BULLET REVIEW: SHIRLEY CHISHOLM UNBOSSED & UNBOWED

NEW FEDERAL THEATRE BLACK HISTORY MONTH CELEBRATION

ANCESTRAL VOICES SOLO FESTIVAL

[Sadly the final performance of this run is Sunday Mar 2, 2025 3:00 PM]

https://www.instagram.com/unbossedunbowed/reel/DCz7OYWvCWM/

Sometimes you stumble into a gem. Ingrid Griffith is a gifted writer/performer who recreates Shirley Chisholm’s remarkable life story in an 80 minute one woman show at the New Federal Theatre at Broadway and West 76th Street ending today, Sunday March 2, 2025.

In 1969 Chisholm was the first black woman to be elected to the US Congress, from her district in Bedford Stuyvesant and the first black woman to run for President in 1972.

Griffith, with a spot on ear for dialect and accents, brings to life Shirley Chisholm and the wide range of powerful characters who impacted her life, including her parents in Brooklyn, her formative childhood years in Barbados and the bare-knuckled thicket of 1960’s Brooklyn community and machine politics as she navigated her way to the national stage.

The show works so well because of its historically granular, unexaggerated subtlety that captures Chisholm’s unshakeable focus on racial and economic justice in the cataclysmic late 1960s.

Writer performer Ingrid Griffith has been working on this project for years. In 2020 she won the “Outstanding Playwriting That Inspires Social Change” award for Unbossed and UnBowed”.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C9XxpXOOLm_/?igsh=ZGEwcm1xbTZmbTZu

In our audience was 29 year old New York State Senator Kristen Gonzalez, born in Elmhurst who has been representing parts of Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan in Albany since 2023.

Senator Gonzalez was introduced and welcomed before the play began. I never heard of her but during the entire play I was thinking of her and the path she was on that Shirley Chisholm helped make possible. On the way home I passed her in the lobby as she was being invited backstage and responded with, “I’d be honored”.