In January 2004, things were not going well for Colman Domingo. He was struggling to support himself as an actor and meanwhile his mother and step-father were both very ill. As his parents’ health deteriorated, he returned to his West Philly neighborhood to clean out the basement of his family’s home and found stacks and stacks of old records –- Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, Gladys Knight, Luther Vandross --  the soundtrack of his formative years. During the slow hours of his late night shift tending a West Village bar, Domingo listened to this music and poured out his soul in a series of writings which, over the past five years, have blossomed into his joyful, nostalgic music-filled autobiographical solo play A Boy and His Soul, opening this week at the Vineyard Theatre.

“It was a very organic process,” Domingo says of the creation of his show. The bar’s owner allowed him to workshop readings of the material in a small performance space there on Sunday afternoons, and though Domingo was not interested in creating a solo performance piece, “that’s exactly what it became.” 

The show was further refined at San Francisco’s Thick Description Theatre under the direction of Tony Kelly and after a lauded run of the show there last year, Domingo and Kelly played an SRO gig at Joe’s Pub, with Vineyard Artistic Director Doug Aibel in attendance. Work continued on the show, and now A Boy and His Soul is kicking off the Vineyard’s 2009-2010 season.

The Public Theater’s hit musical Passing Strange (which garnered the Domingo and his castmates a 2008 Obie Award for Outstanding Ensemble en route to a critically acclaimed Broadway run) featured Domingo strutting his stuff in three vastly different roles, but in A Boy and His Soul, no fewer than ten vividly portrayed characters come to life, including his family: the gruff but loving stepfather; the mother who adores her “special boy;” his disco-listening, strong, outgoing sister Averie; and his tough brother who gets his groove on to rhythm-and-blues.

“The story is about 95% real” says Domingo. “Whether these exact words came out of my siblings’ mouths at the time” is up for debate, but given the need for “a bit of theatrical license, the situations are all real.” Though Averie and Rick haven’t yet seen the show (they’ll be there on opening night this Thursday), they saw a video of the San Francisco version of the play and were “humbled and honored that the audience was interested in their story. Hopefully I’m using their words as an homage to them.”

A Boy and His Soul is a personal, beautifully and poetically written story (much enlivened through Domingo’s lithe, athletically charismatic tour-de-force performance) with careful attention paid to the minute details of day-to-day life: getting ready for a Saturday night out on the town, struggles to discover who you really are, and of course, that great music of the 70s.

At a recent preview performance, the packed theatre was filled with audience members of every walk of life: old and young, black and white, gay and straight. But the collective sighs when familiar tunes were sung and when classic record jackets were displayed, the giggles of recognition at embarrassing rites of passage, and the tears when tragedy struck the family demonstrated the power of specificity leading to the universal.

“My story is your story,” explains Domingo. “It’s not just a black story, or a gay story. It’s more far-reaching than that. It’s about family, and the power of music.” And who can’t relate to that? 

 Photo by Carol Rosegg.