Searching for Willie Lynch
Writer-director Layon Gray, who has previously delved into Black history in such plays as the long-running Black Angels Over Tuskegee, explores tensions within the African-American community in an ambitious work that looks at one family in three different cultural moments: the Jim Crow period, the Civil Rights era and the eve of the Obama presidency. (The title refers to an apocryphal speech by an 18th-century slave owner that describes how to foster intra-Black discord.)