About Us
Black Hero Theater is an education forward theater company that creates a story around antagonistic characters in black comic mythology and makes them antiheroes in world history. The African American predicament in this country has forced black people to be looked at and construed as villains, therefore young people internalize their struggle as a villain's plight. Black Hero Theater will show them, through thespian arts and historical education that destiny has called them to be neither villains or victims, but antiheroes!
First-Rate Curriculum
Black Hero Theater uses a five act play structure in which: the Exposition is a current event, the Rising Action is a historical consequence that led to this event, the Climax reveals an unrecognized strength within the antihero as a reaction to historical revelations, the Falling Action resolves or questions the resolve of the historical conflicts, and the Resolution establishes a new norm state for the world and the re-modified, once lost antagonist.
Commitment to Excellence
Our mission is to teach young people who they are and why destiny has chosen them to be heroic. Our vision is to create an interpretation of history through theater that will spark the young mind that will alter the course of time.
Past Productions
The Effect of the Perfomance on the Youth
The Book of Killmonger was a production produced/written/directed by the founder and president of Black Hero Productions, Michael Elton Casey. He was asked to put on this production in front of 150 fifth graders at View Park Accelerated Preparatory Charter School because they needed a vehicle to teach them Afrocentric awareness as well as historical and cultural relevancy. The play began with the Exposition highlighting the discriminatory arrest of two African American males at a Starbucks in Philadelphia through a conversation, Zuri and the Shaman have in Wakanda. They cast T'challla and Killmonger back in time so that T'challa can see the roots of this discrimination. The Rising Action traversed: Killmonger and T'challa traveling through Harriet Tubman freeing slaves on a plantation in 1838, the real Black Panthers battling J Edgar Hoover and the FBI in 1968, Reaganomincs affected street corner brothers being confronted by Regan and Ricky Ross in 1985 and a missapropriated Black Lives Matter Movement led by a white preacher from Detroit in 2018. The Climax saw Killmonger exposing the hypocrisy of co-opted black liberation movements. The Falling Action exhibited Killmonger fighting for black rights against Wakandan naivety, and the Resolution established Killmonger "drop squadding" T'challa so that he can accept his responsibility in fighting against African American oppression. The youth participated in a procedure called Instantaneous Observation Authoring where they wrote their observations of the play and had it compiled into a book on the spot.
Learn More
See some of the writings of the youth about whether they thought Killmonger was good or bad.