Writer & Director: Zora Howard
Hanging, Slim (Kamal Bolden), Blood (Bryce Foley) and Bird (Julian Rozzell) begin to talk as a pretty lady passes by.
Hang Time, by Pulitzer Prize finalist Zora Howard, takes place in a liminal space where time is undefined. Slim is the talkiest of the three and presents himself as a macho guy, but he also has a soft spot when it comes to love. Blood is the youngest, with high hopes and dreams and a persistent desire to see the world beyond this space, while Bird, the oldest of the three, is a man with many regrets and a lifetime of experience.
The conversations in the play could initially be mistaken for the ordinary banter of three Black men. There is nothing particularly extraordinary or overtly tragic in what they discuss. One of their biggest arguments, for example, is over their favourite blues musicians: Slim is a diehard fan of Freddie King, while Bird champions Muddy Waters. They talk about women, music and their own lives, rather than directly addressing the circumstances that have brought them into this space.
Yet the chilling effect of Howard’s work comes from the fact that they keep talking while suspended in the air. The sound design by Megan Culley constantly shifts between the sounds of nature and those of human society. At other moments, the three men are repeatedly awakened from death, returning to their conversations after their bodies have seemingly gone through the act of dying. The effect is to make their ordinary conversations impossible to separate from the violence surrounding them. Their conversations never directly touch on systemic racism in America, to the point that it becomes unclear whether they are intentionally avoiding it. Or, indeed, has racism become so normal and so frequent that it has turned into a kind of banality, something they would rather not bother discussing? Perhaps it has already become so deeply internalised that it is embedded in their bodies and language, leaving them to talk about blues and women instead.
That is what makes Hang Time most unsettling. The play never explains exactly why these three men are hanging from a tree, nor does it establish when this is happening. Their conversations suggest ordinary lives continuing somewhere beyond the space, while the stage repeatedly reminds us that their bodies are caught in a cycle of death and return. The ambiguity therefore does not simply concern what has happened to them. It extends to the status of the space itself: whether it is a place they have entered after death, a place in which they are waiting for death, or a space in which the violence that surrounds them has become so continuous that the distinction between life and death no longer matters.
That ambiguity is what gives Hang Time its unsettling force. Howard refuses to turn the three men into characters who exist only to explain racism or racial violence in words. Instead, she lets them talk about seemingly ordinary things while the circumstances of their bodies tell us the rest.
Runs until 23 August 2026 | Image: Contributed
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