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‘David Makes Man’ is a new drama from Oprah, ‘Moonlight’ screenwriter
South Florida is still caught under the glow of “Moonlight.”
That movie, a coming-of-age drama about life in Liberty City from Miami-raised screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney, won three Oscars, including Best Picture at the 2017 Academy Awards.
Now McCraney is back with “David Makes Man,” a new South Florida-set TV drama series debuting Wednesday on the Oprah Winfrey Network. Before its premiere, the Perez Art Museum Miami will throw a preview screening of the first episode of “David Makes Man” today.
The screening will be followed by a Q-and-A with McCraney and series star Alana Arenas (a Miami native), says Marie Vickles, the museum’s director of education.
“I think the obvious parallel is,
like ‘Moonlight,’ Tarell is again choosing to focus on a young man for his series,” Vickles says. “Tarell grew up in Liberty City with the same challenges of poverty.”
A stirring portrait of black boyhood, “David Makes Man” follows a 14-year-old growing up in South Florida’s projects. Shaken by his friend’s recent death, David (Akili McDowell) is precocious but an anomaly at his magnet middle school: He seems to be the only teenager whose family lives below the poverty line. His mother Gloria (Alana Arenas), often at work and struggling with a drug addiction, forces David to become his younger brother’s protector.
“David Makes Man,” also produced by Oprah Winfrey and Michael B. Jordan, filmed portions of the show in Liberty City and Orlando, according to production notes.
If the plot sounds similar to that of “Moonlight,” adapted from McCraney’s play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue,” it’s because both projects are drawn from McCraney’s South Florida upbringing. (Haven’t seen “Moonlight” yet? It’s streaming on Netflix.)
“In examining a certain part of my life, when I lived in that place called Homestead — which is like 50 miles south of Miami — I wanted to talk about a moment when I had to make decisions of what my life would be,” McCraney told Deadline.com in January, when the pilot episode premiered at Sundance Film Festival. “That’s weird, for a 12-year-old to be thinking that they had to make these life-altering decisions right then, and it just dawned on me that that wasn’t just happening to me; that it was happening to many people.”
“David Makes Man” has already drawn acclaim from critics. “Even as it immerses us in his subjectivity,” a Time reviewer writes of McCraney’s script, “‘David Makes Man’ builds vivid, sympathetic supporting characters.” “[Cinematographer Todd A.] Dos Reis gives the series a sweaty, rundown authenticity of pink-stuccoed poverty.”
Miami has been especially good to McCraney, now a professor at Yale School of Drama. He scored a Tony nomination this year for “Choir Boy,” his debut on Broadway. And in 2017, his hometown praised the screenwriter by renaming a local street “Moonlight Way.”
“David Makes Man” will screen 10 a.m.-noon today, at Perez Art Museum Miami, 1103 Biscayne Blvd., in Miami. Admission is free. The show debuts at 10 p.m. Wednesday on OWN. Call 305-375-3000 or go to PAMM.org.