The Flea Theater World Premiere SCRAPS the Enduring Aftermath of Racial Killings by Geraldine Inoa

Geraldine Inoa is a writer for TV's "The Walking Dead."  SCRAPS premiering at the Flea Theater is Iona playwriting debut.  It is an astonishingly well written and well constructed play that hits home with hard truths of black males being shot by white officers.  The lengthy one act, one set play is segmented by short blackouts spanning 3 years starting on the stoop in a rundown NYC hood just months after a fatal shooting of a black man by a white officer.  This wasn't just another scenario of a soon to be forgotten man quickly replaced by the next victim in the media. This man has a name, Forrest Winthrop a.k.a. in official reports Winthrop, Forrest.  He's left behind a 5 year old son, Sebastian, another fatherless black male left to be raised by his single mother, Aisha & grandmother.  Forrest Winthrop had just returned from his 1st year on a football college scholarship in the South & planned to take Aisha & Sebastian out of the hood into the suburbs "on a hill so high your neck would snap when looking up at it."  But once back in the hood his running cost him his life shot in the back by a white officer and Aisha & Sebastian are left going nowhere fast.  Also returning from a year studying in London is Calvin whose attire, etiquette & annunciation make him stand apart from his old chums; Aisha, Adriana and Jean-Baptiste (JB) stuck on the stoop poet, rapper, nappy hair philosopher.  Calvin prods JB to get his G.E.D., Adriana to finish NYU and stirs the heat with Aisha with whom he may have fathered Sebastian.  Calvin's convinced he's ascended but is thrust back to harsh reality when confronted by a white cop along with the others.  Iona's dialogue is crude & lyrical, formidable & credible.  JB's rap & repartee hits on racial oppression, cultural appropriation, gentrification and the emaciation of the black male & he's tired of being brow beaten "to pull himself up by the boot straps."  Aisha's pragmatism is do what you got to do after having laid her hopes on riding out on Forrest's NFL shoulders.  Adriana's nightmares & shattered dreams are most haunting.  Her rants of her hatred for whites with their entitlement, apathy, silver spoon mentality & bland palettes ring with palpable truths.  She hates Paula Deen for her racism & appropriation of southern soul cooking which came from the slaves.  Slaves used discarded SCRAPS from their masters table and transformed them into salvageable dishes. "Strange Fruit" the famous anti-lynching poem is heard before Adriana sets up her own noose.  SCRAPS is a potent, relevant & stirring play.  It might have ended with this sobering scene.  Inoa took the play into a final nightmarish parody where Sebastian (now 8) wins prizes on a game show that teaches him harsh realities of his past, present & future.  This was a bold artistic direction taken by playwright Geraldine Inoa, one I wouldn't have ventured but this gifted playwright is a name to remember.