Playwright Pays Homage To Legendary MCs With Play Cycle

Shaun Neblett, aka MC SNEB, is a playwright, educator, and founder of Changing Perceptions Theater. As a young adult, Neblett entered his short play "This is About A Boy's Fear," into the Young Playwrights Festival contest for high school students where the winners received a professional production of their works at a New York City Off-Broadway theater. "This Is About A Boy's Fear" was presented along with other winning plays at The Public Theater in 1995. On April 20, 2016, the Schomburg Center hosted a reading of Neblett’s newest play "Homage 5: Life After Death," after the album of the same name by one of the most influential rappers in the game, the late Notorious B.I.G. Neblett’s “Homage Series” is a cycle of seven plays inspired by hip hop MCs and their classic albums. One of the plays, "Homage 3: Illmatic," inspired by NAS' debut album was presented Off-Broadway, and also received a reading at the Schomburg Center in 2014.  As of yet, Neblett has completed other plays in the cycle including "Homage 2: The Great Adventures of Slick Rick" after the album by Slick Rick.

Although the plays are not about the MCs, they are inspired by themes in the songs on the albums that Neblett has selected for his Homage cycle. "Homage 5" is set in 1997 at an inner city barber shop and focuses on a group of African American men, including the shop's proprietor, one of the barbers on staff, the barber's brother and the shop’s clientele. The play infuses the wit, lyricism and bravado found in Notorious BIG's music. It also examines the mortality of African American men, which is possibly even more relevant now in a Black Lives Matter-era America than it was when Biggie's album "Life After Death" was originally released.

Neblett's plays can be described as hip hop theater, a genre of theater written by artists who were born before and during emergence of hip-hop as an art form. The anthologies Say Word! Voices from Hip Hop Theater, Plays From the Boom Box Galaxy: Theater From The Hip-Hop Generation, and The Fire This: African-American Plays For the 21st Century contain works by artists whose plays are driven by hip-hop or incorporate elements of hip-hop to dramatize a story.

During the talk back session following reading of "Homage 5," Neblett explained his goal is to create theater that features and appeals to young African-Americans, particularly men, who don't usually attend the theater because they don't see themselves represented on stage. Neblett's plays depict a slice of life in urban America and themes such as education, popular culture, art, family and crime recur in his works. Neblett plans to produce a full production of "Homage 5" in 2017 in Brooklyn. Read more about Neblett’s work and receive updates on the development of "Homage 5," by following Neblett @MCNEB or at shaunneblett.com