James Sheldon Plays

Review by Jonathan Kalb. James Sheldon’s Reparations is a new play about racial grievance, guilt and retribution in America that, oddly enough, is both very smart and completely sincere. What I mean by that is that theatrical intelligence—particularly in the tonally tricky arena of race plays—usually seems to mean irony or cynicism nowadays: fractured realities, repurposed quotations, recycled myths, characters in masks or disguises. Reparations, by contrast, is resolutely pe