BLKS

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War **

After enjoying all three plays I have seen by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Appropriate, An Octoroon and Gloria), I arrived at LCT3’s Claire Tow Theater with high expectations. Unfortunately I was disappointed. Although I credit the playwright for his ambition and imagination, I did not feel that he had produced a coherent work. From reviews, I gather that the play has changed considerably since its 2014 Yale Rep premiere, Nevertheless it still did not seem like a finished product. The focus is divided among too many themes including sibling rivalry, family secrets, the scourge of dementia, dealing with parental illness, meeting parental expectations, racism in America and Germany from WWII to the present and man’s underlying simian nature. Particularly in the second act, there are too many long monologues that interrupt the flow. Roberta (the able Charlayne Woodard) is a well-to-do middle-aged African-American divorcee who has been rushed to a Washington hospital after suffering a stroke while visiting the ape house at the zoo. Her daughter Joanne (Rachel Nicks), a would-be children’s writer, is married to Malcolm (Reggie Gowland), a low key school teacher of no particular distinction, who is white. They have a young daughter. Joanne has only recently resumed a relationship with her mother after long years of estrangement. Her hostile brother Tate (Chris Myers), a political functionary working in Boston, flies in to be at his mother’s bedside and immediately lashes out at everyone including the kindly nurse (Lance Coadie Williams). We later learn that Tate and his male partner have recently split. Roberta was brought to the hospital by a mysterious woman who speaks almost no English; this is Elfriede (Michelle Shay), a German half-sister that Roberta has only recently discovered and, somewhat implausibly, never mentioned to anyone. Malcolm discovers a man staying at Roberta’s apartment, Elfriede’s angry son Tobias (Austin Durant), who is out to get a share of his late grandfather’s legacy. The nonstop shouting and bickering between Tate and everyone else grows quickly tiresome; Tate is so relentlessly nasty that I eventually cringed whenever he opened his mouth. The play’s most interesting feature is that for much of the first act we witness the comatose Roberta trying to regain her bearings with the assistance of a pack of gorillas led by Alpha (Williams again) whose language is projected as subtitles. It did not work for me. Simian imagery pervades the play from the monkey-sound taunts at Roberta’s father in Germany to the ape house at the zoo and the apes in her struggle for consciousness. Mimi Lien’s elegant scenic design is evocatively lit by Matt Frey. Montana Blanco’s costumes are apt. I can’t fault director Lileana Blain-Cruz for failing to bring all the disparate elements together better. While this evening was a disappointment, three hits out of four is still an enviable record for a playwright. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes including intermission.

Whorl Inside a Loop **

Sherie Rene Scott and Dick Scanlan, who brought us “Everyday Rapture” a few years ago, are back at Second Stage with another work inspired by actual events. In 2011 the two of them gave a one-day workshop on personal narrative for a class of convicted murderers at an upstate prison. It was so successful that they kept coming back to develop the prisoners’ narratives into a show that was presented for a prison audience. Now they have turned a fictionalized version of that workshop into a play. Scott plays The Volunteer, an actress whose less than noble reasons for being at the prison to teach a 12-session workshop are not at first revealed. Worse, after pledging to the men that their stories would not leave the room, she proceeds, in secret, to use them to develop a play for the public. There is a half-baked subplot that has Hillary visiting the prison to see a performance. The prison scenes alternate with considerably less successful scenes outside in which the prisoners crudely impersonate Scott’s husband, son, lawyer, producer, hair stylist and Hillary. One wishes that the authors had stuck to the prisoners’ narratives, which are quite powerful and well-performed. The other parts of the play are muddled and dilute the impact. A twist at the end that raises the question of who is actually telling whose story didn’t quite work for me. I had trouble separating Scott’s performance from the unsympathetic character she portrays. The rest of the cast — Derrick Baskin, Nicholas Christopher, Chris Myers, Ryan Quinn Daniel J. Watts, Donald Webber Jr. — is excellent and the core material is worthwhile. Too bad they didn’t just go with that. Michael Mayer co-directed with Scanlan. Incidentally, the title refers to a rare fingerprint pattern. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes; no intermission. 

P.S. Second Stage's Tony Kiser Theatre has to be the least audience-friendly theater built in the last 20 years. The seats are narrow and low, the padding is thin, the legroom minimal and there are no handrails on the center aisle. To sit for more than an hour was punishing.

Little Children Dream of God **

The mission of Roundabout Underground is to present works by emerging playwrights in the Black Box Theatre below the Laura Pels. In past years they have presented promising plays by Stephen Karam (Speech and Debate) and Joshua Harmon (Bad Jews.) Currently onstage is this ambitious work by Jeff Augustin, which deals mainly with Haitian refugees in Miami. We meet seven vivid characters. Sula (Carra Patterson) is a young pregnant woman from Haiti who struggles to delay her baby’s arrival until she is in the U.S. She is haunted by nightmares about her past. Her baby does not cry. Joel (Maurice Jones) is the son of the landlord who has turned his apartment house into a de facto refuge for immigrants. Carolyn (Deirdre O’Connell) is a nursing home aide with 11 children who lives in one of the apartments and who reluctantly takes Sula in. Vishal (Chris Myers) is the resident drag queen who sometimes sits for Carolyn’s children. Madison (Crystal Lucas-Perry) is Joel’s stereotypically yuppy cousin who hires Sula as her nanny. Manuel (Gilbert Cruz) is a dying patient of Carolyn’s who is estranged from his children. The Man (Carl Hendrick Louis) is the figure from Sula’s past who figures prominently in her nightmares. Some of the topics touched upon include the struggle to preserve a family heritage, the corrosive effects of gentrification, the disappearance of God, the attempt to escape one’s past, the efficacy of voodoo and the pain of dying alone unloved. I wished that the playwright had narrowed his scope and presented fewer but more fully developed themes. Some of the actors had trouble maintaining a Creole accent. Andrew Boyce’s flexible set design is simple but effective. Jennifer Caprio’s costumes are appropriate. Giovanna Sardelli’s direction cannot hide the unevenness of the material. Augustin shows promise if his control can catch up with his ambition. Running time: 2 hours including intermission.

