On Wednesday night at Stetson Branch Library on Dixwell Avenue, Ife Michelle was explaining the plot of Crowns, the upcoming play at Long Wharf Theatre, and how it continued to relate to mentoring in the community today.
“There’s a scene in the play when Yolanda comes into church dressed a certain way,” she said. Yolanda is from Chicago, escaping the violence in her neighborhood by spending time with her grandmother in South Carolina. The women in that church give her a hat.
“We are queens,” they say. “You wear this when you’re ready.”
Later in the play, Michelle said, when Yolanda returns to Chicago, she has a lesson of her own to impart. As Yolanda tells her peers, a crown in Chicago doesn’t have to be a luxurious hat — although it could be. But it could also be a headwrap. Or even a baseball cap...
Read on in the New Haven Independent.
