After years of struggling on Broadway, the writer,
Actor and director takes aim at New York’s theatre establishment in her hit film The Forty-Year-Old Version
There’s a moment in The Forty-Year-Old Version when frustrated playwright Radha becomes so enraged by an elderly white theatre producer that she has to be physically prevented from throttling him. He has just suggested that, if she’s unwilling to put a white character at the heart of her play about the gentrification of Harlem, she might like to help out with a forthcoming musical about the 19th-century abolitionist Harriet Tubman instead.
It raises the question – how close is the film to the life of its director and star, Radha Blank, who has also spent decades beating at the door of New York’s predominantly white theatre establishment? “I have not actually choked a theatre producer… yet,” she says, “just like I’ve never won a 30 under 30 award and I’ve not had a relationship specifically with a hip-hop producer in his 20s from Brownsville. But that character [D, played by newcomer Oswin Benjamin] is an amalgam of a lot of people I’ve dated, people I’ve met in
music, and I tend to skew younger, so that part is true.”