←Recommendations of Hooded or Being Black for Dummies

Very funny and interesting. I love the two black boys characters as they realize the implications behind their actions and still press forward.

This is a phenomenal play. I cannot recommend it enough. It's impossible to stop reading it once you start. One of the most unique structures I've ever seen leads us to a daring, brilliant, engaging storyline full of characters that you love within only a few pages of reading about them. The "laugh light" is one of the neatest devices I've ever encountered in a play. Read this now, or better yet, get it on stage where it belongs so it can be seen by every single person. This is about as perfect as a play can get.

A deftly written political play. Incisive and direct and beautiful.

Brutal, poignant, hilarious, sharp, and intense. There's a clever use of repetition in how the stutter scenes reset themselves as well as the end of the play wrapping back to the beginning. I actually have the pleasure of acting in a workshop production of "Hooded," but, as a fellow playwright, am also awestruck by the cleverness in the play's structure and the brutal honesty around such a relevant subject.

It is the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's pleasure to recommend Tearrance Chisholm and their play "Hooded or Being Black for Dummies" as a finalist for our 2015 National Playwrights Conference. The play rose through a competitive, anonymous, multileveled selection process that took nearly nine months to execute. As one of 59 finalists out of more than 1,300 submissions, it is the value of the page that has allowed this work to prosper in such a competitive selection process. Our readers especially responded to the highly original theatrical form which allowed the pointed political questions to really land.

Dark satire done right. Unforgiving in its ribbing, punishing in its lessons, hilarious and entertaining and thought provoking throughout. Full of layered meaning. Staging used as metaphor. Archetypes fused with modern politics. An audience forced into complicity and responsibility. Characters who are absurdly comical and painfully human in such a fresh and lively mix. This play is great. It had me guessing at every turn, not due to any mystery, but because it's so inventive in style, story, and structure. Chisholm calls his scene repetition "stuttering", but by the end, the play was nothing but crystal clear to me. Terrific.

A remarkable and vital play for our time. You feel it, in the rhythm of the scenes, in the rhythm of the dialogue, in the story Tearrance is telling. I couldn't be more excited about the potential of a play to take off and have a life in the American theater. This play will soar.

This is a really outstanding play (even though I've heard the insta-loving WG's got cut). It's new and fresh and you haven't read anything like it.