About the Play:

Buzzer is a full-length dark comedy by Tracey Scott Wilson. They say you can never go home again, but African American attorney Jackson is determined to show off his success. When he returns to the mean streets of his youth with his white girlfriend and best friend, he discovers a changing neighbourhood where race, sex and class are what everyone is thinking about but no one is confronting.

Money, race, love, trust, and fear are at the door – this dark comedy pushes every button – buzz us in. Jackson, an upwardly-mobile African American attorney, has just bought an apartment in a transitioning neighbourhood in Brooklyn. He sees the potential of his old neighbourhood, as does his white girlfriend Suzy…at first. When Jackson's childhood friend Don leaves rehab to crash with them, the trio quickly becomes trapped between the tensions inside their own home and the dangers that may lurk outside.

Buzzer was commissioned and premiered by Pillsbury House Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2012. It was subsequently produced in 2014 at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. Its New York premiere was at the Public Theatre in 2015.

Cast: 1 female, 3 male

What people say:

"Skillful…[a] slow-burning, thought-provoking drama…." — The New York Times

"A sizzling drama about race, real estate, and sexual betrayal." — Chicago Tribune

"[Tracey Scott Wilson] does not write diatribes or position papers. Race is not a national conversation but an inner turmoil…in an argument about something else or in a split-second decision about opening the building's door to a stranger. The fact that the main gentrifier here is black turns the usual view of the subject inside out: Can one gentrify one's own home?" — New York Magazine

"Issues of class, race, and the politics surrounding a community in flux are pulled into an engaging debate about a term ['gentrification'] whose overuse has zapped it of nearly all meaning…The resulting snapshot is an interesting one, illuminating the hidden dimensions of this cultural transformation that realtors rarely include in their property tours." — TheaterMania.com

About the Playwright:

Tracey Scott Wilson is an African American playwright and TV writer (including FX's period hit The Americans) whose works have been produced nationally and internationally. She graduated from Rutgers University in 1989 with a BA in English and from Temple University with an MA in English Literature in 1993.