Pharus is a bright, successful student, and he's also a talented singer, the leader of the chorus, which is the pride and public face of the school.The play, with sympathetic direction from Trip Cullman, works best as a jewel-faceted character study with Jeremy Pope, who originated the role of Pharus off-Broadway in 2013, tenderly inhabiting. Drew School for Boys, an African-American prep school. The …"Choir Boy" tells the story of Pharus Young (Jeremy Pope), who's entering his senior year at the fictional Charles R. Pharus is intelligent, opinionated, and conniving but only because he has to be…he’s rather obviously gay in a “don’t ask don’t tell” world where he can’t be open about his sexuality.University of ConnecticutIt’s full of schoolboys who are trying, and often failing, to contain themselves and follow the rules in a prestigious historic African-American boys school. Drew Prep School, a prestigious private school for Black male high school students. He is by.Choir Boy centers on Pharus, a scholarship student at the Charles R. If the school's headmaster is too wishy-washy and naive (and he is), McCraney has seen to it that Pharus is realistically complex. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram."Choir Boy" is his crispest and most confident work. Look down, and you’ll see it on your own, too. And it shows us the people who have long answered those questions behind closed doors, in a self-preserving system with blood on its hands. It probes the big, intractable questions posed by social order, like what people owe each other, how accountability gets shirked, whose stories are told and whose are erased. The play’s razor-sharp edge is all the more cutting for being polished with easy wit, like tickling a captive before releasing the guillotine. “The Minutes” is both a political comedy and a wicked, methodically plotted horror show, not unlike American democracy and its original sins. The actors are nimble with Letts’ mordant, deceptively situational humor, and in embodying their characters’ chilling complacency. The stasis in Shapiro’s staging has a clear logic (how often does the seat of power shift?), and serves as stark contrast to isolated bursts of physical action. The ensemble of Steppenwolf and Broadway veterans, including Blair Brown, Sally Murphy and Ian Barford, play expertly off each other even as they mostly remain in their chairs. Count out the days, and you’ll realize the time is ripe for terror. Booming thunder and zappy brown-outs punctuate the stormy night (conveyed in the lighting design by Brian MacDevitt and in the sound and original music by André Pluess). The municipal meeting hall seems grander than it ought to be, with a soaring arched ceiling that betrays signs of water damage (in a set design by David Zinn). Shapiro, wryly signaling that “The Minutes” has a broader agenda. There’s a deliberateness to the foreboding in this Steppenwolf production from director Anna D. The mayor (Letts) would just as soon move on, and so would everyone else. Peel missed? It seems unlikely that the clerk who records them (Jessie Mueller), who is curt and fastidious, could be slacking. If each meeting includes a recap of the last, where are the minutes from the one Mr. The story’s deeper and sinister undercurrents creep along from the start, camouflaged in the tedium of process. (Fairy tales and rituals alike love an innocent orphan.) At the opposite end, the eldest statesman (Austin Pendleton) has been serving for 39 years, and could he please have a parking spot to show for it? Seven men (all but one of them white) and three women (also white) assemble for the quorum. Though he missed the previous week’s meeting to bury his mother, he’s sunny and eager and naive. Peel ( Noah Reid of “Schitt’s Creek”) is the freshman of the group and something of a babe in the woods. The meeting gets off to a sputtering start, and the mundanity both amuses and numbs. There’s a Christopher Guest quality to the everyday absurdities that pile up as the officials (if we must call them that) migrate into the room, bantering over the snack cart. “A hundred years from now, will anyone care?” It seems like a fair question for the city council in Big Cherry, the “wet sock of a town” where a dozen elected members bat around hyperlocal minutia like stolen bicycles and a redesign of the town park.
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