Breath Boom

There is life/living (Breath) and then there is death/ending (Boom).  Breath Boom is not a play about female gang members, it's a play about people.  Human beings figuring out how to live.  How to survive.  How to succeed based on the rules of the game they've inherited.   Breath Boom, travels through time from 1986 to 2000, set in the Bronx, it shows a group of women who are forced to figure out how to  live, how to adapt and how to survive while existing in an environment that oftentimes produces an animalistic mindset.

Kia Corthron has crafted a fictional word sharing with us many of the social dynamics that have shaped these women and how they both succeed and fail at balancing their multi-layered identities -- pseudeo-sisters, daughters, girlfriends, mothers, friends, lovers, victims, takers.  We watch as they navigate both physical and mental survival.  We cringe, we question, we laugh and we cry because their human-ness is our own.   As we watch and experience the harsh life these women lead we may even mutter to ourselves "But by the grace of God, there go I."

Impacted by social ills such as domestic violence, molestation, racial profiling and poverty, the young women and their caretakers have been conditioned to become auto bots functioning on automatic pilot as they react to the same-shit-different-day world they live in. 

"Do I look like I got time to fool around, arts and craft? Grown woman."  Prix, the plays main character expresses this sentiment to her mother in the final moments of this gritty human story.  At the end of the dialogue Prix refers to herself as a grown woman.  In this comment Prix acknowledges that she has managed to do what many of the plays other characters don't, she has matured.  

By the plays end Prix discovers that she has not fully imploded, but she's ready to offer the world a new kind of pay back.  She's ready to care; not just about herself, but for mother and the world around her. ~ Denise J. Hart, MFA