National News

On Stage in Manhattan Again, but He Still Has the Prince’s Number

NEW YORK — Here it is four years later, and Steven Prescod still has not performed his one-person show “A Brooklyn Boy” in London’s West End.

Posted Updated
On Stage in Manhattan Again, but He Still Has the Prince’s Number
By
JAMES BARRON
, New York Times

NEW YORK — Here it is four years later, and Steven Prescod still has not performed his one-person show “A Brooklyn Boy” in London’s West End.

Some things do take time. Prince William has not ascended to the throne, either.

The prince figures in this because he and Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, saw a shorter version of “A Brooklyn Boy” when they visited New York City in 2014. The gossip columns were abuzz: The prince said “A Brooklyn Boy” would find an audience in London and told Prescod to be in touch.

“Prince William has handed out his telephone number. TO A STRANGER,” declared the Australian edition of Cosmopolitan.

Simon Perry, who covered the royals for People magazine and is now its chief foreign correspondent, described the scene after the performance of “A Brooklyn Boy” that the prince and duchess attended. The prince “went straight up to Mr. Prescod and told him how impressed he was and really wants to help this guy get on the world stage,” Perry said in a video that accompanied his article.

Prescod is onstage again with “A Brooklyn Boy,'’ this time at the East Village Playhouse, at 340 East Sixth St., near First Avenue. It is a storefront rented by CityKids, a nonprofit arts group whose founder says it aims to build “safe spaces where youth turn their pain into purpose.”

Like William, CityKids figures in Prescod’s story. But it is not in “A Brooklyn Boy,” either.

The show is a tour de force. Prescod tells his story with an agility that seems true to life, and also larger than life. He plays 32 characters, from his mother and father — on the night they met and fell for each other — to friends he hung out with, and got in trouble with.

But “A Brooklyn Boy” is about who he was, not who he is, and the who-he-was part of his life ended when he went to CityKids in 2009. “A Brooklyn Boy” stops without examining the transformation that followed or that other high point in his life, the big moment with the royals.

For someone who tells his life story onstage, Prescod was the quiet one in a conversation that included Moises Roberto Belizario, who shares a credit for the book, music and lyrics with him and a solo credit as the director. It was Belizario who did most of the talking, although Laurie Meadoff, founder of CityKids, chimed in.

Belizario said there was a producer “we were working with” on a London production who wanted a promise that William and Catherine would attend “A Brooklyn Boy” on opening night. Royals are like presidents, governors or mayors on this side of the Atlantic. They have schedules. The palace handlers would make no such promises, even after so much effusiveness.

Belizario said Prescod was no angel when he arrived at City Kids — Prescod, who was on probation after pleading guilty to armed robbery and assault, was sent there by another nonprofit group, Cases, a clearinghouse that seeks ways to help young offenders pull their lives together. Prescod said he had told someone at Cases that he loved to dance and rap. “They said, ‘We know a great place for you — CityKids,'” he recalled. “I thought it was a day care center.”

Belizario, 49, said he was no angel, either. He arrived at CityKids after he was arrested at 17 on drug and weapons possession charges (he was acquitted). Eventually he was hired for its staff and is now its artistic director. He said Prescod made an impression. “It was like I was looking in the mirror, 10 years before,” Belizario said, “and he could deliver the message I had wanted to deliver.”

Prescod, who had been arrested when he was 16, said more about Belizario in an article for Essence than he did sitting next to him. Prescod wrote that he figured Belizario “was going to be just like every other man in my life — a know-it-all that wants to push me to be who he wants me to be.” He said he had been told that he would not have to “talk about what I did wrong, all I had to do was show up, tell them that I know how to answer phones, file papers and work on the computer. So I was prepared to do just that.”

Belizario’s first question was what had Prescod done wrong.

They bonded. Belizario told him to write down stories of his life. Prescod began constructing scenes like the one in “A Brooklyn Boy” about his appearance in court. He has a flair for details — the court clerk’s voice, calling his case number; the judge’s voice, offering him five years on probation, later reduced to three years for good behavior; and his own thoughts as he wondered where his life was headed.

He acknowledged that he was lucky, although he says little in “A Brooklyn Boy” about just how lucky he was — lucky that the judge sentenced him to probation rather than prison. And lucky later, while on probation, that three police officers did not find a gun he had been holding for a friend.

He saw their patrol car coming down the street. He reached up, hiding the gun just out of sight on a ledge above the front door of his family’s home. The officers stopped, apparently not realizing where he had reached. They apparently assumed he had gone for the mailbox, to hide a drug stash.

“They kept saying, ‘Where’d you put it?'” — without realizing that Prescod was worried about a different “it” than the one they had in mind. He said the relatives he lived with had not known he had the gun — “I kept lying about it,” he said.

The officers went into the house with their guns drawn. His grandfather, an aunt and a young cousin were inside. One of the officers told him, “You’re lucky I’m a good cop or else I could have shot you.” Or, Prescod said, if the officers had found the gun, “I’d have gone to prison till I was 22. I was 22 when I met the duke and duchess.”

That encounter happened because Meadoff, who founded CityKids in the 1980s and left to work with young people through media, had returned. A friend called her and said the prince and the duchess were coming and asked if they could visit CityKids.

The next thing Prescod knew, he was onstage with the prince and duchess in the front row.

After the show, he said, “I thought we were just going to say hello.”

But the prince wanted to talk.

Here Belizario interrupted. “It was a validating moment,” he said. “It let him realize, he matters.”

Copyright 2024 New York Times News Service. All rights reserved.