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A A A Comments By JOSEPH DUPARD JR. Thursday, Feb 16 2006

Growing up in the small Louisiana town of Lake Charles, African-American author Pamela Davis-Noland knew quite well that not all racism is black and white — it can be black and black. She takes on the subject in her novel Coffee-Colored Dreams, a critic's darling of a tome that has now been adapted to a play, which runs today only at the Heinen Theatre during a very busy All-Star Weekend.

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Set in New Orleans, Coffee-Colored Dreams is the story of Celia DuBois's frustration with love and her disgust with light-skin/dark-skin racism among blacks. She's had it with baby-mama drama and has no interest in a thug's passion. In fact, she feels she'll never find the right guy. But Celia's bleak outlook changes when Jeffery Jackson strolls into the Big Easy from Chicago and enters her life. Jeffery's challenge is to convince a woman scorned that he is completely unlike the rest, and that he and Celia are soul mates.

Reginald Edmund, an up-and-coming Houston playwright, will direct the stage version of Dreams. "It touches so many subjects," he says, "racial bias, sexual irresponsibility, love and inner-racism." As for Davis-Noland, she's hyped up on this new brew of her story. "I needed to find a way to get as many people as possible in one room to tell them about this book." Let's hope it lets out before the game starts.
Sun., Feb. 19, 5 p.m.

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