The world premiere comedy follows a Black woman playwright facing off against wealthy white women.

On February 22, Toni Tresca and I attended the world premiere opening of Chasing Breadcrumbs from Local Theater Company. Afterward, we recorded our conversation reviewing the show — here’s the edited transcript.

Alex: Chasing Breadcrumbs is a world premiere play by Michelle Tyrene Johnson now up at the Boulder Dairy Arts Center. It’s a comedy, and we thought it was pretty funny throughout.

Toni: Yeah, the story is about playwright Serena, played by Kristina Fountaine. She’s been on a run lately with a couple of fantastic roles at Curious, Cullud Wattah, and The Confederates — among a number of other roles. Serena is a Black playwright who often writes about race, and her agent, Gwen, played by Michaela Murray, comes to her with a commission.

Alex: Both were excellent performances, as was, unsurprisingly, her work in this production.

Toni: There’s this society of Karens, that’s a thing in the play, and they want her to write a play about this woman who she’s never heard of, who they say was a part of the civil rights movement because she supposedly marched with Dr. King in Tennessee.

The Karens, from left: Heather Hughes, Noelia Antweiler and Andréa Morales. | Photo: Shannon Altner

Alex: And so they wanted her to write a play based on this shred of sketchy history with the idea of “reclaiming” the reputation of white women — we’re not a bunch of racists and that kind of thing. The Karens are led by Rebecca, played with gleeful rich-lady energy by Noelia Antweiler.

Toni: She leads with smiles, but you can tell there are daggers underneath. And she makes a rather compelling offer. It ends up being $175,000 to write this play — quite uncommon in the American theatre.

Alex: Unheard of, right?

Toni: Yeah, Serena says at one point that something like the past 10 theatres put together haven’t paid her that amount.

Alex: So, it sets up this massive standoff between Rebecca and Serena. But there are some other interesting characters as well, including Serena’s brother, who is part of the reason she accepts this commission. She finds the project fairly detestable, but it turns out her brother needs a kidney transplant. And they’ve promised her they can fast-track a “gently used kidney,” as they call it.

Toni: He’s a gay character going through some health incidents related to the diabetes that the character has. Lavour Addison, who plays the character, and Kristina portray the pair with a really touching, natural sibling dynamic. There are a lot of mean jokes back and forth, which is very true to sibling dynamics. You can tell it all comes from a clear place of love.

Alex: Absolutely. And, of course, the money would also help them because they live in a tiny apartment in New York City. Also, as a side note, Lavour replaced James Brunt, who was seriously injured in a car accident just a few days before the play’s premiere. He is OK and recovering, and our thoughts go out to him. So Lavour came on opening night with the script in hand but really did a nice job of pulling off the part without much of a hitch.

Toni: James was injured on Wednesday night, the day before the company was scheduled to begin previews on Thursday, so a performance was canceled on Thursday to give them more time to step in. At the after-party on Saturday, Betty Hart, who is the director of the piece, addressed that in her speech, saying that there was a bittersweet quality to opening night because James, who had been working very hard for this for quite a long time, was now not able to complete the piece. But Lavour certainly rose to the moment and made sure that the show could go on.

Alex: Well said and they really did have great dynamics between them. However, there was one thing that I didn’t quite understand. I must have missed the genesis of this inside joke between the Sound of Music song “Do-Re-Mi’ song that drove him crazy. What was that? Because they kept repeating and I was like, I don’t get it.

Toni: That was a musical song that apparently always used to bug him when they were children, so she uses it to torture him. It’s nothing more than that. There’s nothing deeper there. It didn’t super work for me either and didn’t get better the more they repeated it.

Michaela Murray, Lavour Addison and Kristina Fountaine. | Photo: Shannon Altner

Alex: Okay, so nothing more than that.

Toni: I guess I’m like Kevin because I too found it quite irritating. And it got less funny the more it went on.

Alex: Much of the comic dialogues lands, but there were definitely a few cliche, flat jokes. I know you pointed out that there’s a lot of inside baseball theatre stuff that seemed a little self-indulgent.

