Velvet Green Summer
- John Palmer Payne
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 11 hours ago
A play about finding your people and recognizing that home is not always where you were born.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Writing never left me, even when everything else did. Through the last several years of rediscovery, it was the one constant that kept me grounded, helped me process, and, honestly, I am not sure I would have survived without it. I have kept most of it to myself for a while now. But I am ready to start sharing again, to offer some insight on life, culture, and the things that give it meaning. A 50-person black box theater in Fort Lauderdale on a warm May night felt like exactly the right place to begin.
They gave me a seat. That is how it started. I reached out, introduced myself, said I wanted to write about it, and they said yes. It felt like the right way to get back into doing this again.
Somewhere between Atlanta, Jacksonville, and Fort Lauderdale, I stopped writing reviews. Not because I stopped going to things, but because life reorganizes your priorities whether you ask it to or not, and survival was my priority over the last several years. Walking into Empire Stage on a warm May evening, though, something clicked back into place. The space holds maybe ~50 people. The lighting was already doing something beautiful before the house even went dark. I recognized a few faces and met a few new ones. There was a warmth in that room before a single word was spoken.
That warmth is exactly what Velvet Green Summer is about.
Written and directed by Kim Ehly and presented by Kutumba Theatre Project, this is a play about a young woman named Ash, navigating the world in a body and a truth that not everyone is ready to accept. The setting moves between Fort Lauderdale and Jacksonville, and I will be honest with you: the moment Jacksonville entered the picture, something in my chest shifted. I grew up there. I grew up gay there. The closest gay bar was 45 minutes from my house, out at the beach. You drove that 45 minutes, or you were alone. There was no middle option. Jacksonville has a way of making you feel like you are the only one, and the play captures that suffocation without ever being heavy-handed about it.
"Abbie Fricke, as Ash, does not perform the character. She inhabits her. Every small hesitation, every moment of searching. It all lands."
The lead's name is worth pausing on. To some people, she is Ash. To others, she is Ashley. That distinction is not incidental. It tells you everything about who respects her and who merely tolerates her. Abbie Fricke, in the role, does not perform the character. She inhabits her. Every small hesitation, every moment of searching, every flash of humor that breaks through the weight, it all lands. Michele Verdi-Knapp, playing the parental figures in the story, provides the necessary counterweight, embodying the kind of complicated love that means well and still causes damage.
The staging is creative and confident for such a small space. The production uses music as a timeline, threading songs through the decades from the 1960s all the way into the 1990s. The audience always knows exactly where in time they are, not because anyone tells them, but because the music tells them. The lighting does the emotional work that the dialogue sometimes leaves unspoken. In a room that small, every technical choice is felt in your body, not just registered in your brain.
The coming-out story is present, but it is not the point. That sounds like a subtle distinction, but it matters. The play understands something that a lot of queer storytelling still gets wrong: being LGBTQ+ is one thread in a full life, not the whole fabric. Ash's journey is about something bigger than any single label. It is about the accumulated weight of not belonging, and the long, nonlinear process of finding your way to people who see you clearly and choose you anyway.
"Family, the play argues, is not inherited. It is built. It is chosen. And the people who take the time to know your hopes, your dreams, your way of moving through the world, those are your people."
Without giving away the shape of Act 2, I will say this: Ash moves through loss and confrontation and memory, wrestling with a past that did not hold her and a present still being constructed. The resolution does not wrap things neatly. It does something more honest than that. It suggests that belonging is not a destination you arrive at. It is a practice. It is a decision made over and over again, about who you let in and who you finally, gently, release.
I left Empire Stage thinking about chosen family. I have been thinking about it a lot lately, actually, the realization that the people who belong in your life are not always the ones tied to you by biology. They are the ones who invest in you. They are the ones who make time for you. Who take the trouble to actually know you. Velvet Green Summer does not state that thesis. It demonstrates it, in two hours, with a small cast in a room the size of a living room, with songs you already know playing in a new order that makes you feel them differently.
That is what good theater does. And this is good theater.
If you have not seen it yet, you still have time. Velvet Green Summer runs through Memorial Day weekend with three remaining performances: Friday, May 22, at 8 pm, Saturday, May 23, at 8 pm, and Sunday, May 24, at 5 pm at Empire Stage in Fort Lauderdale. There is something fitting about spending part of a holiday weekend in a small room with a story about belonging. Go find your seat!
Production Details
Play: Velvet Green Summer
Written & Directed by: Kim Ehly
Presented by: Kutumba Theatre Project
Remaining Shows: Fri May 22 at 8pm • Sat May 23 at 8pm • Sun May 24 at 5pm
Cast: Abbie Fricke as Ash, Michele Verdi-Knapp, Jill Bellak, Taylor Lyn Dawson, Katie Jackson, Eduardo Marquez, Brian McCormack, Ryan Townsend
Awards: Broadway World Award, Silver Palm Award, Top 5 Miami Herald, Top 10 Sun Sentinel, FringeNY Audience Favorite, Carbonell Nominee
Supported by: The Our Fund Foundation
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