TV star Danielle Moné Truitt returns to her stage roots with 3: Black Girl Blues, an alternately hilarious and devastating one-woman show about a trio of grade school best friends whose lives follow drastically different paths from their teen years on.

First up is Keisha, currently on the phone with childhood chum Jill to gripe about how shitty things have been going for her lately, most significantly about how she’s once again had to kick out her lying cheating boyfriend Eric for “messin’ with this girl LeeLee” long enough to have had a baby with her “while we was still together.”

And this is just the start of a twenty-five minute rant that allows Truitt to dig deep below the surface of a young woman with a foul mouth, a wounded heart, and a violent streak that had me gasping in shock even as I ached for her no-way-out-but-down life.

We next meet the woman at the other end of the line, the soft-spoken, seemingly happily married but quietly desperate Jill, downing glass after glass of wine as she unloads her troubles on newly-minted law partner Stephanie, an encounter that gradually reveals how hellish life in suburbia can be when your high school sweetheart-turned-husband turns out to be a lying, cheating louse who won’t even let you have your own ATM card.

Finally, it’s Stephanie’s turn to take center stage, picture-perfect in a shocking pink pantsuit with a not so picture-perfect life, no matter her six-or-seven-figure salary and a life unencumbered by husband or children, a life that Keisha and Jill wouldn’t necessarily envy if they knew the secret that Stephanie has kept buried deep inside for decades.

If it’s not already clear, what playwright Anthony D’Juan has written for his longtime bestie to perform under his spot-on direction is powerful, revelatory theater.

 What makes 3: Black Girls Blues all the more remarkable is seeing all three women played by a single actress, not simply because it gives Truitt a chance to dazzle and stun in three distinctively different roles, but because it makes it crystal clear that had life treated Keisha, Jill, or Stephanie any differently, each of them might have found herself in one of the other’s shoes.

The late, great John Iacovelli (his name sadly misspelled in the program) designed the show’s attractive, easy-in-easy-out set, one that’s been expertly lit by Steve Pope.

3: Black Girl Blues is presented by CMA Entertainment and Truitt Love Productions and produced by Cheryl Martin and Danielle Moné Truitt. Kristina Roth is stage manager and Kira Hoag is assistant stage manager.

In the dozen or so years since Danielle Moné Truitt first performed 3: Black Girl Blues, she’s gone on to star in three major TV series: BET’s Rebel, Fox’s Deputy, and now NBC’s Law & Order: Organized Crime.

Her name alone ought to ensure an SRO run for the play’s longest professional run yet. That it’s also seventy-eight minutes of eye-opening, gut-punching theater is icing on the cake.

The Hudson Mainstage Theater, 6539 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood.
https://www.onstage411.com/newsite/show/play_info.asp?show_id=6326&skin_show_id=32.6326

–Steven Stanley
May 19, 2023

Tags: Danielle Moné Truitt, Hudson Mainstage Theatre, Los Angeles Theater Review