Living, and Dying, While Black in ‘Scraps’

NEW YORK — Three months after her boyfriend died, gunned down by police, Aisha is past the constant-crying phase of mourning. At 20, with their young son to look out for, she feels a grief subsumed in rage.

It’s not just that Forest is gone, killed when he raced out to buy diapers. It’s that she blames him, partly, for getting shot — because he, a young black man, dared to run through the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant, in Brooklyn, in the middle of the night.

“I know I told him to hurry, but no one told him to run,” she says, simmering with anger. “You know we can’t be runnin’ like that.”

Directed by Niegel Smith at the Flea Theater, Geraldine Inoa’s bracing and intense new play “Scraps” is about lives cut short by police violence, and the cataclysmic harm those killings do to the people left behind. But it’s also about the asphyxiating constriction of living while black in a society whose notions of acceptable behavior hinge on race: a narrow set of rules for black people, a far more forgiving one for whites.

Forest was 19, a college football player back home for just a day before he died, and his absence is the air that Aisha (Alana Raquel Bowers) breathes. The same is true for their unseen son, Sebastian, who at 5 cannot stop wetting the bed; Aisha’s sister, Adriana (Tanyamaria), a student at New York University; and their neighbor Jean-Baptiste (Roland Lane), an aspiring rapper who spends his days on the stoop of their building, getting high.

That’s where he is when he raps the prologue to the play, rhyming fiercely about “an entire generation of black men who were never allowed to be.” Next door, on the boarded-up storefront of a bodega (the set is by Ao Li), a mural serves as a memorial to The Notorious B.I.G., his sad brown eyes looking out from a somber face.

Inoa, a playwright to watch (and a writer for the AMC horror series “The Walking Dead”), melds various styles here, moving from the rap opener to a naturalistic first act. The second act (there is no intermission) begins with a disturbingly vivid suicide, then shifts into the unsettling, urgently heightened landscape of Sebastian’s nightmare.

He is 8 years old by then and played by Bryn Carter, an adult. If you can feel the influences here — Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Spike Lee and James Scruggs (“3/Fifths”) come to mind — Inoa nonetheless uses them in service of her own sharp vision.

Act 1 isn’t entirely successful. There’s some stilted exposition, and the principal men — Jean-Baptiste and Calvin (Michael Oloyede), who left the neighborhood for Columbia University a year ago and has hardly looked back — aren’t as richly written as the women. But, oh, Aisha and the vulnerable Adriana are marvelous, whip-smart roles. Bowers and Tanyamaria dig into them beautifully, fully mining their humor and complex emotion.

Inoa creates a microcosm of a black neighborhood, so self-contained that it feels like an invasion the moment a white police officer (a chilling Andrew Baldwin) enters. His arrival has the same ominous effect as the appearance of a white cop in Antoinette Nwandu’s “Pass Over.”

What unfolds from there is gut-punch sickening. Of course, a little boy is having nightmares.

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Event Information:

“Scraps”

Through Sept. 24 at the Flea Theater, Manhattan; 212-352-3101, theflea.org.

Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.