Note: Judging from tonight’s theatergoers, Roundabout’s marketing to nontraditional audiences has been far more successful than LCT3’s. Tickets are $5 cheaper ($20 vs. $25), but I doubt that difference is significant.

brownsville song (b-side for tray) **

If good intentions and heartfelt sincerity were all it took to write a successful play, Kimber Lee (who apparently has an aversion to capital letters) would have hit the jackpot with her drama at LCT3’s Claire Tow Theater. We know before the play begins that Tray (Sheldon Best), an 18-year-old black Brooklynite just finishing high school, is dead. The play opens with a grief-filled monologue by Tray’s grandma Lena (Lizan Mitchell) advising us that Tray’s life is worth far more than the few lines the newspaper will devote to his senseless death in a street shooting. After this strong start, the play moves backward and forward in time to describe Tray and the effects of his death on his grandmother, his beloved little half-sister Devine (Taliyah Whitaker), his long-estranged stepmother Merrell (Sun Mee Chomet) and, to a lesser extent, his friend Junior (Chris Myers). Unfortunately, the play begins to lose its course and ultimately resorts to some manipulative sentimentality. A few things puzzled me. What happened to Tray’s biological mother? Was the choice of an Asian-American actor to play Merrell an indication of his stepmother’s ethnicity or just a bit of nontraditional casting? (I concluded it was the former.) Some of the plot points stretched my willingness to suspend disbelief too far. Merrell’s reappearance, first as a tutor for Tray’s college admission essay, and then as a job applicant at the Starbuck’s where he is a barista, seemed too pat. The play’s sentimental but nonetheless wrenching ending reinforces our sense of tragic, senseless loss. The production is first-rate: the cast is very good, the set by Andromache Chalfant is excellent, the costumes by Dede M. Ayite are apt, the lighting by Jijoun Chang and the sound design by Asa Wember are effective and the direction by Patricia McGregor is assured. Would that the playwright had been able to maintain the high level of the play’s opening scene. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes, no intermission.

An Octoroon ****

After showing great promise with his recent play "Appropriate" at the Signature Theatre, Brendan Jacobs-Jenkins has fulfilled that promise -- and then some -- with this new work at Soho Rep. Jacobs-Jenkins is a master at appropriating theatrical tropes and reworking them into something new and more interesting. In the earlier play, he took the Southern dysfunctional family play and turned it inside out. In the current play the object of his deconstruction is "The Octoroon," an antebellum melodrama by Irish playwright Dion Boucicault, that opened at the Winter Garden in 1859 and ran for several years in road companies. The result is a meta-melodrama unlike anything I have seen before. The play opens with a depressed black actor, BJJ (Chris Myers) claiming to be the playwright, in his underwear, discussing a recent session with his therapist, during which he reveals his admiration for Boucicault. Suddenly Boucicault (Danny Wolohan) appears onstage and a shouting match ensues. They are joined by an assistant (Ben Horner) who helps them prepare for the play. BJJ applies whiteface makeup, the white assistant puts on blackface, and Boucicault adds redface, dresses in an Indian (no political correctness here!) costume with an elaborate feather headdress and performs a vigorous dance. Suddenly the rear wall of the stage collapses forward to reveal a bright all-white set with the floor covered with cotton balls, representing the Louisiana plantation Terrebonne where the action takes place. A trio of slaves -- Minnie (Jocelyn Bloh), Dido (Marsha Stephanie Blake) and Grace (Shyko Amos) -- take the place of a Greek chorus, but one that talks trash and contemporary psychobabble. The characters include George (Myers again), the young master who loves his 1/8th black cousin Zoe (Amber Gray), the evil overseer McClosky (Myers yet again) who also desires Zoe, the wealthy heiress Dora (Zoe Winters) who wants to wed George, the old house slave Peter (Horner again), the innocent young slave Paul (Horner once more) and his devoted Indian friend Wahnotee (Wolohan again), the auctioneer LaFouche (Wolohan) and a ship captain (uncredited). They are joined onstage by cellist Lester St. Louis whose music subtly underlines the action. The dialogue blends excerpts from Boucicault's play with Jacobs-Jenkins's inventions. The cast doubling opens clever opportunities such as a one-actor fight scene between George and McClosky. Meandering through the play at several points is an enigmatic Br'er Rabbit figure, a sharply dressed rabbit/man with a cottontail and a very expressive face. (It turns out that he is none other than the playwright himself.) Director Sarah Benson works wonders with the complex material, Mimi Lien's set is amazing, Wade Laboissonniere's costumes are wonderful, as are all other aspects of the production design. My compliments to Soho Rep for mounting such an ambtious play and congratulations to the playwright for his well-deserved Obie. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including intermission.