The Barber and The Unnamed Prince Director's Notes

When my oldest son was a teenager, I took a photo of him as he got a haircut at a Washington, DC barbershop located in the heart of the Adams Morgan neighborhood. This area had, at one time, been one of the most diverse communities in DC, but things were clearly changing and this barbershop was now one of the few Black-owned businesses still standing. It was heartbreaking for me to see that the city where I grew up - the town that we called “Chocolate City” - was changing in a way that systematically excluded the people on whose backs it was built. The picture that I took of my son, however, was even more heartbreaking. He had a look of burden and weariness that I had never seen on his 15-year-old face. It shook me to my core. Was he burdened? Was he weary? Or was he carrying the weight of something that I was unaware of? Had I myself weighed him down with the constant lectures about what to do and what not to do; how to walk and how not to walk; how to be and how not to be to survive as a Black male in this country?

The picture haunted and unsettled me. It wouldn’t leave me alone. One day I found myself asking the question: “If I saw this picture in a museum and had no connection to this young man other than the hue of our skin, what story might I draw from the expression on his face?” It was out of that question that the seeds for this play were planted.

Go-Go music and the Chocolate City I grew up in went hand in hand. Steeped in the African tradition of call and response and driven by drums and percussion, Go-Go was born in the 70’s when band leader, Chuck Brown, started mixing Latin percussive sounds with the structure and melodies of Blues, Jazz and R&B - all growing out of an African musical sensibility. Go-Go became our best kept secret. If you weren’t from DC, most likely you didn’t know about it. Over the years Chuck Brown came to be known fondly as the Godfather of Go-Go as other artists emerged following in his footsteps, and the music became the heartbeat of Chocolate City. Go-Go was everywhere - in the clubs, in our homes, in our cars and in the streets as ambitious young people created their own Go-Go beats on plastic buckets and bins giving the people exactly what they were thirsty for on Friday and Saturday nights all over the city.

In May of 2012, Chuck Brown joined the ancestors. The irony of Chuck’s leaving us as the gentrification train was pulling into the station did not escape me. So I thought, ‘The passing of a local icon, the changing face of the city, and a father’s love for his “burdened” son. Let’s put them in the same place on the same day at the same time and see what we end up with.’

For Chocolate City. May you, like the Phoenix, rise again.

- Gavin Dillon Lawrence, Playwright and Director of The Barber and The Unnamed Prince