopoem, BROWN BOY MAD incorporates elements of film, song, poetry, and even the perspectives of the student actors in an attempt to describe some of the author’s real-life interactions with race and micro-aggressions in “post-racial” America.