The Red Letter Plays: Fucking A

In 1997 Suzan-Lori Parks made a casual remark to a friend that she wanted to write a riff on The Scarlet Letter and call it Fucking A. What she eventually produced was not one but two plays, both about a poor, illiterate woman named Hester who has been ill-treated by life. For the first time ever, they are being presented in tandem at Signature Theater.

B

Fucking A, written a year after In the Blood, is a far more ambitious, complex work. Set in “a small town in a small country in the middle of nowhere,” this dystopian fable resembles a Jacobean revenge drama presented in the manner of Brecht and Weill. Hester Smith (a superb Christine Lahti; God of Carnage) has been forced to become the town abortionist, for which they have carved the letter A into her chest. She has been trying for 20 years to raise the money to ransom her son Boy from prison. The rich girl who snitched on him for his petty theft is now the town’s First Lady (Elizabeth Stanley; On the Town). Whenever Hester visits the Freedom Fund Lady (Ruibo Qian; Bull in a China Shop), she learns that the price of ransom has gone up because of her son’s latest infractions in jail. The Mayor (a droll Marc Kudisch), frustrated that his wife has not borne him a child, is dallying with Hester’s only friend Canary Mary (Joaquina Kalukango; The Color Purple), who hopes that he will marry her after he has his wife eliminated.  We learn that a dangerous criminal, Monster (the wonderful Brandon Victor Dixon) has escaped and is being trailed by three vicious hunters who look forward to torturing him before killing him. When Hester finally scrapes together enough money to arrange a picnic with her son in the prison courtyard, the guard (J. Cameron Barnett; The Emperor Jones) leads in a prisoner called Jailbait (Ben Horner; An Octoroon) who turns out not only not be her son but claims to have killed him. Aside from Canary Mary, the only person showing Hester any kindness is Butcher (the wonderful Raphael Nash Thompson; Othello at The Pearl), who has long been her secret admirer. The First Lady’s unexpected pregnancy sets in motion a crescendo of violence. The play’s tragic ending approaches the level of Greek tragedy. The play is enhanced by musical interludes with some of the actors doubling as musicians. Each of the main characters gets a song. Instead of a song, the butcher gets a bravura five-minute soliloquy during which he enumerates the many infractions of his daughter Lulu. One innovation (which I found merely a distraction) is that when the women discuss matters of female sexuality, they switch to an invented language called Talk with translations projected on supertitles. The casting of Lahti as Hester is an interesting case of nontraditional casting in reverse. The role has been traditionally played by a black actor. Casting a white actor shifts the basis for much of the injustice from race to class. Fortunately, the play can support either interpretation. Rachel Hauck’s (Our Lady of Kibeho) flexible set suits the action well. Emilio Sosa’s (On Your Feet!) costumes are appropriate to their characters. Jo Bonney’s (By the Way, Meet Vera Stark) confident direction holds everything together. Running time: two hours 20 minutes including intermission.

Bull in a China Shop

C-

Mary Woolley led such an interesting life that it is hard to imagine that it could be turned into a boring play, but playwright Bryna Turner, making her professional debut with this LCT3 production, has managed just that. Among her many achievements, Woolley was president of Mt. Holyoke College for over 35 years and was largely responsible for transforming it from a sleepy regional seminary to a first-rate women’s college. One of her first official acts was to hire her lifelong partner Jeannette Marks, as a professor of English and, within the year, to make her department chair. Suspected favoritism toward Marks dogged Woolley’s career. What Turner has written came across to me as scattered chapters from a Cliff Notes summary of a biography. There was very little enlightenment and not much emotional involvement. Maybe it was more meaningful to lesbians. Since there were two excerpts from a lecture on Woolf’s Orlando, maybe it would have helped to have read that book. As I experienced the play, it shed little heat or light. I must confess that I had to fight nodding off a few times. The multicultural cast is led by Enid Graham as Woolley and Ruibo Quan as Marks. Lizbeth Mackay plays the college’s tradition-bound dean, Michele Selene Ang plays Pearl, a student with a crush on Marks, and Crystal Lucas-Perry’s character, Felicity, is either Marks’s landlady or roommate. The deliberately contemporary dialogue uses the title “Ms.” and is loaded with gratuitous F-bombs. Turner stretches anachronism too far for me when she describes a peace conference to which Woolley was sent by President Hoover: she says she wanted to tell Hitler to pull out of Poland. The conference was seven years before he invaded. Oana Botez costumes the leads in culottes. Did American women wear them 100 years ago? The set design by Arnulfo Maldonado features a back wall with a bright floral design and a large window, a slightly raked polished wooden floor and a walkway at the front. Before the play begins, the set is obscured by a large white rectangular object hanging down that looks like a mattress, but raises to form the set’s ceiling. When the play ended and the rectangle was lowered to its initial position, at least 15 seconds went by before there was applause. Lee Sunday Evans directed. Running time: 90 minutes; no intermission.