Dyllón Burnside on Life After ‘Pose’ Onstage Making Broadway History
Taking in “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” the Broadway play from playwright Keenan Scott 2nd and director Steve H. Broadnax 3rd, is far from a silent experience. From the moment the show begins the audience inside the John Golden Theatre is engaged: talking back to the actors, murmuring in agreement, reacting in emotion.
The actor Dyllón Burnside, one of the play’s seven cast members, says it’s like this every single night — and it hits home the magic of being back onstage again, telling a story that is making history on Broadway.
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“One of the responses that I’ve heard a lot is that a lot of people have said, ‘wow, I know all of these men on the stage.’ A lot of Black folks who have come to see the show and they’re like, ‘that’s my brother’ or ‘this character is me’ or ‘this character is my father,’” Burnside says. “It’s been really interesting the way that this piece is affecting people. People have been really emotional. There’s lots of joy in the theater. People are laughing a lot and they’re talking back to us in the theater, which I love. It’s been a really cool cross section of feedback. Mostly people just say how grateful they are to get to witness it and get to see these portrayals of these Black men on stage.”
Since Burnside was last onstage in 2016, his life has changed dramatically, thanks to a little show called “Pose.” The 32-year-old became a sensation along with the rest of the series’ cast, as the show won multiple Emmys and became a cultural fixture (its final episode aired earlier this year).
Burnside says returning to the theater following the ending of “Pose” is a therapeutic experience in many ways.
“I see myself a lot more clearly now I think. I have a better understanding of who I am as an artist and what I want to say and how I want to say it,” he says. “Before, when I was on the stage, I was doing it because I thought, ‘this is what I need to do to become a good actor. I want to study theater, I want to be on the stage to sort of get my chops and pay my dues in a way. This is what all the greats did. They studied theater and they worked in the theater.’ I do come back to the theater with the mindset of coming back to my roots and really working on my craft and being grounded in the craft of the work that I do. I feel like I have less pressure or attachment to outcomes in a certain way. It’s really interesting. It’s really about the process for me.”
Courtesy of Emilio Madrid
“Thoughts of a Colored Man” follows seven Black men over the course of a single day in Brooklyn; each character is named for a different emotion or state of being, which is listed in the Playbill but isn’t expressed onstage until the very end of the play. Burnside is Love, a young man on a journey to discover love in his life.
“I think what Keenan has done brilliantly with this piece is created these archetypes of men and then really turned them on their head,” he says. “I think while my character is called Love, I don’t think he always shows up in a way that looks like love, what we traditionally think of as looking like love. He occupies a space of melancholy for much of the play. That’s sort of been the goal with this piece, is to really show Black men in a way that they are more than just the labels that have been put on them. They are three-dimensional human beings who are multifaceted and have inner lives that must be honored.
“For me, this piece has been about honoring my own inner life and about honoring the inner life of so many Black men who experience love, or want to experience love and are looking for ways to express it and don’t really know how,” he continues.
The play is one of the first new original productions to open on Broadway since the big return of the theater after the pandemic closure, and it’s making history as the first time a show has had a cast of all Black men, written, directed and lead produced by Black men as well.
“I think that it’s still yet to be seen where Broadway is headed. I don’t know that ‘Thoughts of a Colored Man’ can be called a case study of where it’s headed. What I will say is that it definitely marks a shift. ‘Thoughts of a Colored Man’ is very different from anything I’ve ever seen on Broadway,” Burnside says. “It’s refreshing to look out into the audience and see so many Black people who have bought tickets and come out to the theater. I’ve been working in the theater since 2012, and it’s always been said that Black people don’t come to the theater. They don’t come to Broadway. ‘Thoughts of a Colored Man’ has proven night after night, since we’ve started previews, that’s not the case. I think that when you give them compelling stories with a phenomenal cast and you market to them, they will come. When you allow people to tell their own stories, whatever sort of group you come from, marginalized people get to tell their own stories, they’re always more authentic.”
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