Making its Broadway debut this summer is the Blatino crowd-pleaser known as “Plátanos & Collard Greens.” The David Lamb play explores Black-Latino relations in New York and attempts to answer the age-old question, can love between Blacks and Latinos survive? (Given how much Guanabee has covered the combination, we sure as hell hope so.)
The story, occasionally expressed in overcooked hip-hop rhymes, tells the helplessly modern tale of two young Hunter College students—the male’s Black and the female Dominican—who fall in love and spark the disapproval of the girl’s mother. Denying her own African-Latino roots, Mrs. Plátano (not her actual name) is the kind of woman who keeps her daughter out of the sun for fear of her getting toasted. So it’s no surprise that the only basis for dismissing her daughter’s suitor is the color of his skin. (Racial overtones are clearly a theme here.)

According to The New York Times, the production can be many things to many people:

…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.

In layman’s terms, this means it illustrates the whole concept of ‘live and let live’ using all those crayons that sit between brown and black. At the end of the article, the purpose behind Lamb’s message takes center stage and is what keeps him going—something about racial harmony and lifestyle choices, etc. We forget ‘cause we got bored.

Regardless, the show’s attendance might just as easily compel the playwright to continue writing. At the end of its run in September, “Plátanos & Collard Greens” will have been seen by about 90,000 Broadway fans. That’s about 20,000 more than the Joan Didion memoir-based “The Year of Magical Thinking” can boast. Seems more people are interested in watching two ‘hot’ cultures go at it than listen to the crazy rants of a lonely widow.