riter Amiri Baraka wrote that poetry is not a poem, but a heightened sense of language found anywhere: a newspaper article, a conversation. The Live Theatre Gang's production of the verse-play Printz of Poets (New York Comedy Club) underscores, robustly, Baraka's contention. This collaborative writing effort is both urban and supernal. The plot is sometimes hokey, but the characters' rhythmic idiolects are iridescent. And juxtaposed with the sublimely sloppy set replete with Biggie Smalls and seraphic Mariah Carey posters, this is postmodernist slob chic.

The play finds a young poet-rapper named Lemar (who lumbers awkwardly in his skin) grappling with unemployment, fame, and his girlfriend's pregnancy. He is abetted by four actors playing different aspects of his psyche, who alternate between dozens trash talking and language that echoes the numinous. Skitz (Jomo Kellman) is equal parts Flava Flav and Mad Hatter. His nimble high jinks virtually eclipse the rest of the cast during his onanistic sketch “5 Minutes.” However, director Reed McCants's deft touch is manifested in the way the comely Rastafarian sage Reason (Nacinimod Deodee) coolly tempers the verbal landscape with lines like “I must wrestle with the stolen soul nestled within this vessel.”

Countless times the writing rises to that of the superlative poet “outside of poetry”—the first “Big Willie”—Shakespeare. The evening's provocative verbal whirlwind is only occasionally undermined by a phone prop (which is abused while trying to advance the plot), where disembodied voices, although funny, sound like cookie-cutter caricatures of African American thugs, nagging nanas, and nasal-voiced, Jewish bosses. Hip-hop is an unbridled and kinetic phenomenon, but director McCants elicits stillness and its formidable powers from his cast. He transforms this rap-to-riches narrative into an eye-opening experience, even if, somehow, you happen to be sleeping.
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In Los Angeles

Drama-Logue

May 7-13, 1998

Headline: Great Women of Color

By John Ross Clark

“The Live Theatre Ensemble and Reed McCants have mounted an evening of historical monologues, at the Whitefire Theatre in Sherman Oaks, entitled Great Women of Color.  This montage of African-American women spans the gamut from black slave Phyllis Wheatley on through to Katherine Dunham, the great contemporary choreographer.  In between we also get to meet the inventor of pomade, Madame C.J Walker, the inimitable Sojourner Truth, story-teller Zora Neale Hurston, journalist Ida B. Wells, blues legend Bessie Smith, and playwright Lorraine Hansberry.  Written, in turn, by director Reginald D. Brown and budding playwright Ah-Keisha McCants…  It is alternately enthralling and enervating.  When the authors allow the characters to use their own words, it often soars; particulary Mae Mercer (lecturing as Truth and singing one of Bessie’s best-known songs), Renee Featherstone as Zora Hurston (telling one of her black folktales, full of humor, irony, and self-mocking), and Kimberly Bailey (who is devastating as the cancer-ridden Hansberry).  This last monologue is introduced through the replay of a radio interview with Hansberry some five years before her death, while we watch the deteriorating woman shuffle in with her tray of medicine.  What makes this the highlight of the evening is the simple dramatic truth of watching a beloved individual dealing with her own untimely demise.  It is heart-wrenching, yet strangely elevating.  The half-dozen scenes which precede it serve to remind us how abject the black woman’s life in America was for much of our history.  And yet, from such bleakness arose women of strength, wit, and character.”  
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Click here for the

Source Magazine Article

On Ah-Keisha McCants
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