Emmy, Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild, and NAACP Image Award winner Alfre Woodard has a new film opening the New Voices in Black Cinema festival. Ben Bowman’s Knucklehead, an indie drama starring Woodard and Gbenga Akinnagbe (Modern Missionary [2006] at The Intiman Theatre, The Thin Place [2010] in the NYC Fringe Festival) as a dysfunctional mother-son pair screens on Thursday, March 26th in Brooklyn.
When his brother is shot, mentally disabled Langston Bellows (Gbenga Akinnagbe, The Wire) is left without a protector in Brooklyn’s housing projects. Now under the control of his abusive mother (Alfre Woodard, 12 Years A Slave) he must take his future into his own hands. Langston strives for independence from his prior life, from his mother, and from his fractured mind.
Woodard was last seen on Broadway in Regina Taylor’s Drowning Crow (the 2004 adaptation and updating of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull), opposite Anthony Mackie (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, A Behanding in Spokane), Aunjanue Ellis (Joe Turner’s Come And Gone, The Tempest), Ebony Jo-Ann (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Mule Bone, The Sunshine Boys, Gem of the Ocean), Stephen McKinley Henderson (King Hedley II, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Fences, A Raisin in the Sun), and Tracie Thoms (Rent, Stick Fly). She made her professional theatre debut in 1974 at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage. Her breakthrough role came three years later (1977) in the off-Broadway production of Ntozake Shange’s classic for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf.
Alfre’s film and television career is vast and diverse. She won her Screen Actors Guild Award in 1995 for her work in the film version of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson.
Knucklehead screens Thursday, March 26th at the Peter Jay Sharp Building BAM Rose Cinemas. To purchase tickets and get more information, CLICK HERE.
