"Not a Cabaret, Old Chum"
For my review of We're Only Alive for a Short Amount of Time please click on THEATER PIZAZZ.
Sunday, June 30, 2019
Friday, June 28, 2019
37 (2019-2020): Review: YES! REFLECTIONS OF MOLLY BLOOM (seen June 27, 2010)
"Flower of the Mountain"
For my review of Yes! Reflections of Molly Bloom please click on THEATER PIZZAZZ.
Wednesday, June 26, 2019
GUEST REVIEW 7: THE COMEDIAN'S TRAGEDY
“Laugh, Clown, Cry”****
By Aron Canter
From time to time Theatre's Leiter Side will be posting reviews of Off-Off Broadway shows my schedule prevents me from seeing. If you are interested in reviewing Off-Off Broadway, please contact me so we can discuss. I hope you find the expanded coverage useful. Sam Leiter
The Comedian’s Tragedy, written by Matthew Amendt and directed by Bill McCallum, is a love letter to the theatre, a tribute to all things Greek, and a successful and entertaining evening. A highly imaginative and interesting script is enlivened by strong performances. While the production I attended did not induce much laughter, the evening is undoubtedly fun and the work notably thoughtful.
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| Anna Sundberg, Sarah Baskin, Ron Menzel, Matthew Amendt, Stephen D'Ambrose, Asma Thabet, Truett Felt and Gary Lowery. Photo: Heidi Bohnenkamp. |
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| Matthew Amendt, Julian Remulla. Photo: Heidi Bohnenkamp. |
Aris (Amendt, the playwright), is a sweet and sharp boy who, when the play opens, hates the theatre and mocks its value as an aspect of civic life. We quickly learn that Aris had written a comedy that was poorly received. However, under the inspiration of his cousin Philippus (Julian Remulla), his uncle Themon (Stephen D. Ambrose), and a local Persian woman named Xerxica (Sarah Baskin), Aris takes up the charge to write a tragedy, the highest of the arts.
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| Ron Menzel, Matthew Amendt. Photo: Heidi Bohnenkamp. |
Amendt performs with charm and energy. He has written for himself, and his company, a great deal of lovely dialogue and monologues with strong imagery. Ron Mendel performs as the Chorus Leader—both as a one-man Greek Chorus and with his own hidden role in the play. He also is the conniving, professorial drama teacher of most of the Athenian youths. As Themon, Ambrose performs with intelligent conviction and clear speech.
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| Matthew Amendt. Photo: Heidi Bohnenkamp. |
The Access Theater’s long, relatively shallow performance space is mostly empty, with half-Greek, half-comic book-style posters plastered across the walls. Rather than dressing the actors in togas, set and costume designer Izzy Fields has created a quasi-Appalachian look that creates the sense of a Mediterranean, distant time. Fields adds effective touches to many of the costumes, such as having the war veteran, Themon, wear old medals that keep falling off his chest, with a dirty blindfold covering his eyes.
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| Matthew Amendt with Asma Thabet, Truett Felt and Anna Sundberg. Photo: Heidi Bohnenkamp. |
The entire production is filled with such small yet clever touches. Because all the performers communicate with energy and clarity, the images speak volumes. Near the end of Act One, Amendt provides a wonderful monologue in verse filled with floral and mythic themes. He navigates the verse with impressive dexterity. The dialogue is firm, well-shaped, and keeps things moving.
The play, as noted earlier, is in many ways a love letter to the theatre. Aris falls back in love with tragedy, and as he does, he performs monologues on why the medium matters. The Chorus Leader is given a number of speeches that essentially elucidate the power of live performance. Cleon, the antagonist, effectively played by Anna Sundberg, and Baskin, as Xerxica, each expresses the importance of the theatre to civic life, Xerxica through affirmation, Cleon through denial. The play itself is sneakily metatheatrical but you’ll have to see it to learn how.
As a novice fan of Greek history, I had fun living in this fictional Greek world. Those better acquainted with the background will be even more delighted.