Toni:  I almost wonder if the action and the themes of the play touching on the tokenization of Black people by white folks might have been more powerful if they were set in a non-theatre setting. A lot of the ways that those power dynamics are shown are through those inside-baseball settings — the rehearsal room, jokes about blocking, musical theatre in-jokes. It might not have been as truthful for the playwright to write about something in a different setting, but I almost wonder if it might have been more impactful to put a little bit of distance from that and put it in something that the audience might be able to relate to rather than the playwright.

Alex: Michelle Tyrene Johnson spared no opportunity to stick pins in the three white characters, who are mostly portrayed as evil ninnies. So, if tokenization of Black people is bad, why is it OK to flip it around to where it’s sort of the same thing about white people? It seems clear we’re not supposed to ever sympathize with white people in plays like this.

Toni: Hm, I’m not sure I agree with that interpretation. I found it interesting that the stage manager character, played by Andréa Morales, is included in the rehearsal context. We later find she’s more sympathetic even though she’s still largely ineffective. But she doesn’t have a lot of lines, so her character doesn’t have the power to change the situation. Meanwhile, the two others, particularly Noelia’s Rebecca, are played as monstrous figures. I think that characterization works within the context of the play itself and the satire that it’s trying to achieve.

Alex: Noelia’s great at playing unpleasant characters like this. I also wanted to call out Heather Hughes, who played Debbie. She was really strong — a great comic actor who spices up her performance with a lot of very funny bits — like vocal glitches and facial expressions.

Toni: I agree, and I also quite enjoyed Michaela Murray’s performance as Gwen, the agent. She was quite appropriately focused on getting her 10 percent agent’s cut throughout the play, but you could also tell that she had a real sense of kinship with Serena and respected her as a friend and human being. But she can only help so much because Serena is a bold personality who enjoys getting into fights with the other characters, which leads to many of the play’s amusing scenes.

Alex: Definitely two very headstrong characters in Rebecca and Serena going at it. And Michaela was great as a comic go-between with the unenviable job of trying to rein in this bombastic character, Serena, who doesn’t take shit and is very outspoken. The production itself was well done. The set was fairly minimal with a lot of moving parts, so they changed scenes pretty often. I thought that was done well, with seamless transitions.

Toni: And that was paired well with sound cues by sound designer CeCe Smith. Lots of fun, high-energy music covering the changeovers and some pretty effective lighting design by Sean Mallary. The Dairy can often be hard to light too because the lighting rigs are really constrictive in those spaces, but Mallary did skillful work.

Alex: And as usual, a nice job by Betty Hart directing this one. I thought she teased out six excellent performances from the characters and moved the whole thing along at the brisk clip required by the script. And of course, she had to ad-lib very quickly with the injury to James Brunt to pull this thing together with Lavour stepping in.

Toni: This play was a part of the 2024 Local Lab — Local’s new-play process — and I remember thinking when I heard the reading last year that the play was timely but not super urgent. That’s changed given the state of our political moment, the cuts to arts funding and the constant attacks on DEI and people of color by the current administration. The play’s themes really just hit harder — and there’s even an added line about that from recent news.

Alex: Yeah, there’s definitely a lot to think about too in addition to being quite funny. It’s also interesting to note that this is showing in Boulder, isn’t it?

Toni: Absolutely. It left me wondering though how folks in Boulder might respond to it, particularly because the play is so critical of rich white funders, many of whom are probably sitting in the theatre, many of whom perhaps even funded the play that we were watching that evening.

Alex: Art imitating life and all that stuff. Well, I think people who have lots of money like that are fairly thick-skinned when it comes down to it. It’s like, “Well, you can make fun of me all you want. I’ve still got all the money.”

Toni:  But overall, we’d recommend checking out Chasing Breadcrumbs from Local Theater company. The play features excellent performances from six of the area’s finest actors, who execute a mostly sharp script that is agilely directed by Betty Hart and has high production value throughout.