IG: Again, Actors Theatre is where the first break beat play premiered! If that hadn’t happened, I don’t know that I would’ve written this series. HRM: What excites you most about Hype Man being produced in Louisville? It’s asking the audience to consider how we can find ways to say, “I may not completely know where you’re coming from, but I’m there for you, and that’s more important than whether I understand your experience on a personal level.” For Verb, it’s like, No, this could happen to me or my family at any time. For Pinnacle, the issue of police brutality gets to be more theoretical. Verb and Pinnacle have had a real connection since childhood, but there’s a fundamental difference in each character’s sense of urgency related to the shooting. The conflicts that emerge between Verb (who’s black) and Pinnacle (who’s white) in the wake of a police shooting in their city illustrate that black folks and white folks can share a space, we can consider ourselves friends, but there’s a disconnect in how we experience the world. Hype Man is all about that tension around who has the privilege of remaining unaffected. A lot of people weren’t open to hearing what was being said. The immediate response from some was censorship, of denying that the black body exists under threat. But the Black Lives Matter movement started mainstream discourse around this phenomenon. It’s been going on within the black community and in hip-hop for a long time. The conversation around racially motivated police brutality, and black folks not feeling safe in all spaces, isn’t new. IG: I wrote this play during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. HRM: What do you hope audiences will take from the experience of seeing Hype Man? Through the working relationship between Verb and Pinnacle, the hype man and main rapper in this story, the play’s looking at hip-hop as a countercultural art form that’s become more mainstream. Hip-hop is about saying difficult things that no one wants to say but doing it in such a slick way that people nod their heads in agreement. The hype person’s like a living exclamation point, an accelerator or engine to fuel what the main rapper’s trying to get out there. The role of the hype man/woman/person in a hip-hop crew is to help the primary rapper express their message. The play is also exploring what it means to be a hype person. Hype Man addresses questions like: what does it mean to be an ally? If you’re participating in an art form that came from protest movements and represented the disenfranchised, do you have a responsibility to honor those roots? They’re also investigating how the invention of hip-hop has affected America, our relationships to one another around issues of race, and the importance of this music for young people trying to find a voice. And I don’t just mean that the plays feature rap. Hype Man is the latest of my “break beat plays.” I made a commitment, starting with How We Got On (which premiered in the 2012 Humana Festival), to write a series of plays about hip-hop. It’s a workplace drama, the business just happens to be rap music. Idris Goodwin: On a basic level, Hype Man is about a band. Hannah Rae Montgomery: What inspired you to write Hype Man? Here’s what playwright Idris Goodwin had to say Actors’ resident dramaturg, Hannah Rae Montgomery. The hip-hop centric drama touches on issues of race, class and music. Hype Man is one of Actors Theatre of Louisville’s production for the 2019-2020 season.
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