Access Theater
380 Broadway, 4th Floor
Through July 6
Saturday, June 22, 2019
36 (2019-2020): Review: THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES (seen June 21, 2019)
“A Taste of Honey”
There’s a lot of buzz, most of it good, about The Secret
Life of Bees, a sweet-as-honey musical realization of Sue Monk Kidd’s bestselling
2002 novel of that name, now at the Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross
Theater. The book was also adapted into a 2008 film
starring Dakota Fanning, Jennifer Hudson, Queen Latifah, and Alicia Keys.  |
| Elizabeth Teeter and Manoel Felciano. Photo: Ahron Foster. |
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| LaChanze, Elizabeth Teeter. Photo: Ahron Foster. |
The story, occupying a two-act structure that lasts two and a
half hours, centers on self-centered (at first), 14-year-old Lily Owens (Elizabeth
Teeter, impressive), with dreams of being a writer, from the fictional town of Sayvon,
South Carolina. Her father, T. Ray (Mandel Feliciano, very good), blames her
for the death of her mother, who died when the much younger Lily picked up a
gun that went off. She feels not only great guilt but a wrenching yearning for
her mother’s arms.
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Saycon Sengbloh, Elizabeth Teeter. Photo: Ahron Foster.
|
T. Ray treats her cruelly, punishing even minor infractions by
forcing her to kneel on gravel till her knees are raw. She and the family’s snuff-using
black housekeeper, Rosaleen (Saycon Sengbloh, sensational), injured by local rednecks
(Joe Cassidy, Matt DeAngelis) when she attempts to register to vote, run off together,
landing in the town of Tiburon, North Carolina. There, Lily notices honey jars
for sale with the image on them of a black Madonna, the same image as on a postcard
from her mother.
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Eisa Davis, Vita E.
Cleveland,
Romelda Teron Benjamin, Saycon Sengbloh, Anastacia McCleskey,
Nathaniel Stampley, LaChanze, and Elizabeth Teeter. Photo: Ahron Foster.
|
This leads her and Rosaleen to an apiary, where they are
cared for and given work by the sisters May (Anastacia McCleskey, wonderful),
June (Eisa Davis, outstanding), and August Boatright (LaChanze, exceptional).
The latter is the well-educated family leader, allowing literary references to
abound (Rosaleen is given Jane Eyre to read). These determined, independent
black women have created a prosperous beekeeping business despite their racist
surroundings. Lily forms a bond with another worker, Zach (Brett Gray, excellent),
a black boy with aspirations of becoming a lawyer, but their budding attraction
will have to contend with 1964 prejudices.
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| Anastacica McCleskey, LaChanze. Photo: Ahron Foster. |
The sisters, and those associated with them, worship the
statue (actually, a ship’s figurehead found floating in a river) of the black
Mary that signifies their honey brand, but also symbolizes maternal love. The scenes
expressing the awe in which the statue is held (when the darkened stage glitters
with candles) are among the most moving in the play. Lily’s mother had a deep
connection with the sisters, which will eventually be revealed.
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| LaChanze, Elizabeth Teeter. Photo: Ahron Foster. |
Other dramatic incidents that move the tale toward its
conclusion include the outcome of a suit for the affections of the sour June (she
can’t get over a jilting at the altar) by the tenacious school principal Neal
(Nathaniel Stampley, perfection), who refuses to accept her constant
rejections; Zach’s arrest while driving by white cops in a scene similar to the
kinds of incidents that continue to roil our society; and T. Ray’s discovery of
Lily’s whereabouts.
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| Brett Gray, Elizabeth Teeter. Photo: Ahron |
Gold’s beautifully staged production uses the increasingly common,
simplified approach (as in Fun Home) of an essentially bare stage (design
by Mimi Lien), its naked brick walls exposed, and its locales indicated by
selected furnishings and props (like the stacks of realistic honey trays)
carried off and on with choreographic precision by the actors. Beekeeping
smokers play a part as well, providing an organic way of introducing hazy
effects as the actors create clouds of smoke with them. Also charming are the
bees themselves—golden, trinket-like creatures dangling from wires on rods manipulated
by three performers.
