It’s seven o’clock on a chilly November Sunday, but inside the Intersection for the Arts theater in San Francisco, things are warming up. In the dim and compact space, four men dressed in jeans, T-shirts and hoodies dash about the “stage,” which is nothing more than a brown, paint-splattered floor level with just a first row of seats.

Angry Black White Boy, directed by Sean San José, is the current creative presentation of the Hybrid Project at the Intersection, and as the men rehearse for the show, undetectable words fly from their mouths. The only thing that makes sense is their bodies, which move in coordinated rhythm, almost like a dance. The conversations their movements convey make words almost unnecessary.

Tom Wolf’s theatrical take on the novel of the same title by Adam Mansbach transforms the story for the stage by using a hybrid of rap, hip-hop, dance and theatrical storytelling. Both the play and the book are satirical and outrageous tales about race, whiteness and identity in twenty-first century America.

Macon Detornay was played by Wolf himself. Dominique was played by Tommy Sheperd, and various other roles were played by Keith Pinto, who was also the choreographer for the play.

They proceed to take the audience on a journey of a “black, white boy,” and turns the notion of race upside down.

“I was a fourteen-year-old boy with a Malcolm X T-shirt,” Detornay proudly claims in the play. He is a Jewish man who grew up in an affluent Boston home and struggles with the knowledge that his great-grandfather, Cap Anson, was the man responsible for creating the color line in major league baseball. “This is my fucking history,” he admits, while standing less than a foot away from the audience.

“There was really something about this story that spoke to me,” Wolf explains of why he chose to adapt the book into a play. Almost eerily, Wolf and the character he plays share a lot of the same characteristics —both are white, Jewish men who have embraced black and hip-hop culture, and hope to promote change regarding racism.

Wolf is an MC and rapper for Felonious, a group he founded with both Pinto and Sheperd, and is also the program manager of The Hub at the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco, which promotes the revolution of Jewish identity through arts.

“I don’t even have a ‘grew up in the hood’ story,” says Detornay in the play, while trying to explain as to why he wants to raise white people’s awareness of their own racist feelings towards black people. And seemingly, neither does Wolf.

“What right do I have as a white kid from San Rafael to even call myself a hip-hop artist?” Wolf said in an interview for SFGate.com. “To be a part of this culture that is so obviously not born on the streets I grew up on?”

Detornay, who drives taxis while attending school at Columbia University, also mirrors Wolf’s passion for hip-hop, but the fictional character reaches an extreme and begins to rob his white customers at gunpoint.

“I bet this is the first time you ever regretted the color of your skin,” he says to one of his victims, played by Pinto, as he runs for his life.

These robberies cause panic among white people in New York City, and automatically everyone, including the news stations, blames the crimes on a black man. Detornay corrects this mistake during a subsequent robbery: “Take a good look,” he orders the white man. “What fucking color am I?”

“White.”

“Jesus. Thank you. I thought I was going fucking insane here,” Detornay yells. “Now…get the fuck out of my cab. Hurry before you forget what I look like.”

After making sure that everyone knows that it was he who committed the crimes, and not an innocent black man, Detornay becomes somewhat of a celebrity with the help of his friends, Dre and Dominique. They then form The Race Traitor Project, which spawns the idea of a national “Apology Day.”

This day, as planned by Detornay, is supposed to get white America to realize their inner racism and to create a dialogue about race. In the end, his dream becomes a nightmare, and the city is devoured by riots, leaving him to question his own commitment to his cause.

“It’s always walking lightly and on eggshells when it comes to [racism], and I feel that a lot of Americans–white Americans, and I don’t want to put them all in to one bracket–but a lot feel like the racial thing is in the past,” Sheperd says. However, he believes that racism is still alive in America, and he hopes that Angry Black White Boy, which is being adapted into a movie for 2009, will create a dialogue between whites and blacks in order to uncover and work on the issue of prejudice.

After the theater becomes pitch black, the cast lines up on the stage. Wolf declares, “Just because we elected Barack Obama, a black man, as our president, doesn’t mean that racism’s gone.”