The Story That Tells Itself Without Asking

A Black playwright telling a Black story in a predominantly white theater system is framed as representation victory—but Kwame Kwei-Armah's CrazySexyCool. Opened at Arena Stage in Washington DC, reproduces the exact mechanism it claims to critique.

A Black creative professional made an artistic decision about a Black story without the participation of the Black women who lived it.

Tionne "T-Boz" Tenese, Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes. Rozonda "Chilli" Thomas did not choose this adaptation—they had no creative authority over the narrative that bears their names and dramatizes their most private struggles, from T-Boz's sickle cell disease to Left Eye's abusive relationship to the grief following her death in a car accident in 2002. The mechanism at work is what institutions call "vertical representation"—someone from the marginalized group gains access to institutional power and makes decisions on behalf of the group. Looks like progress from the outside but doesn't disturb the structure that required them to gain access in the first place.

Consider how this differs from the actual model TLC pioneered in the 1990s. The group controlled their own narrative—they chose their producers, their songwriters, their image, their sound. Left Eye Lopes produced her own work. A musical about their lives that strips that sovereignty from them, even in the name of "authentic" representation, takes three women who insisted on telling their own story and puts them on stage as characters in someone else's.

The show celebrates Black creative control while removing it from the actual Black women whose stories are being told.

Representation gets absorbed into the system it was meant to critique. The language of "Black stories made by Black creatives" becomes institutional shorthand—a checkbox that signals progress while the actual power structures stay intact, which means gatekeeping doesn't disappear when the gatekeeper changes races, it just learns new language.