Running After Shadows
Vincent Terrell Durham
City Lights Theater Company
In the middle of his latest Instagram, live-stream “unboxing” as he practically is making love to his just-arrived garlic press and doing a one-man, conga line wearing his new, authentic, red, “America’s Test Kitchen” apron, recent culinary convert Morgan Collins opens one more, unexpected package as his online audience watches with anticipation. The surprise contents he finds with a “What the hell?” reaction open a Pandora’s Box of painful childhood memories and the still, raw pain he carries inside after a lifetime of an absentee father. With the camera still running, thirty-eight-year-old Morgan pages through a diary he kept from the age of nine to thirty-three, searching at the behest of his followers’ onscreen comments to remember at least one, good memory of a father who seemed to do all he could to ignore his only son.
City Lights Theatre Company stages the both delightfully hilarious and deeply moving world premiere of Vincent Terrell Durham’s Running After Shadows. The one-hander features James Arthur M. in the role of a Black, gay, and single Morgan as he brings back to his current consciousness the events and people who shaped — for good and bad — who he is today. The result is at times outrageously funny, at times searingly sad, and in the end both heartbreaking and heartwarming. James Arthur M. — under the astute combination of whimsical, sensitive, and boundary-pushing direction of Aldo Billingslea — with his immediate likeability pulls us in as part of his loyal, online audience and brings us along on a journey that provides him dozens of opportunities to more than prove his stellar acting abilities.
Please continue to Talkin’Broadway for the rest of my review.
Rating: 4 E
Running After Shadows continues through February 8, 202r, in a ninety-minute (no intermission) world-premiere production by City Lights Theater Company, , 529 S. 2nd Street, San Jose. Tickets are available online at www.cltc.org .
Photo Credit: Christian Pizzirani