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| Eisa Davis, Nathanial Stampley. Photo: Ahron Foster. |
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Saycon Sengbloh, Nathaniel Stampley, Eisa Davis, Anastacia McCleskey, & LaChanze. Photo: Ahron Foster.
|
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LaChanze, Jai’Len Christine Li Josey, Vita E. Cleveland,
Elizabeth Teeter, Romelda Teron Benjamin. Photo: Ahron Foster.
|
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| Eisa Davis, Jai’Len Christine Li Josey, Vita E. Cleveland, LaChanze, Anastacia McCleskey, Nathaniel Stampley, Romelda Teron Benjamin, Saycon Sengbloh. Photo: Ahron Foster. |
Each actor brings conviction and depth to their roles. The book contains many things familiar from multiple other depictions of the Civil Rights years, and it sometimes teeters on the sentimental. Nonetheless, its expert presentation makes it all seem newly minted. The Secret Life of Bees has plenty of sting in its tail but it soothes as well with an unforgettable taste of honey.
Linda Gross Theater/Atlantic Theater
Company
336 W. 20th St., NYC
336 W. 20th St., NYC
Through July 21
OTHER VIEWPOINTS:
35 (2019-2020): Review: A STRANGE LOOP (seen June 20, 2019)
“Identity Heft”
A Strange Loop, a new, raucously profane, satirical, Off-Broadway musical comedy at Playwrights Horizons, is a sometimes painful, sometimes joyous, and sometimes comic cry of angst about a fat, black, gay man writing a musical comedy about a fat, black, gay man writing a musical comedy about being a fat, black, gay man writing a musical comedy, etc. |
James
Jackson, Jr., John-Michael Lyles, Jason Veasey, Larry Owens (in red jacket and hat), Antwayn Hopper, John-Andrew Morrison, L Morgan Lee. Photo: Joan Marcus.
|
 |
Antwayn
Hopper, Larry Owens (in
front). Photo: Joan Marcus.
|
He also notes how often his name has confused others about
his identity; the same is true of his appearance, which has led people (black
and white) to confuse him with the playwright/director Robert O’Hara. This, he says,
has only further encouraged his preoccupation with establishing his own
identity. And identity is at the heart of A Strange Loop, a show that,
as Usher explains, takes its title from Douglas Hofstadter’s cognitive
science term:
It’s basically about how your sense of self is just a set of meaningless symbols in your brain pushing up or down through one level of abstraction to another but always winding up right back where they started? It’s the idea that your ability to conceive of yourself as an ‘I’ is kind of an illusion? But the fact that you can recognize the illusion kind of proves that it exists kind of?
Get it? Whatever.
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John-Andrew Morrison, James Jackson, Jr., John-Michael Lyles, L Morgan Lee, Antwayn Hopper, Jason Veasey. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Like the paintings of M.C.
Escher, the narrative (and some of the music) keeps looping back on itself.
But the term also refers to a song by Liz Phair, whose lyrics aren’t
particularly loopy. The latter connection seems more attuned to Usher’s
preoccupation with his “inner white girl,” that is, the undue influence on his
own music of that by white-girl singer-song writers like Phair, Joni Mitchell,
and Tori Amos because of the freedom these artists represent as opposed to his
own hang-ups as a gay, black boy in thrall to his mother.
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| L Morgan Lee, James Jackson, Jr., Jason Veasey, Larry Owens (plaid shirt), Antwayn Hopper, John-Michael Lyles. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Usher, a red-tunicked usher at Disney’s The Lion King—frequently
alluded to when names like Mufasa, Nala, Rafiki, Sarabi, and Scar are
attributed to his family members—is a Detroit-raised songwriter living in New
York with a bigtime student debt. He’s struggling to create a “big, black and
queer-ass Broadway show” that avoids the compromises a black artist, who wants
to write something “unapologetically black” has to make to appeal to white audiences,
critics, and backers.
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L Morgan Lee, John-Michael Lyles, John-Andrew Morrison, Larry Owens (plaid shirt), Antwayn Hopper, Jason Veasey, James Jackson, Jr. Photo: Joan Marcus.
|
At one point, he’ll be forced by necessity to compromise
when he’s asked to ghostwrite a gospel opera on behalf of moviemaker Tyler
Perry, whose work his family adores (because he writes about “real life”), but
which Usher despises as “crap” and “hack buffoonery.” Much of the show’s humor
comes from how certain characters in Usher’s life parody the broadly
stereotypical Tyler style.
