“Can’t a black man just wanna hang himself for pleasure?” —Darnell in Hang Man
Except, we quickly find out, this isn’t a lynching. Not exactly, anyway. It seems the black man hanging from the tree—a guy named Darnell, residing until that moment in what the script calls a “a shit town in Mississippi”—gets off on autoerotic asphyxiation, i.e., masturbating while he strangles. He’s done it many times before in the solitude of the woods, where he’s beyond the reach of the people whose money he’s gambled away and, per Portnoy, the mother who drives him nuts enough to seek release in dangerous sex. Something just went wrong this time. We know all this because being dead doesn’t prevent Darnell talking to us from his pinata perch in the tree. Osei-Kuffour and director Jess McLeod give us what has to be one of the most eerily comic images in Chicago theater history when Fenner’s amiable, dangling Darnell lifts his head and speaks.
Through 4/29: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3:30 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM, the Gift Theatre, 4802 N. Milwaukee, 773-283-7071, thegifttheatre.org, $35-$40, $25 seniors, $20 students.
