“Yeah, I’m real,” says Femi, a sharp-witted transgender den mother to abandoned youth, during the second episode of “David Makes Man.” Emerging out of nowhere with a group of homeless teens, Femi offers the 14-year-old David water and protection as he walks home with drugs he has been forced to carry. She is one of the show’s several characters who could be real or a figment of David’s vivid imagination.
“You didn’t see all these eyes on you?” she asks. “That’s all right, everybody don’t need to see everything.”
It’s a representative exchange on a show that may blur reality and fantasy at any given moment. But it also continues the nuanced explorations of black boyhood by the writer Tarell Alvin McCraney, best known for his Tony-nominated play “Choir Boy” and as a writer of the Oscar-winning “Moonlight.” And while “David Makes Man” shares a Miami setting with “Moonlight,” its 10-hour arc enables McCraney, who grew up there, to flesh out the hopes and tragedies of an entire South Florida black community…
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