Usher feels worthless because, while “starved for black
affirmation and affection,” he’s unable to find a suitable black partner, his
hookups mainly being white, like the meth-using Inwood guy who does it to him
from behind. It’s a raunchy scene reminiscent of a much funnier one in Torch
Song Trilogy.
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| John-Andrew Morrison, Larry Owens. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
He suffers from the towering guilt of having been raised by
God-fearing people (including his scripture-spouting mother), who reject his
“homosexsh’alities,” worry over his sinful life, and reject his artistic
aspirations. He also can’t avoid reminders of a friend who died of AIDS and
ponders if he can possibly change or is just “stuck with who I am.”
 |
John-Andrew
Morrison, L Morgan Lee, John-Michael
Lyles, Jason Veasey, Larry
Owens (plaid shirt), Antwayn Hopper, James Jackson,
Jr. Photo: Joan Marcus.
|
A Strange Loop explores his anxieties in what the
script calls “daily self-loathings” by representing them as an ensemble of six
singing, dancing, and acting Thoughts. These are performed by the ultra-versatile
L. Morgan Lee (the only female), James Jackson, Jr., John-Michael Lyles,
John-Andrew Morrison, Jason Veasey, and Antwayn Hopper. It’s hard not to feel
that the play is a therapeutic exercise designed to exorcize Jackson’s demons.
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| James Jackson, Jr., Larry Owens, L Morgan Lee, Antwayn Hopper. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Each—helped by Montana Levi Blanco’s many costumes—takes on
two or more caricaturish roles, including Usher’s pious mother and alcoholic
father, an imaginary Mr. Right he meets on the subway, a doctor, an agent, and
a lover. There are also fanciful appearances by such black luminaries as
Harriet Tubman, Carter G. Woodson, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and
others, even “Twelve Years a Slave.”
 |
| Jason Veasey, Larry Owens. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Usher and his Thoughts sing and dance his problems in a
highly theatricalized format creatively staged by Stephen Brackett and vividly
choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly. Arnulfo Maldonado’s set, flashily lit by
Jen Schriever, makes use of door-sized, neon-outlined cubicles that are either
placed upstage next to one another or sent to opposite sides of the stage.
Toward the end there’s a surprising, if not absolutely
necessary, scenic shift to Usher’s parents’ more naturalistic, overcrowded
home, with a church setting directly overhead. Usher now takes on the role of a
fiery pastor (of the Quasi-Africana Church of God in Christ), castigating gays
by declaring AIDS to be God’s punishment for their transgressions.
The music is heavily rhythmic; the lyrics emotionally expressive,
didactically inclined, and narratively thin; the language often filthy (anal
sex and fellatio, less delicately expressed, get the lion’s share); the
“n-words” and “fag” references endemic; and the familiar African-American
allusions (like Popeye’s chicken) common.
A Strange Loop is highly polished, and the
multitalented Larry Owens makes a splashy New York debut in a tour-de-force
performance. Because of its treatment of black, gay identity, it’s the kind of
play that will provoke reams of socio-political discussion by those more
qualified to discuss it than I.
 |
L Morgan Lee, John-Michael Lyles, John-Andrew Morrison, Larry Owens
(plaid shirt), Antwayn Hopper (behind him), Jason
Veasey, James Jackson, Jr. Photo: Joan Marcus.
|
Regardless of how well directed, designed, and performed A
Strange Loop is, or how often it inserts woke references (like vers bottom,
intersectionality, code-switching, second-wave feminism, and so forth), the troubles
of its solipsistic hero lack the stamina to keep one in the loop for an uninterrupted
interest over an hour and 45 minutes.
Playwrights Horizons
416 W. 42nd St., NYC
Through July 28
OTHER VIEWPOINTS:
Thursday, June 20, 2019
34 (2019-2020): Review: TONI STONE (seen June 14, 2019)
“A Quality Start”
Toni
Stone (born Marcenia Lyle Stone in St. Paul, Minnesota; 1921-1996), the
first woman to play with men in organized baseball, played on a variety of
levels from the 1930s through the early 1950s. She pitched as a teenager but
her adult career was as an infielder. Regardless, Lydia R. Diamond’s fascinating
new eponymous play about a largely forgotten pioneer could well be described by the pitching term of “quality start.”
