Is It Real or Is It Racist?
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White Hot Black Comedy is the first attempt at playwriting for Plys, a former Reader staff writer (her City Council watch column, which originated in the Reader, went on to run in the Sun-Times and the Tribune). Figliulo, a former executive with E! Entertainment Television and Plys’s cousin, has tried her hand at screenwriting but is a playwriting novice. They’re promoting White Hot Black Comedy as a cross between Sex and the City and Pulp Fiction that offers a “heartfelt, often hysterically funny look at five diverse Chicago girlfriends” who gather for a weekend in Michigan each summer, “an eclectic group in race, sexual orientation and socio-economic background.” The play’s main characters–three white and two biracial–are “loosely” based on a group of the authors’ friends. According to Figliulo, “a lot of people will see something they’ve rarely experienced, which is friendship between people of different backgrounds deep enough that no one has to pull any punches.” Plys says their friends are all enthusiastic about the play; when Cornelius dropped out, one of them read his part at the reading.
But it turned out he wasn’t the only one with reservations. After the first reading, Plys says, the actor taking the lead role of Melissa, a biracial woman with a drug-addicted husband, “made it clear she was unhappy with [the] character, that it ‘wasn’t a good role model.’” Explanations that the characters were based on real people–the inspiration for Melissa was even at the reading–didn’t sway her. In a later e-mail she told the authors it seemed to her that “all the black characters are bad and all the white characters are good.” The fact that “the [black] guy who gets the girl in the end is a respectable, doting father” didn’t seem to make a difference, Plys says.
The Institute was spun off from the Science and Math Department in 1991 after a nasty polarization of the faculty. It was headed up by Zafra Lerman, the incendiary and charismatic professor who’d built Columbia’s Science Department from scratch after arriving there in 1976. At the Science Institute she continued to develop innovative ways to teach that brought funding from sources like the National Science Foundation (with learning opportunities for students in Chicago public schools) and an international reputation. Two years ago, Columbia president Warrick Carter nominated the Institute for the Council of Independent Colleges’ award for “Outstanding Achievement in Undergraduate Science Education,” and it won.
