Ever since Karl “Dice Raw” Jenkins moved from being a part of The Roots as a rapper, producer and lyricist into the world of theater, his life has changed radically.
As a playwright, Jenkins penned staunchly serious and provocative works such as ‘The Last Jimmy’ and its tale of Black male incarceration, as well as the biographical theater piece ‘Henry Box Brown’ based on the 19th-century slave who escaped to freedom by mailing himself in a wooden crate to abolitionists in Philadelphia.
After selling out theaters throughout his hometown with his plays, Jenkins in 2019 became the executive producer at North Broad Street’s New Freedom Theatre. Another legendary Philadelphia icon, the New Freedom Theatre is renowned, since 1966, for its dedication to Black theater.
Now, Jenkins is merging his role as executive producer and his vocation as a playwright into a new show for NFT: ‘Forgotten Founding Fathers.’ This hip hop dance-based theatrical odyssey on the life of Black leaders crucial to the American Revolutionary War and the Reconstruction, stars Vernon Keith Ruffin Jr. aka Keith from Up the Block playing multiple characters, and runs February 15-17.
“I wrote ‘Forgotten Founding Fathers’ for several reasons, the first of which is that our mission at NFT is to chronicle Black lives through the arts,” says Jenkins, who wrote his new play with fellow Philadelphian Jamal Miller. “The other reason was with the huge success of ‘Hamilton’, perhaps it is time to mention actual Black American heroes of the Revolution. This is no dis and no shade to Lin-Manuel Miranda – he’s great – but I did want to take that same energy and root it in something that was important to me.”
Jenkins is a multi-disciplinary artist who uses different canvases for different projects – songs with The Roots such as “Don’t See Us,” and solo albums like ‘Reclaiming the Dead’, or theater pieces such as ‘The Last Jimmy’ in which to express his ideas or concerns.
“Funnily enough, some of The Roots albums are like theatrical events… their first manager, Richard Nichols was into theater, and I always thought of him as my model.”
From that hip hop standpoint, Jenkins uses Philly rap legend Keith from Up the Block as one of his principal stage workers for ‘Forgotten Founding Fathers’ — the cast includes actors and dancers Josh Culbreath, Mike Stew, Minister Jamie Knight, Elyse Starlet, Kieran Choi, Jaylah Martin and Conor Choi — to tell his magnificent and magnetic stories.
“There’s so many dates and times with so much historic information in ‘Forgotten Founding Fathers’ that Keith really brings the script for life, makes these actual heroes come alive,” says Jenkins. “Perhaps if I had gotten up there and did all that, I might have seemed like a robot.”
Revolutionary War activist Crispus Attucks (killed as an unarmed Black man), Wentworth Cheswell (who rode with Paul Revere), and U.S. Army leader Prince Whipple, (royalty that got swept up into the slave trade) — it is stories such as these that Jenkins wanted to tell with ‘Forgotten Founding Fathers’.
“When I used to come home from school as a kid, I would tell my parents about how we learned about slavery in class, and they always told me not to worry about that, because in reality, we were descended from kings and queens,” says Jenkins. “That wasn’t, however, what I learned during those lessons on slavery. My teachers rivaled that information, because of a lack of information then. But characters such as real-life African Prince Whipple prove those facts.”
For more information or to purchase tickets, visit freedomtheatre.org