Wikipedia says a quality start is “a statistic for a starting
pitcher defined as a game in which the pitcher completes at
least six innings and permits no more than three earned runs.” Thus, Toni
Stone, based on Martha Ackerman’s book Curveball: The Remarkable Story
of Toni Stone, is neither a perfect game nor a grand slam but it’s a good enough
revelation of a pathbreaking athlete and her times to qualify as a quality start,
pitcher or no. (It also happens to be the second Toni Stone play, Roger Nieboer's Tomboy Toni having been produced at St. Paul's History Theater in 1996.)
The two-act play, which runs around two hours and ten
minutes, is overlong, like a game that goes into extra innings but, for most of
its duration, Pam McKinnon’s imaginative staging, supplemented by the incisive
choreography of Camille A. Brown, keeps the ball spinning and the actors
moving, with considerable baseball-like business: mimed ball-throwing and
catching, bat swinging (and accompanying sound effects), and so on. Baseball implements, like catcher's masks, are used for multiple purposes. Often, someone
playing an umpire adds emphasis by calling strikes.
It helps greatly that McKinnon
and Brown’s team of nine African-American players is of major league-level
acting ability, most of them playing a single position (“character,” I should
say), with occasional shifts to someone else (including white folks). 
When necessary to suggest another character, an actor will
usually hint at the change by donning a symbolic item of clothing, even to play
a woman; in one gender flipping portrayal, though, Kenn E. Head, playing Millie,
a female friend of Toni’s, does it in full drag, but seriously and not for
laughs. (The excellent costumes are by Dede Ayite.) April Matthis, playing Toni
in a memorable, award-level performance, is the only actual woman in the company. (She took over the role from Uzo Aduba last year when the latter left because of a scheduling conflict.)
Diamond’s approach is metatheatrical, as Toni Stone (1921-1996),
slides through her autobiographical tale, both narrating to us and interacting
with the other players in highlight moments from her story. With a couple of
exceptions, everyone continues wearing the baseball uniforms of the
Indianapolis Clowns, an important team in the Negro American League.
Stone, who’d been playing with semipro teams, including barnstorming
ones, joined the Clowns (replacing Hank Aaron, of all players!) when she was 32, in 1953. It was this job that broke the barrier
against mainstream, female pros, although she still had to deal with a lack of
respect for her abilities and too great an emphasis on her gender.
(Her accomplishment, by the way, isn't to be confused with that of the women who played for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, founded in 1948 exclusively for female players. It was the inspiration for the movie A League of Their Own.) 
The action takes place during the mid-20th-century years
when major league baseball was transitioning from all-white teams to the inclusion
of black players, beginning with Jackie Robinson, who is often mentioned in the
dialogue. This revolutionary situation, of course, signaled the imminent end of
the Negro Leagues and is likely responsible for allowing the door to open enough
so that a female player could slip in (there would be two more afterward).
The play’s baseball players appear to be a jumble of reality
and fiction. King
Tut (Phillip James Brannon) and Jimmy Wilkes, were actual people. The former is depicted as a capable player while the
real person of that name, a.k.a. “the clown prince of baseball,” is said to have
had only seven plate appearances in his career, his three decades in the game
being primarily as a comedian.
Spec Beebop [sic] (Daniel J. Bryant), another baseball funmaker,
who teamed up with Tut, was a nonplaying dwarf (his name spelled Bebop, not Beebop);
in Toni Stone he’s a short, overweight, bespectacled athlete with a
professorial bent, who jokes about his substantial male endowment. (Al Schact, of course, was the
“clown prince” of major league baseball.)
I’m unable to verify the existence of player-coach Woody Bush
(Ezra Knight), whose name doesn’t appear in this
alphabetical list of Negro League players, which is also the case with
Elzie Marshall (Jonathan Burke), the handsome guy whose ladies man-attitude
Toni sees through as a subterfuge for his homosexuality.
The core of Toni Stone concerns the obstacles put in
the way of a black female athlete who played as well as any male but who had to
go to great lengths to prove she could do so with them on the same field. She
had to battle sexist attitudes from owners and teammates, who often saw her
more as a publicity stunt than as a viable player. At the same time, like her male teammates, she also had to battle the period’s virulent racism, which the play doesn’t hesitate to
present.
