The highly controversial play about an up-and-coming Black lawyer confronting the obstacles of alcoholism and potential racism, while learning to handle his sexually adventurous girlfriend, stars Gbenga Akinnagbe in the title role of “Michael.” Michael has a new girlfriend a new, expensive apartment and a seemingly perfect life. However, there are demons in his life that he must overcome in order to truly be “fulfilled.”

Akinnagbe, known for his role as the hitman “Chris Partlow” from HBO’s acclaimed series “The Wire”  has also appeared on stage in the 2013 revival of N. Richard Nash’s classic romantic comedy, The Rainmaker. For his role in Fulfillment, Akinnagbe received raves for his “sensitive, multilayered performance.”

The production also features Otoja Abit, Jeff Biehl, Christian Conn, Denny Dillon, Susannah Flood, and Peter McCabe.

Bradshaw’s plays, including Intimacy and Burning, are notorious for their frequent and graphic occurrences of actors performing simulated sex acts and plots involving rape, incest and sexual slavery, as well as racially-based humor. The same can be found in Fulfillment as the play includes graphic intercourse, erotic spanking, and choking; so much so that it required the aforementioned sex choreographer, Yehuda Duenyas.

Fulfillment opened on September 11 to mixed reviews. The New York Times’ Ben Brantley called it “engaging and unsettling.“ Samuel Leiter of The Broadway Blog praised Ethan McSweeny’s direction but said it “isn’t enough to overcome the characters’ inconsistencies, the episodic plot’s implausibilities, and the sense that its scenes of sex and violence are there merely because that’s what one expects in a Bradshaw play.”

Although Fulfillment is leaving New York, it’s scheduled to open in Chicago at the American Theatre Company to kick off Season 31: The Legacy Season. The play will run November 6-December 13, 2015 under McSweeny’s direction. For tickets and more information, visit here.

The post Fulfillment to Close on October 19 appeared first on Broadway Black.

When his brother is shot, mentally disabled Langston Bellows (Gbenga Akinnagbe, The Wire) is left without a protector in Brooklyn’s housing projects. Now under the control of his abusive mother (Alfre Woodard, 12 Years A Slave) he must take his future into his own hands. Langston strives for independence from his prior life, from his mother, and from his fractured mind.

Woodard was last seen on Broadway in Regina Taylor’s Drowning Crow (the 2004 adaptation and updating of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull), opposite Anthony Mackie (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, A Behanding in Spokane), Aunjanue Ellis (Joe Turner’s Come And Gone, The Tempest), Ebony Jo-Ann (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Mule Bone, The Sunshine Boys, Gem of the Ocean), Stephen McKinley Henderson (King Hedley II, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Fences, A Raisin in the Sun), and Tracie Thoms (Rent, Stick Fly). She made her professional theatre debut in 1974 at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage. Her breakthrough role came three years later (1977) in the off-Broadway production of Ntozake Shange’s classic for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf.

Alfre’s film and television career is vast and diverse. She won her Screen Actors Guild Award in 1995 for her work in the film version of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson.

Knucklehead screens Thursday, March 26th at the Peter Jay Sharp Building BAM Rose Cinemas. To purchase tickets and get more information, CLICK HERE.

The post Alfre Woodard’s Back To NYC In ‘Knucklehead’ appeared first on Broadway Black.