Broadway is building back Blacker

Broadway has almost always been a great place to see a new musical, but when it comes to new American plays, many of the best have not made it there. Producers are trying to change that – and, this season, seem particularly willing to correct one lacuna by putting on an unprecedented number of plays by commercially neglected Black playwrights in the district once known as the Great White Way.

Lynn Nottage, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, is a Black playwright who has not been neglected. Intimate Apparel, her poetic 2003 play set 100 years earlier inspired by her seamstress great-grandmother, only played off-Broadway, but went on to be one of the most-produced dramas this century, while Sweat, her empathetic 2015 drama about a Pennsylvania factory town swallowed up by opioid addiction and racial tensions, became a part of the wider cultural conversation after the election of Donald Trump.

The latter made its Broadway debut in 2017 – and, with its reputation as a prophetic work of art (that still stands up, unlike

Hillbilly Elegy), has been staged all over including Edmonton, Vancouver and Toronto right before the shutdown in 2020.

Clyde’s, Nottage’s latest, now having its world premiere at Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theatre, is a surprise sequel to

Sweat, but has a completely different tone. Set in a truck-stop diner run by a bossfrom-hell named Clyde ( In Treatment’s Uzo Aduba), it is a workplace comedy that focuses on the lives of three formerly incarcerated people working in the kitchen.

Jason (Edmund Donovan), a character from Sweat who perpetrated its most heinous act and who is now covered in white power tattoos, is one. He ends up forming an unlikely alliance with a young Black single mother, Letitia (the absolutely electric Kara Young), and Latino romantic Rafael (Reza Salazar), whose journeys to jail were both related to addiction, as so many are.

Unlike Sweat, Clyde’s is not a fully realistic play. The proprietor – played with cruel verve and in outrageous outfits by Aduba – appears with grease fires behind her at various points; she berates her employees – who she says won’t be able to find jobs anywhere else – and makes them feel like they deserve that abuse.

By contrast, Montrellous (Ron Cephas Jones), an enlightened sandwich artist of sorts, pushes his colleagues to believe that they have potential to make the best sandwiches in the world. His story of how he went to jail may be too good to be true – but in the purgatory of parole, who are you going to listen to, the voices of devils or angels? Clyde’s comes to a sudden stop that leaves you hungry for more – but it’s a heartwarming and genuinely funny oneact play. On until Jan. 16.

THREE OTHER DRAMAS BY BLACK PLAYWRIGHTS TO SEE THIS SEASON

Trouble in Mind. To Jan. 9 at the American Airlines Theatre.

The Shaw Festival revived this 1955 tragicomedy by Alice Childress brilliantly this past fall. Its depiction of a Black actress’s struggle to give a truthful performance in a social-issue play penned by a white liberal was ahead of its time; LaChanze stars in New York.

Slave Play. To Jan. 23 at the August Wilson Theatre. Playwright Jeremy O. Harris’s Tony-nominated comedy concerns a trio of interracial couples undergoing “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy” at a fake plantation; its shocking premise and conclusion give you an idea of what it might have been like to encounter Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf back when it was actually controversial. In the middle, however, there’s a poignant exploration of how anti-Black racism can permeate the personal (and some affectionate fun poked at current academic jargon).

Skeleton Crew. In previews Dec. 21, opens Jan. 23 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. Dominique Morisseau is one of those widely produced American playwrights who it is shocking to discover has never had a show on Broadway (though she did write the book for Ain’t Too Proud, a jukebox musical about the Temptations). This play, the third in a trilogy set in her hometown of Detroit, gives a snapshot of life among the workers at an auto plant on the brink of foreclosure. Phylicia Rashad is part of its Broadway premiere.