Toni is smart, quick-witted, and resistant to guff, but good-natured
and confident, as prone to profanity as her teammates, and anything but a
victim. When needing to take refuge from slings and arrows, she retreats into a
recital of the statistics of the players—black and white—of the day and
shortly before, as references to the likes of Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth attest. For
some reason, however, no years are cited to clarify the statistics cited. The play
presents Toni as remarkably well-versed in baseball stats but stumped by typical
classroom mathematics. (It’s not mentioned but Toni’s two-year Negro Leagues career—including
a season with the Kansas City Monarchs—ended with a batting average of .243.)
Matthis’s performance delivers on every count, being both personable,
formidable, and funny. She’s emotionally and intellectually pointed that you
forgive her for lacking the physical stature of a professional ballplayer, or for
the slight hitch in her swing when she handles a bat.
Toni Stone delves into the biographical weeds of its
subject, introducing not only Toni Stone’s mother; her Irish Catholic priest; Syd
Pollock, the white owner of the Clowns; Millie, the prostitute who became her
close friend (Toni sometimes having had to sleep at brothels when nowhere else
was available in Jim Crow towns), and one-time star catcher and later baseball
mentor, Gabby Street. 
Of considerable importance is the four decades-older, San
Francisco-politician/saloon owner Auralious Alberga (Harry Blanks), who falls
in love with and marries her, but eventually has second thoughts about his wife
being a professional ballplayer.
Toni Stone is enacted on a set (designed by Riccardo
Hernandez) whose upper reaches are lined with large, stadium-style lights (effectively
used by designer Allen Lee Hughes), and whose acting area is a dirt-colored
wooden floor backed by low, bleacher type seats. Strangely, no green is present
in the scheme.
Whether or not Toni Stone wins any pennants, it comes
close enough to hitting it out of the park to make it an early season
contender.
Laura Pels Theatre/Roundabout Theatre
Company
111 W. 46th St., NYC
Through August 11
OTHER VIEWPOINTS:
32 (2019-2020): Review: THE GREAT NOVEL (seen June 19, 2019)
"Some Plays Are Born Not So Great"
Amina Henry’s The Great Novel, a 95-minute play in
the Flea’s Siggy space, directed by Sarah Norris, is the latest project from
the New Light Theater Project (Breeders).
Henry, a product of Brooklyn College’s highly lauded MFA Playwriting program, has
written what is, in essence, a conventional play that she and her director have
gussied up with unnecessary, pseudo-absurdist distractions. These provide an
artistic gloss that does little to elevate its style or substance.
 |
| MaryKathryn Kopp, Tabatha Gayle, Nikki E. Walker. Photo: Hunter Canning. |
To represent their home, scene designer An-Lin Dauber has filled
in the spaces between the brick pillars, which form a permanent backdrop on the
Siggy’s wide, shallow stage, with sheer, white curtains. The set itself is
little more than posh-looking, antique furniture, a fireplace with a mantel, and a mirror-like,
lozenge-shaped wall decoration on which scene titles are projected. Near the
play’s end, tropical vegetation (lushly lit by Christina Tang) can be seen when the curtains are pulled aside.
 |
| Tabatha Gayle, Joshua Bermudez, Nikki E. Walker. Photo: Hunter Canning. |
Dick, whose name probably is intended as a jokey slur on his
vacant character (it’s his disaffected son’s preferred salutation, rather than “Dad”),
is mourning the loss of his wife, who died a year earlier. He’s content to let
Bertha handle the parental care of his kids, as well as every trivial household
chore (like winding the clock, despite references to today’s world), while
ignoring her as a human being.
 |
| Michael Aguirre, Joshua Bermudez. Photo: Hunter Canning. |
Seventeen-year-old Charlotte, an obnoxious, spoiled, drama
queen, turns everything into a melodrama about herself. Anne, the most normal
child, is a 13-year-old suffering from an insistent cold; she serves mainly as
a convenient target for her selfish sister’s rants. Like her sister, she traipses
through the play in a white peignoir (costumes by Mari Taylor), regardless of
the time of day.
