Black Survival and Cyclical Fate in Hang Time

The air in the room felt heavy, dense, and still with anticipation. Kamal Bolden, Bryce Foley, and Julian Rozzell stood with their eyes closed on a tiered platform, silent and unmoving, as the audience filled into their general admission seating at the Apollo Stages at the Victoria for Zora Howard’s Hang Time. The actors seemed suspended in time, standing on precarious ground within a dark abyss.

I sat down and felt a great sense of unease. My muscles were tense, and my fists clenched in preparation for what I assumed would be a deeply emotional and raw exploration of Black trauma in relation to the practice of lynching. As the audience settled in their seats, my anxiety peaked. The house lights dimmed, and my hands went cold, an indication my nervous system had activated an acute stress response in my body, sending all the blood to my internal organs in preparation for fight or flight.

Within moments of the play’s opening, I was laughing. An innate vigilance remained, but I allowed myself to smile, to laugh, and to find joy even within an extremely dark context.

In the black box theatre, three posts at center stage formed a tiered platform for the actors to stand on. This a visual container for Hang Time puts both the actors and viewers in a precarious position: At any moment, the ground can give out under the actors, leaving the audience powerless to intervene. The play is composed of conversations between Bird (Rozzell), Blood (Foley), and Slim (Bolden), each of which abruptly ends with characters being elevated in the air and the lights dimming, symbolizing their return to death. The play is driven not by a traditional narrative structure, but instead by the cyclical repetition of these conversations, which range from comic to mundane to tragic. Although I was aware of the impending end of each scene, I was captivated. No matter how funny or sad or intriguing the subject is, it all must come to an end.

With the characters’ lives seemingly hanging in the balance, stakes loom large, but they are not insurmountable. Perseverance and endurance are spotlighted in the characters’ refusal to submit to their circumstances and continued awakenings into new scenes. Howard places her three protagonists in a mysterious, all-consuming void; the environment they exist in functions as a god that takes time, light, laughter, and air. Bird, Blood, and Slim have nothing but their minds and their words to keep themselves and each other going.

With very different outlooks on life and morality, Bird, Blood, and Slim are positioned along generational divides. Bird, the elder statesman on the stage, represents a past rooted in tradition and respect. Blood, the youngest character and the newest man to join the hanging trio, represents an eager and optimistic youth. Slim exists between the two, oscillating between avoidance and bitter awareness. The trio utilize their most basic weapons of resistance that the Black diaspora has mastered since the earliest experiences of oppression: humor and music. With these tools, the trio transforms seemingly insignificant actions into a stalwart defense against overwhelming melancholy.

Slim reminded me of an uncle who’s had one too many at Thanksgiving: funny, unpredictable, and surprisingly sentimental. He functions as the glue of the precariously linked trio. The quick and biting nature of Slim’s teasing, which targets Bird as a cranky old man and Blood as a naive young boy, indicates a deep awareness of human emotion. He situates himself as an oppositional force so that Bird and Blood have something to unite against. He brings friction and entertainment, seamlessly flowing between jester, villain, therapist, and ultimately the emotional center of the play.

At the crux of Hang Time is the warping and flattening of time. The protagonists are without agency. Their inability to control or predict the timeline they exist on strips them of comfort and resolution. A major thread throughout the play is Blood coming to terms with the fact he’ll never be able to return to his known world, a truth that Slim and Bird have long accepted. Without the basic freedom to even move freely within their void-like surroundings, the men are forced to simply wait. Their literal suspended state is similar to what is done in the criminal justice system with lives lost to gratuitous prison sentences. As exemplified in Slim and Bird’s forced acceptance of their circumstances, there is a natural progression in losing time that results in one occupying a mental purgatory bereft of hope, where the only directive is to wait.

Slim, Bird, and Blood turn the excruciatingly boring act of waiting into an opportunity just to hang out. Although they are forced by proximity to coexist, their willingness to preserve one another’s mental health is a revelatory aspect of the play. Just when things are about to get too deep, or perhaps they are about to stumble upon an answer, everything resets. In the middle of soliloquies and emotional pleas, the men are thrust into the air, their bodies violently jerking and struggling to find the ground again. The lights cut out, and the men are silenced. Eventually, they return to their posts only to do it all over again. Any long-term action is futile, which reveals the play as a bastion of subtle, moment-to-moment resistance.

Hang Time isn’t inundated with overtly political statements or messages. Instead, it leans into a normalcy that felt accessible but conceptually rich while casually interspersing historical references that could be referencing a plethora of Black American horror stories, from Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin. Similar to the way Slim challenged Blood and Bird to connect, the play itself serves as a challenge to the audience. Hang Time is not a play for passive viewing but an active experience of piecing together information and trying to understand the mysterious predicament the three protagonists find themselves in. In the audience, I became witness, detective, and judge, attempting to put together a story using the moments shown in the performance, character observation, and a greater understanding of the American context within which the story unfolds.

Mirroring and interrogating nuances in the Black American experience, Hang Time materializes the invisible struggle of being subjected to the dominant currents of society without the autonomy to redirect the flow. Like gravity, the existence of identity-based oppression is factual and ever-present in the play, but it doesn’t prevent the characters from jumping.

Hang Time was not pure entertainment. Rather than getting lost in the performance, I was thinking: thinking about how this play reflects my own inner monologue, thinking about the context of racial politics in America today, now six years after the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, and wondering whether my experience in that theatre was different from that of other members of the wildly diverse crowd. I wasn’t unsettled or traumatized but left feeling curious and introspective, energized yet sobered.

Although Hang Time speaks to a uniquely Black experience in America, it ultimately tells a very accessible and principally human story. Bird, Blood, and Slim’s Blackness is real and a crucial component of their identity, but Howard doesn’t keep the play there. Instead, she uses their intimate conversations to expose their familiar personhood as individuals composed of the same wants, feelings, and desires as anyone else. Howard’s characters do not comply with the simplistic confines of imagined Blackness in popular culture but instead look inward to what is rarely shown or even considered in the capacity of Black men. In exploring gentleness, intimacy, and the mundane, Howard demands a deeper contemplation of empathy, perceived difference, and finding a new definition of love.

Over the course of Hang Time, I didn’t simply pity the predicament Bird, Blood, and Slim are in, but came to genuinely care about them. Similarly, the trio of characters develops a deep attachment for one another over time, depicting a platonic love that is rarely acknowledged amongst Black men. While their feelings are never verbalized, it is apparent in the care they take of one another, as for them, the only way to survive is to see past superficial differences of opinion and rely on the only other people they can. Despite the inescapable horrors depicted in Hang Time, there is an optimism that Howard maintains that can be applied to society at large and feels extremely apt today; even in crisis, there is always the capacity to choose compassion, and it may just be the key to overcoming seemingly insurmountable power imbalances