How Blood Go

Congo Square Theatre Company proudly announces the latest iteration of its Celebration of Healing with How Blood Go—a play that explores racial inequality's past, present, and future in the American healthcare system. 

The story centers around four main characters, Quinntasia, Didi, Ace, and Bean. Quinntasia, who once weighed over 300 pounds, is now the picture of health and fitness. To help others, she opened a wellness program called Quinntessentials. Hoping to get funding for her program, she works with a healthcare company that has placed a device on her neck to monitor her weight loss. However, when she learns that the changes to her healthy body weren't solely due to her hard work but that the device makes Quinntasia, a black female, look like a white female named Quin in the eyes of white nurses and doctors—she has to decide if the funding for her program is more important then her self-worth as a black woman.

In flashbacks, we also learn of the lineage of Quinntasia's family mistreatment when Bean was a part of the unethical experimental medical treatment of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. During these experimental trials, doctors used the term "Bad Blood," which is toxicity in the body due to body system deficiencies, causing a person's body to detoxify naturally, as a mechanism to fear to get blacks into a trial testing for syphilis; without their knowledge or consent. Like many black men who the U.S. Public Health Service conducted this unethical syphilis experiment, Bean was enticed with free meals, health care, and burial stipends to the syphilis trial program. 

This historical story is crucial to the writer of this profound story, Lisa Langford, as her grandfather's uncle was a patient in the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, where studies show that 128 people died of syphilis or related complications, 40 wives were infected, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis. And the significance of the headstone after a black person died, placed in an unmarked grave, suggests to white society that the person buried is not worthy of remembrance and should therefore be ignored entirely and forgotten. The value of the headstone was to remove that stigma and prove that their black lives matter.

Theatre Artistic Director Ericka Ratcliff hopes audiences coming to this play are ready to explore racial inequities in the healthcare systems and practices against blacks. A South Side native of Chicago, director Tiffany Fulson brilliantly brings playwright Lisa Langford's storyline of racial inequalities in the American healthcare system towards blacks. Fulson and Langford masterfully illuminated and reeducated the audience with this powerful narrative about how white society uses a form of pareidolia, a psychological phenomenon in which the mind perceives a specific image or pattern difference or where it does not exist— where blacks must be exclusively white to receive fair treatment. And dissecting the crucial care blacks need in the medical field and how whites arbitrarily and historically have discriminated against blacks considering healthcare. Langford even illustrates how blacks segregated themselves through education, using Ace as an illiterate man that became educated— melting into the perceived image of whiteness. 

How Blood Go is a disturbing intellectual juggernaut with an explosive and intense storyline that will knock you off your feet. Still, some will find it draconian or think it's just another angry black story about unfair treatment, and they are correct. Who wouldn't get angry about being treated like a lab experiment, viewed as not human, and the continually strained relationship and mistrust between the healthcare system and African Americans in this country? 

How Blood Go features the star of The Chi actor Yolonda Ross as Didi, Congo Square ensemble member Ronald L. Connor (Ace), Jyreika Guest(Quinntasia), Kayla Kennedy(White Quinn/ Frank), Caron Buinis(White Didi/Anne/Norm), Marcus Moore(Tron/John Brown), Kristin Ellis(Big Gal/Negress) and David Dowd(Bean/Negro). All of the cast performed magnificently, but the scenes where Quinntasia and Quin switched places on the mini trampoline and between the wooden frame mirror magnified the visual illusion of the supremacy the white race feels over blacks. 

There are a lot of uncomfortable truths in the play, with several people in the audience being shocked and appalled, but when has the darkness of injustice ever been comfortable? Unfortunately, some of our darkest historical events have been removed and conspicuously never added to remain comfortable. Plays like How Blood Go are needed to remind us that we all bleed the same.   

Let's Play Theatrical Review Highly Recommends Congo Square Theatre's How Blood Go at Steppenwolf Theater. 

Congo Square Theatre Company

Presents the World Premiere of

HOW BLOOD GO

Written by Lisa Langford

Directed by Tiffany Fulson

March 11 - April 23, 2023