Preview Our World: Actress Sanaa Lathan Returns to the Stage

This week on Our World with Black Enterprise, host Marc Lamont Hill sits down with actress and leading lady Sanaa Lathan, who discusses her career in Hollywood in such films as Love & Basketball, A Raisin in The Sun and the upcoming thriller Contagion, as well as her return to the stage in the Off-Broadway play By the Way, Meet Vera Stark.

While Lathan is best known to audiences as a film star, she initially gained critical acclaim as a stage actress Off-Broadway, after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley and Yale School of Drama. Lathan plays the title character in By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, a new comedy from the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage, who draws upon the screwball films of the 1930s to take a funny and irreverent look at racial stereotypes in Hollywood. The play, performed at Manhattan’s Second Stage Theater, is a 70-year journey through the life of Vera Stark, a headstrong African American maid and budding actress, and her tangled relationship with her boss, a White Hollywood star desperately grasping to hold on to her career.

Later this year, Lathan will co-star in the Stephen Soderbergh thriller Contagion alongside Matt Damon, Jude Law, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Bryan Cranston and Laurence Fishburne.

Our Slice of Life segment profiles Bonnie St. John, an author, speaker and medalist in skiing. St. John, author of How Strong Women Pray (FaithWords), was the first African American to win Olympic medals in ski racing, winning a silver and two bronze medals in the 1984 Paralympics in Innsbruck, Austria. St. John skis on one leg; her right leg was amputated when she was just five years old. Overcoming obstacles, including being a victim of child abuse, she graduated with honors from Harvard University and won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford; was appointed to the White House National Economic Council; and has been featured on The Today Show, CNN, Good Morning America, as well as in People, the New York Times, Essence and many other publications.

Also, in this week’s On The Record segment, Hill leads a discussion about love in the Black community with VH1’s Love & Hip Hop Executive Producer Mona Scott-Young, Man Up Campaign Co-Founder and Executive Director Jimmie Briggs and international author and radio host Esther Armah.

Our World with Black Enterprise is the award-winning weekly 30-minute program, hosted by Marc Lamont Hill, providing a fresh mix of interviews with today’s top newsmakers and celebrities, eclectic roundtable discussions concerning the hottest topics affecting African Americans, and profiles of some of the world’s most intriguing people.

Click here for times and stations where Our World with Black Enterprise airs in your area.