FIRST ACTS

A literary memoir traces a playwright’s turbulent childhood.

A star pupil in his all-Black elementary school, Frazier matriculated into the honors program at a mostly White junior high school outside the borders of his Washington, D.C., neighborhood. His first day of seventh grade was a shock, to say the least. “I’d never seen so many white kids in all my life—that is, not all at once and up so close without the protection of the TV screen,” he remembers. “All kinds of white. Pinks and reds, pales and brights. A rising, raging sea of white. A trembling, threatening tidal wave of white.” (To make things worse, he was the only student wearing a tie.) It was the beginning of the author’s balancing act, one that he would perform for the rest of his life: learning to exist simultaneously in two worlds. With this memoir, the seasoned playwright records the formative experiences of his youth—dealing with dyslexia, learning to dance, and serving in ROTC while struggling to hide his attraction to other men. With each new challenge, he grew more adept at seeing the world from a bifurcated perspective, a skill that would serve him well when he embarked on a writing career in adulthood. Frazier’s prose is measured and often lyrical. Some of the essayistic chapters have a narrative quality, but most orbit their subject in a discursive, anecdotal manner. One late chapter concerns the author’s lifelong ritual of ironing his shirts, a topic that allows him to reflect on the tensions underlying his fastidiousness: “It’s not that I’m incapable of leaving messes or that I suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder or have some kind of fabulous fashion sense. It’s more that I’d rather not see things messy, which of course can lead to wanting things—myself included—to be seen as perfect, which at times has caused more problems than it’s solved.” Equal parts bildungsroman and a love letter to the Washington neighborhood of Anacostia, the memoir succeeds in its deft accumulation of small, quiet epiphanies.

A probing, engaging account of the indelible moments that formed a writer.