“My mother and her mother before her believed if only they could be light, light and rich, if they could marry a light-skinned man, they’d be loved,” says Alma in Dael Orlandersmith’s Pulitzer prize-finalist play about colourism in 1960s America. It charts Alma’s love story with her lighter-skinned childhood sweetheart Eugene in rural South Carolina. While the action is set in a place and an era far from here, the issues Orlandersmith’s writing covers are no less rampant in our modern times.
Yellowman is an expansive play that sketches through the years of Alma and Eugene’s relationship. In the playground, they chase each other and sing their way into their teenage bodies. At 14, flustered, they secretly share that they want their friendship to mean more. Finally, in adulthood, they’ve entwined deeply; their difference in skin tone, despite what they have been told, doesn’t matter.
