“Platanos & Collard Greens”
In its ethos and sentiment, the play rests somewhere between a civics lesson and Howard Finster’s folk art. Mr. Lamb doesn’t traffic in the imperatives of angry reproach. “Platanos & Collard Greens” is a simplistic morality tale rendered in cheerful tones, a look at the refraction of racial prejudice from one minority group to another, and a primer in how best to curtail pernicious stereotype.
The story, some of which is told in belabored hip-hop rhymes, revolves around a group of ambitious students at Hunter College, an election for student body president and a chaste love affair between a young African-American man and Dominican woman whose mother disapproves of the relationship. Mr. Lamb removes the potentially complicating factor of class so that the mother’s criticism of her daughter’s boyfriend is rooted purely in the color of his skin. Hard working, the boy comes from a well-educated family. The mother, in denial of her own African roots, is the sort of woman who admonishes her daughter to stay out of the sun so as not to look like “those Haitians.”
The particulars of the storyline have made the play quite popular on college campuses, where Mr. Lamb is typically asked to stage it at the invitation of student minority groups. In the past few years, “Platanos & Collard Greens” has been produced at more than 100 colleges and universities across the country, including Princeton, Cornell and Wesleyan.
