Ground Up & Rising in the News...
The Hate U Gave: The Tupac Shakur
Story, a review.
Bill Hirschman , Special Correspondent for South Florida Sun-Sentinel |
Meshaun Arnold Labrone
as Tupac Shakur |
The Hate U Gave: The Tupac Shakur Story may be the most thought-provoking and
lacerating evening in South Florida theatre this season.
A dazzlingly insightful script and mesmerizing performance, both by Meshaun Labrone
Arnold, make this a don't-miss production by Ground Up & Rising hosted at Miami-Dade
Community College.
This dissection of race relations is set in the rapper's mind during his 1995 imprisonment
while awaiting trial for sexual abuse. Arnold and director Arturo Fernandez have created
a 75-minute fantasia of profanity-laced raps, rants and reveries examining the good
intentions, tragic results and destructive hypocrisy on all sides.
Arnold peels back the antagonistic thug veneer to bare Shakur's vision of himself: a
genial, misunderstood, profoundly aggrieved social critic. But Fernandez has inserted
balancing arias from a Greek chorus who condemn Shakur for glamorizing the obscene
damage of the ethos he markets. Shakur counters, "I didn't create this - I diagnosed it."
Fernandez has amplified the script with imaginative staging, dramatic lighting and a wide
range of music that comments on the roceedings. But his masterstroke is to turn down
the volume and speed to let the work breathe in dramatic silences and quiet soliloquies.
By slowing the rendition of a Shakur song, he reveals its words as passionate and
insightful sociological comment wrapped in a lyrical if profane street poetry.
Arnold's tour de force performance ricochets Shakur between self-deceptive
rationalizations and righteous accusations. At one point, he reads aloud a searing court
indictment of white males' oppression. The particulars may not justify the extremity of a
race's disaffection and anger, but it certainly documents its origins. When an elderly Jew
says black people don't know the real horror of ghettos, oppression and extermination,
Shakur recites Shylock's "Hath not a Jew eyes" speech --- not just a tactic rife with irony,
but a playwright's inspired choice to illustrate the complexity of race relations.
This script does not excuse anyone including the music-buying public who are fascinated
with the trappings of thug life, but don't pay attention to Shakur's subtler underlying
message in his lyrics.
But like Barack Obama's speech in March, Arnold calls across the racial divide for
everyone to begin examining persistent racism and its fallout. |
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