Taken From Extra.ca

“Nigger,” says Berend McKenzie and unfurls his right arm away from his body, palm slightly open.

“Fag,” he says in the same matter-of-fact tone, this time uncoiling his left arm.

“I know. They make me uncomfortable. They make me angry. Welcome to my world.”

“As a child,” he explains, “I realized I had [these] two things working against me, and both would determine the course I took in life.”

With that quietly explosive prologue, the slightly built McKenzie-as-Buddy relentlessly unleashes his lifelong collision with the historical power that the words nigger and fag have been infused.

Nggrfg is a one-man, hour-long performance of four vignettes — Liner; Oh, Brother; Father, by the way; and Tassles. They mark pivotal periods in McKenzie’s life when those two words, either separately or together, have elicited deep shame, grief and terror of the private and public kind.

He weaves the tale non-linearly, morphing seamlessly and assertively into the different personae that make up his life’s trajectory. At first, he’s a 16-year-old mouse of a teen desperately trying to be anything but his obviously gay self, as he vies for the affection of the edgy, mohawk-sporting girlfriend of his high school dreams. With her on his arm, he thinks, his street cred would skyrocket. His predatory schoolmates won’t call him fag anymore.

Fast forward, and he’s 40, a frustrated actor battling entertainment industry stereotypes — and the grating ignorance of his own agent — about the roles black men can play and how they should play them.

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