Allan Appel Photo
A drug dealer is coming to Fair Haven tonight looking for JaQuann Brantley — carrying a bullet with Brantley’s name on it.
Fortunately for JaQuann Brantley (at left in photo), that lethal action is taking place not on the streets but the stage.
Not that Brantley is unfamiliar with the rough life of the streets. The 20-year old from the Dwight neighborhood has had friends and acquaintances shot dead in turf and drug battles that were the tragic culmination of often petty slights or jealousies. He has avoided that fate. But he has also had an unsettled life including bouncing among several foster homes.
Now he may have found a home in the theater.
Fair Haven’s Bregamos Community Theater, to be precise. Brantley is one of the stars of Momma’s Boyz, a gripping story of three friends caught up in the drug life. It debuts Thursday night at the Erector Square theater; performances run through Sunday.
“He’s a gem for us,” said Rafael Ramos, the play’s producer and the founder of Bregamos.
Ramos met Brantley at a dinner where the young man was performing poetry.
Although he had had spoken word experience, mainly at city venues with open mikes, Brantley had never acted.
Ramos knew a natural when he saw one. “He’s very talented. He’s very eloquent when he expresses himself. It comes out like poetry,” said Ramos, who takes credit for discovering Brantley. “And the language and energy just pour out of him.”
The play, written by Candido Tirado, premiered at New York’s Hip Hop Theater Festival in 2002. It has won various awards. In the Fair Haven production, Brantley plays Shine, a young dealer who gets in a jealous competition with his mentor in drugs, Thug, over who can sell more bags. Shine can see beyond the drug life, but Thug can’t. The younger dealer becomes an obstacle for him and eventually shoots him dead.
“The events in the play are everyday life for me,” said Brantley. “My friends in the hood, they get popped for dumb stuff. The dirt never disappears. It catches up to you and turns into a mountain,” he said on Wednesday night in a break at tech rehearsal.
How was the play experience different from real life — or, rather, what is the novice actor getting out of the role?
“We’re stuck in time,” he said. And yet there is also a force at work, a kind of cosmic agency for good that gives people a second chance. In short, even in the most dire circumstances there is always a choice.
Brantley was referring to the plot structure of Momma’s Boyz: The opening scene has Thug kill Shine. That’s the culmination. Yet it didn’t have to be that way. There’s a decision to be made, and it could have gone the other way. Nothing is preordained.
The play makes that point by going backwards in time, so that the very last scene is the first that chronologically or causally occurred. And Shine is shown making a different decision. A better decision about his life. Had he chosen well, he might have lived. Of course, then there would not have been a play, or at least not the one we have seen.
The play enjoys poetic energy of the kind that Brantley possesses in abundance. He plays with a prickly vulnerability so nicely off the more experienced actors, Akintunde Sogunro as Thug and Gabriel Hernandez as Mimic (pictured right and center in top photo). Hernandez was last seen in 2007 as Bregamos in Aaron Jaferis’s Kingdom.
In this scene in the video clip, we see the three pumped up pals engaged in a jealousy-fueled verbal battle over customers that will culminate in Shine’s shooting death.
It was clear to Rafael Ramos what Brantley was getting out of his debut: “He may not know it, but it’s therapeutic. He has this role to play and to analyze [choices]. He sees his real self and friends in the play, and he gets to make the decision, without the risk.”
In real life, as opposed to the stage, Brantley is looking forward to graduating high school, via the adult ed route, this June. He’s receiving guidance to transition to college through the Children’s Community Programs of Connecticut. Longer range plans are to go to community college locally and then to Brown University, he said
The play is also the debut of Bregamos’s refurbished theater space. There are serious new theater lights, a tech booth with sound and light control boards and a modular seating capacity of up to 199 people.
Ramos said the theater was configured for 99 people for Momma’s Boyz; he hopes it will be filled. Shows run from Thursday through Saturday, at Erector Square off the Blatchley Avenue entrance, with an 8 p.m. curtain. Sunday’s matinee is at 3 p.m. For tickets email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or call 866 – 631-880, extension1.
“Given the number of homicides of young people related to the drug trade,” Ramos said, he could not ask for a better play or more eloquent young players to launch the new house.
Did Brantley have any hesitations or frustrations in stepping into the make-believe world of the stage, even a tough make-believe world?”
Brantley replied that the audience is seeing in the play only half of what really goes on in the streets. “There’s an element you can’t portray even in a good play,” he said.
Momma’s Boys is directed by Raphael Massie, who recently appeared, as an actor, in Elm Shakespeare Company’s production of Yasmina Reza’s Art at the Kehler Liddell Gallery. The lighting design is by Halima Flynn; the stage crew is Avery Sanchez, and the tech crew is headed by Melvin Matos.
(Editorial note: Last fall Bregamos produced a staged reading of a play by this reporter)