86. Review of GENERATIONS (October 14, 2013)

86. GENERATIONS

 

In less time than it takes to order, eat, and pay for a meal at the average restaurant you can ingest British playwright Debbie Tucker Green’s GENERATIONS, a 30 minute or so theatrical tone poem in which cooking plays a central role, served up by the Play Company in cooperation with the Soho Rep. Does it have some tasty parts? Yes. Is it well prepared and served? Yes again.  Did it leave me fully satisfied?  Not so much.



From left: Shyko Amos, Khai Toi Bryant, Ntombikhona Diamani. Photo: Julieta Cervantes.

As usual at the Soho Rep, the space has been transformed (by designer Amulfo Maldonado) to match the play’s dramatic needs. Powdery red-brown earth resembling what you see on a baseball infield covers the floor; the seating is a wildly eclectic assortment of wooden, plastic, and metal chairs, benches, stools, and crates, which looks like it’s been assembled from some local junkyard. Nearly every inch of wall space is covered with red, orange, blue, and yellow sheets of corrugated metal to create a shanty-like South African house. (Of course, no actual home would be as spacious as the one created in the otherwise limited confines of 46 Walker Street.)

A soiled kitchen counter with cooking facilities and implements stands near the center, surrounded by the audience on three sides. An old refrigerator, shabby cabinets and shelves, and other domestic items (including vegetables in plastic bags) line the walls. Local music plays on the radio when you enter, and, if you’re thirsty, chances are you’ll be sipping a bottle of beer purchased in the lobby.

As the play begins, a choir of 13 splendid singers, seated in small groups amid the audience, suddenly rises and begins to sing a cappella (in an undisclosed South African language) and to move rhythmically under the excellent musical direction of Bongi Duma. The words are the names of various people who’ve died, followed by “Another leaves us, another has gone,” which, although not mentioned in the dialogue, alludes, I’m sure, to AIDS victims. (Considering the play’s subject matter and the vagueness of the writing, one could be forgiven for thinking they died of food poisoning.) The play’s music, although often rather lively, is referred to in the script as a “dirge.” During the course of the action, at various moments of emotional intensity, the choir heightens the effect by its chanted interpolations, underscoring the lines.

The acting itself, effectively directed by Leah C. Gardiner, has a rhythmic structure, with its combination of realistic and stylized behavior, as the actors speak Ms. Green’s deliberately repetitious, choppily truncated, elliptical, and often monosyllabic dialogue in which the word “cook” (and variations on it) holds pride of place. At several places, Grandma (Thuli Dumakude) says to Grandad (Jonathan Peck): “I was the cooker—you was the cookless—I was the cooker who coached the cookless. I coached you to cook.” To which he remarks: “You couldn’t cook.” Also important are references to memory, both what is remembered and what forgotten.

What the characters present are the interactions within a family of three generations, Grandma and Grandad; Mama (Ntombikhona Diamini) and Dad (Michael Rogers); and Boyfriend (Mamoudou Athie), Girlfriend (Shyko Amos), and Junior Sister (Khail Toi Bryant). As time passes, the lights (nicely overseen by Matt Frey) gradually go from bright to dim, leaving only kerosene lamps hanging on the walls aglow; what seem at first like minutes actually have been years. The bustling action of the early scenes gradually subsides, a melancholy mood seeps in, and only Grandad and Grandma remain.

What little plot there is circles around the family’s relationship to cooking, the thread that links one generation to another. As the Boyfriend wonders, over and over, about the Girlfriend’s cooking skills, the characters banter, taking up pages of dialogue, about who taught whom to cook, with the words circling back on themselves, emotions rising and falling; meanwhile, as food is prepared, the older folk reminisce about how cooking played a role in their love lives. The Boyfriend and Girlfriend disappear to the chanting of the choir, but the same basic repartee as before continues when they’re gone. Next to leave is Dad, who’s soon followed by Mama.

The final scene, with only the saddened grandparents, hints at the tragedy of AIDS, especially when Grandad says, “This thing. This dying thing. . . . This unease. This dis-ease,” which is about the play’s only specific reference to something other than cooking and eating in this family’s lives. But why and how this specific family succumbed is never addressed, making them instead symbolic of South Africa and not representative of any specific individuals. This, perhaps, is why the South African national anthem is sung by the choir at the end.

GENERATIONS is artistically evocative; however, its insistent ambiguity, which some have found a strength, left me hungry for something more.