Tony Award® winner, Emmy Award® winner, and Oscar® nominee Laurence Fishburne is both the star and the playwright of this one-man tour de force which he describes as “the stories and lies people have told me. And that I have told myself.”
Mr. Fishburne has captured imaginations throughout his extraordinary career with unforgettable performances on stage and screen, from Ike Turner in What’s Love Got to Do with It? (Academy Award® nomination for Best Actor), to Sterling Johnson in August Wilson’s Two Trains Running (Tony Award for Best Featured Actor), to his mind-bending turn as Morpheus in the blockbuster film series The Matrix.
Now he brings his legendary storytelling skills to PAC NYC for a World Premiere event helmed by Leonard Foglia, director of Mr. Fishburne’s acclaimed solo performance Thurgood on Broadway.
Best experienced live, Fishburne’s detailing of his private family history takes turns eliciting humor and generating sympathy for both the actor and his octogenarian mother. During his childhood, Hattie Crawford ran a charm school — his Brooklyn home decorated with several full-length wall mirrors as women took turns striking poses and strutting the catwalk of his living room. In the play, Fishburne depicts the character playing his mother as one who plies her child with “nasty pills” on occasion, and takes sexual advantage of him during the same years she pushed him toward early film roles like “Mr. Clean” in the Vietnam War epic, “Apocalypse Now.”
The sketches are good, clean — uh, mostly clean — fun, but it’s likely that audience members on exiting (a large percentage are fans, it’s to be presumed) will remember having spent the past hours with a man whose honesty about his achievements and shortcomings won’t soon be dismissed and may even serve as a model for living a life free of secrets and lies. Nice work if you can get it, and you can get it here.
2024 | Off-Broadway |
Original Off-Broadway Production Off-Broadway |
Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
---|---|---|---|
2024 | Drama League Awards | Disinguished Performance | Laurence Fishburne |
Videos