Disposable Men

James Scruggs, who wrote and performs this collection of character pieces, has done something very difficult: he has written an angry play about racism that is also slyly funny. But be warned: the laughs will usually catch in your throat. This multi-media show engages issues of race in the button-pushing satirical style that Spike Lee was aiming for in his film “Bamboozled”.
– Jason Zinoman, The New York Times

Stage dramas successfully utilizing video projections are few and far between. Often the coupling is at best tedious, and usually a silly distraction. With Disposable Men James Scruggs crafts an organic, mesmerizing piece of theater seamlessly incorporating multiple forms of video an visual content.
– Douglas Singleton, L Magazine

Astutely combining live performance with a panoptic array of video projections, Scruggs offers a pointed, visually striking account of denigrated negritude in the media and on the streets.
The high quality of the design is matched by Scrugg’s confident performance, and the show’s finale, in which the audience uses 41 wooden guns (outfitted with laser pointers) to re-create the infamous death of Amadou Diallo, is fittingly provocative.
– Adam Feldman, Time Out

If anyone is tired of theater that only offers mindless escape to its viewers, then I highly recommend rushing to HERE Arts Center where James Scruggs works to make the audience feel implicated at every moment (particularly white audience members) by not letting viewers remain as complacent observers behind the theater’s fourth wall.
– Warren Hoffman, Talkin’ Broadway

With the adept assistance of the director Kristin Marting, the show manages to be both light and tragic, earnest and postmodern, all the while putting one in mind, oddly enough, of a phrase coined by Clarence Thomas: “a high-tech lynching.”
– Jason Zinoman, The New York Times

The piece examined the uncanny similarities that Hollywood monsters and African American men share, the unfounded fear of and the perception of oversize negative attributes. Using 8 channels of video, satire, humor and radical audience participation, the piece explores the horrific history of American medical apartheid, and government sanctioned killings of black men.