Professor's Play Premiers This May
Alshawn Rushing
Issue date: 4/28/08 Section: Features
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Sharman is hot-meaning he knows how to break a sweat.
Professor Sharman is a cultural anthropologist who has most recently been busy putting out an off-Broadway play entitled "The Small of Her Back", which tries to explain what happens when the world of online anonymity collides with the real world.
Sharman is a busy man. He has been doing work in Costa Rica. He also has a new book coming out, which is a collaboration with his wife. The book covers the story of night shift workers throughout New York City. It is expected to come out in fall of this year and he currently has another play and a movie in the works.
"The Small of Her Back" is about a self-diagnosed bi-polar woman named Piper who has an online friendship with a girl named Mollie. Piper convinces Mollie that she is capable of taking her own life. The plot of the play speeds up when Mollie's brother John comes to visit Piper unexpectedly.
When John arrives he finds that Piper isn't exactly what he expected and soon realizes he may be the one in the position of needing help, not Piper. It's important to know that there's a lot more to the story than meets the eye, and everyone isn't who they appear to be.
"Anthropology is about telling stories, and telling a good story is critical to being a good anthropologist… If you're going to boil it down, telling stories is what we do as cultural anthropologists," said Sharman.
He added, "It required a lot of observational research, going online and observing how people interact."
With The Small of Her Back, Sharman honors the boundary between anthropology and fiction while still portraying his characters from an anthropological perspective.
He said, "It's coming out of a place of trying to understand how other people experience the world."
The original title of the play was supposed to be "Age/Sex/Location" named after the standard greeting in any chat room; however the title was already used. So the next suitable option was "The Small of Her Back" which is a line from the play.
"[It is] a line that evokes intimacy - something we all crave and something the internet provides only a fleeting, thin version of. It is also a reference to the woman, Mollie, that both characters share, though we never see," said Sharman.
Though this is Sharman's first play, he's written several scripts before. A few years ago he began writing scripts as a creative exercise in order to rekindle his interest in writing screenplays.
A one-act play became an entire script, and soon he was compelled to share his work. Sharman rented a studio and staged his own reading. Among the fifty in attendance, one was a play director starting her own theater company. Six months later, Sharman was tapped to have his play performed off Broadway.
Sharman did not always know he wanted to become a cultural anthropologist. His journey into cultural anthropology started in the film department at the University of Texas.
As a film major, Sharman became disenchanted after the failure of his first film project. Described by Sharman as a "civil war zombie vampire movie," the film didn't get a good reception, despite starring David Arquette and Billy Bob Thornton.
With a year left at the university, he began to wonder what he ought to do with his life and took an interest in art history. Even though art captivated his interest, he became even more interested in the people and opted to become an anthropologist.
After graduating from Oxford with a PhD in cultural anthropology, he began his career studying the Caribbean Diaspora in Latin America through reading books, observing the culture and visiting local bars in Costa Rica.
After writing several articles on the matter, he left Costa Rica for New York, and started a not-for-profit art education organization in East Harlem.
East Harlem was going through the throes of gentrification and became the basis of his first book, "The Tenants of East Harlem."
The book catalogs the cultural and ethnic biography of Manhattan's most diverse neighborhood and its transition from its mostly German and east European beginnings, to its current mixture of Puerto Rican, African American, West African, Chinese and a reluctant Caucasian benefactor of urban renewal.
"The Small of Her Back" premiers on May 9 at the 411 theater, and plays through the 12, and from May 16 to 19.
Even though the tickets are $18, Brooklyn College students buy $10 tickets by typing a special code on smarttix.com, where tickets are sold.
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