The Black Boy in Pink (YES Festival)

The Black Boy in Pink is a bold new work by a young provocative playwright set in his hometown of Cincinnati. The year is 1959. Wyatt Frost is a young black man who has been forced to make hard choices to survive. Flickering across his fuzzy RCA Victor television set comes the possibility of a different existence. As his life becomes entangled with the legacy of a picturesque local wealthy family, will Wyatt be able to choose the life he has always wanted? Will he be able to color pink his otherwise black and white existence?

Isaiah Reaves is a dramatist and actor based in Cincinnati, OH. Reaves began writing at the age of eleven. At fifteen years old, his play Wyatt’s Bed received a reading at the Tony Award-winning Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. Since then, his full-length plays have been staged at The Cincinnati Fringe Festival, where his production of The Blackface Project was named a CityBeat Critic’s Pick in 2018. His work has also been produced as part of the Know Theatre of Cincinnati’s Serials and Underground series, as well as in the One Minute Play Festival, Northern Kentucky University, and the Clifton Performance Theatre. Reaves has received training from the College-Conservatory of Music’s Summer Playwriting Workshop and is currently a junior BFA candidate at Northern Kentucky University, where he is the Ken Jones Playwriting Scholarship recipient.