I heard the writer/director/star of this semi-autobiographical movie interviewed on NPR, and she sounded like quite a character.
Radha Blank plays Radha Blank, a 39-year-old former actress and playwright who has spent the last ten years teaching drama to teens in Harlem, to make ends meet. As a result her agent, wonderfully played by Peter Kim, hasn't been getting her many auditions and she's finds herself on the back burner in the New York talent pool.
She's overweight and black and single and poor, and increasingly unhappy with where her life is going.
In desperation she tries rapping. About the same time, one of her plays gets picked up for "workshopping" (which is a step below actually being produced) through some hanky moves by her agent, but the white producer and white director want to mess with the black message of the play. She goes along with it out of necessity but isn't happy about it.
The movie was raw and felt real and was wonderfully acted, but the Harlem deep inner city culture was foreign to me. The rapping I will never understand. The theater is foreign to me. Can't say I really enjoyed being pummeled with all this relentless victimhood.
Home 