the break/s

Saw a show last night on the tab and behest of friends of mine visiting from the Bay. Said friends are significantly more "with it" (this is what the kids call it, i think) than i, significantly more aware, exposed, ready, eager. The show was at ACT downtown, a show called the break/s: a mixtape for stage written and performed by Marc Bamuthi Joseph, an attempt, i think, to introduce the middle-class, middle-aged white audience of a $50/ticket (!) theater to hip-hop, both as a culture and, to a lesser extent, as a musical genre. (A review that seems to well encapsulate the whiteness of the intended and actual audience can be accessed here.)
Are we all aware how unknowledgeable i am about hip-hop? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone? Anyway, i enjoyed it more or less, although we only paid a total of $60 for four of us with a discount code and a couple of student tix which were only $10. It was worth that much, in that i enjoyed the way he tied the transnationalism of hip-hop culture to a personalized narrative (Haiti to US to Europe to Senegal to US to Cuba to US) and defined hip-hop more as a type of potentiality rather than a specific set of criteria (although isn't this true of all genres, movements, cultures?). Things that failed: poor integration of black male sexuality; unfortunately limited integration of black women (limited to a video clip of :45).
No one i went with liked it, so we can probably say that is was a poor hip-hop performance (i think all of the people i went with are hipper than me, even if k@ is not hip-hopier), but i expect white people understood it madly, loved it. Did it fail, then? What it probably failed to do was provide a real reckoning with hip-hop and the violence of its oppression (both as object of and purveyor of). Did it provide white people with a cathartic experience through the aesthetics of hip-hop? Maybe.
I cannot decide if that is good thing or not. Think y'all should have been here to critique it (i'm sure it would have failed for you), gotten drunk with us and eaten some fucking homemade pizza (we didn't do this last part, but that sounds really good right now).