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| Oghenero Ghaje, MaryKathryn Kopp. Photo: Hunter Canning. |
Saul is a substance-abusing, self-hating, feckless loser. Apart
from Bertha, the only other family outsider is Potter (Oghenero Gbaje), Charlotte’s
British-accented boyfriend and schoolmate, whom she, romantic to the point of
delusion, considers her “lover.”
 |
| Michael Aguirre, Tabathat Gayle, MaryKathryn Kopp. Photo: Hunter Canning. |
Bertha, burdened by her six-days-a-week job and the numerous
responsibilities it entails, wants more time to write what she believes will be
a great novel, although she hasn’t a clue
about what its subject. When we first meet her, she’s struggling not
only to jot down the first sentence, she doesn’t even know who her characters
will be, what they look like, or what their story will be. From what we’re shown,
Bertha seems to have neither the imagination, knowledge, nor skill to write
even a short story, much less a novel; on the other hand, she’s familiar with
the stereotypical tropes of classic British literature. She thus settles for writing
about the Brennans, noting, to our incredulity, how “interesting” they are.
 |
| Madeline McCray, Nikki E. Walker. Photo: Hunter Canning. |
But then a ghost appears to tell her otherwise. This is her
late Granny (Madeline McCray), a colorfully overstated, Jamaican-accented woman
in Caribbean garb, who watches over and disapproves of Bertha’s choices, insisting
that she must write a novel about her own family in Jamaica. She herself keeps
providing anecdotal and atmospheric background. How lucky to have a dead
amanuensis available to do all one’s research, wouldn’t you say?
 |
| Madeline McCray. Photo: Hunter Canning. |
There’s nothing especially ghostly about her (aside from no
one but Bertha being able to see her) and, for some reason, she often says her
lines directly to us as well as to her granddaughter. Granny is a clumsy device
for expressing Bertha’s internal thought processes, giving her someone other
than the Brennans with whom to examine her options and to offer advice, such as
that she make money by stealing an objet d’art favored by Dick’s late wife.
 |
| Joshua Bermudez, Nikki E. Walker. Photo: Hunter Canning. |
Ultimately, Bertha has had enough. A climactic scene at the
end with Dick allows her to get everything off her chest so she can return to
her cultural roots (and accent) and write the novel Granny has been insisting
on all along.
 |
| Nikki E. Walker, Madeline McCray. Photo: Hunter Canning. |
Perhaps to pump some blood into this rather anemic tale,
director Norris has the actors play everything in a heightened style that attempts
to comment on their characters but that results in what could most politely be
called overacting. Very little of what they do helps the audience make an
investment in the basic reality of the action, since it’s hard to care about
cartoons. Here and there something truthful emerges. I also guess you could say
that Kopp’s Charlotte accurately limns the nasal tones of what resemble those of a vapid Valley Girl, even
with the occasional vocal fry. Charlotte, of course, is a New Yorker, but one
takes what one can get.
 |
| Tabatha Gayle, Nikki E. Walker. Photo: Hunter Canning. |
Just as disturbing is the choice to have the multiethnic
cast wear partial whiteface makeup. Henry explains in the script that race and ethnicity
are social constructs, so she’s inspired to make an experiment “to draw attention
to the social construction of race by having all actors, except for Granny, in
white face.” This is intended to underline the irrelevance of race in the
casting and signify “the diverse racial and ethnic tapestry of the world.”
This may be a noble ideal but, in practice, it only works
against itself. The Great Novel is a play in which a black woman works
for a white family but it actually never specifically introduces the issue of
race; with some slight revision, it could as easily be about a Polish maid. And
it certainly doesn’t need this annoyingly distracting “Day of Absence” convention,
which draws attention to something outside the play’s scope.
When you see a multiethnic cast—apart from those playing
Bertha and Granny—with the upper half of their faces painted white (the white
actors included), you see actors who look like clowns, their already
exaggerated acting even further reduced to caricature, and the reality of what
they’re expressing seriously compromised.
Add it all up and, I’m afraid, The Great Novel becomes anything but a great, much less a good, play.
Flea Theatre/The Siggy
20 Thomas St., NYC
Through June 29
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