The Play CHOKEHOLD is Enacted to Stop Police Brutality in the US

CHOKEHOLD, performed at the 14th St Y, is a powerful play taking aim at the unrelenting shooting of black men by law enforcement in our racially divisive nation.  Written by Anthony Pennino, this forceful play is not without flaws, but to take potshots at its foibles would be a disservice to its influential message & clever construct.  Pennino drives home the continuous count of killings of unarmed men, women & children of color & the exoneration of law enforcement involved.  CHOKEHOLD recants the names of victims of recent years & recent days in an elegy to the victims; many of whom may have been forgotten.  CHOKEHOLD ensnares your attention from the onset.  A video taping is being set-up as 2 black enforcement officers roughhouse a white male, order him to strip & rummage through his possessions.  Two black women catalogue his discarded items with disdain, "Abercrombrie & Fitch, that is so yesterday.  Plenty of anti-depressants but only $3 in the wallet," she asks with incredulity.  The white "prisoner," seems more dazed than the audience now unsure if the abduction is real or being staged for reality TV.  The tension & hostility emanating from the 5 actors engaged in imprisoning, humiliating & videotaping their victim is palpable.  I was baffled by the audience's laughter.  We learn the 2 "officers" are posing as law enforcement.  Devon, the white captive clothed only in his skivvies, ID's one of his captors as Andre, the RN from his freshman dorm at Bard.  Devon is pressed with a script & ordered to read into the camera.  Devon's epiphany of his imminent death sends him into a pathetic, blubbering fit.  The crew sermonize "the scales of justice need tipping in another direction."  As Malcom X claimed "Sometimes you have to pick the gun up to put the gun down."  Each of the cast is given the spotlight for their righteous soliloquy on injustice.  The murder of Devon, an innocent white man, will reverberate whereas "Black Lives Matter" is a fallacy.  The actors other than Devon are a rigid distraction on stage when not spouting rhetoric.   Still, their oratories are compelling.  "If you are not part of the solution, you are a part of the problem."  (E Cleaver)  CHOKEHOLD is a gripping play on our world that has gone made and its infectious, volatile tempest ready to combust.  "There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you." (A Baraka)