The solo performance as a dramatic art form is well-established. Caught in the social machinery, the character is an ordinary person who combats huge imperial forces but, being ordinary, must use ordinary means and should be of good humor so he can roll with the punch, come back smiling and land a solid blow on the jaw of the monster. And the story should be true.
Brian Copeland created Not a Genuine Black Man in 2004 at the Marsh, a boiler-room of dramatic entrepreneurship in San Francisco’s Mission District, and has performed it over 500 times.
When he was just a boy, his family moves to a white-only suburb and there the trouble escalates.
With agility, Copeland plays over 20 characters in the two-hour show including himself, himself as an 8-year-old, his mother, his sister, his grandmother, his son, his father, his landlord, 3 policemen, 2 lawyers, his father, a waitress, a pastor of an all-white church, a hate-letter writer, two white teenaged racists and several irate neighbors. He also fragments the narrative in time, flashing back and forth between his childhood and his current status as a successful performer, family man and business man. And he keeps it all together for the audience. 
The drama includes genuinely tragic moments relieved frequently with inside jokes. The show has range, turning corners abruptly, humor and success sharply juxtaposed with failure and depression. He is a talented comedian but this is not two hours of stand up. The man has a lived sense of the tragic.
Copeland has had his own radio and TV shows, has written a book detailing the experiences in Not a Genuine Black Man and there is a TV series in the works.
Not a Genuine Black Man plays at the Off Market Theatre in San Francisco through July.
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