Sheffield — Kareem M. Lucas will be performing his monologue “A Warm Winter” at the Race Brook Lodge on Saturday, April 20, at 8 p.m. Lucas, who is based out of Harlem, NY., was born in Brooklyn and has created multiple monologues over the years, including “iNegro, a rhapsody”; “The Maturation of an Inconvenient Negro”; and “Black Is Beautiful, But It Ain’t Always Pretty.”
“A Warm Winter,” an autobiographical monologue, has been described by Lucas as “part confession, part standup, and part sermon.” “The first seed of the piece took place during a very warm winter, which is why I took the title from what was going on in the world,” Lucas told The Berkshire Edge. “I kept the title because I like the sound of it. It’s a metaphor for something not being quite right in the world, with things shifting in ways that we can’t predict—like with global warming and everything else. But then, what does this mean for a person in the world?”
Lucas said that the monologue is about a very specific incident that happened on New Year’s Eve in 2015. “I mistakenly took synthetic marijuana and had a horrible reaction to it, I ended up in an ER and almost died,” Lucas said. “It was an insane experience, and I go through a lot about what happened to me throughout the show. I had this sense of heightened paranoia and fear. My body was out of control and it was crazy. My friends and family were scared, and all these strangers were trying to help me, and the shit got real very quickly. But at the end of it, I was grateful I was able to survive that. But then there was this weight of responsibility. I was like, okay, I made it through that, and how can I make sure that doesn’t happen again? But what does this incident all mean?”
Lucas explained that the monologue is an attempt to get underneath what happened and why it happened in the first place. “What I learned is that I was using all of these different things to escape what I was feeling and where I was,” Lucas said. “Eventually, that desire to escape just brought me to confront everything I was trying to escape. I learned that everything I was trying to look away from, that’s all something I will have to face sooner or later.”
Lucas said that “[t]here are people who see themselves reflected in [his] experiences and the stories that [he] tells,” so he chooses to share his experiences with people through his monologues. “Through my storytelling, they don’t feel alone,” Lucas said. “People can start moving towards a place of healing. I’m very fixated on taking ugly things that we try to hide, the suffering that people are ashamed of, and I try to make it beautiful. I try to give it meaning so we can try to be more integrated and aligned as human beings. I’m excited to dig into my experiences, see where I can take it with the audience, and see how we all can grow and learn together.”
For more information about the performance and to buy tickets, visit Race Brook Lodge’s website.
