While there has been no abatement over the past week in new theater fare you’ll find apt for marking Black History Month, there’s a continuing undercurrent of Chekhovian comedy and satire that might fly better in a Failure to Communicate Month. What doesn’t happen in Chekhov’s bittersweet comedies is often more important than what does.
Missed opportunities are a recurring motif in Sans-Culottes in the Promised Land, a contemporary satire equally well-suited for celebrations of black history and failed communications. Kristen Greenridge’s play won a slot at the prestigious Humana New Play Festival in Louisville last year, and the current run at Carolina Actors Studio Theatre (CAST) through February 20 qualifies as a regional premiere.
Greenridge’s characters, all of them blacks, often fail to articulate their experiences, observations and inner longings. More often, they’re just too self-absorbed to listen. With Greenridge whipping up the pace through multiple blackout scenes — some with no dialogue whatsoever — and CAST director Michael Simmons spurring the action along by deploying all of the necessary scenery to different sectors of the stage, our latter-day sans-culottes seem to be blundering blindly in the Sinai Desert. Yes, this is surely somewhere close to the Promised Land, but nobody is luxuriating here.
Or happy. Since Greenridge’s script emerged from her own experiences as a nanny in an affluent Boston suburb, the nanny in Sans-Culottes, hiding the shame of her illiteracy, might be considered the playwright’s central character. But all of her characters are flamboyantly drawn and the problems we dwell on most are those of the family who employ Lena.
Mom is a lawyer who finds a glass ceiling daunting her quest to become a partner in her firm. Carol’s husband Greg, an architect, can’t close that big deal — or stop fondling the parade of nannies sashaying through their home. Meanwhile, their daughter Greta, feeling conspicuous as the one black at her school, is increasingly withdrawing to her room, drifting into a fantasy world and emerging as a grotesque Snow White. A flour child for real.
Clearly the chief irritant is Carol. Rather than soil her royal Nefertitti-ness with actual parenting, she farms her daughter off to the wacked-out Charlotte, who serves up a spaced-out mix of history, heritage and herbalism. When Greta returns home, Carol decrees that she is exclusively in Lena’s care — despite the nanny’s frank loathing for children and the Caribbean housemaid’s desperate longing to love and nurture the girl.
Designing and lighting his set, Simmons grasps the exoticism and the absurdity of Greenridge’s fantastical world. Robert Lazenby’s sound design is pitch perfect, executed with admirable precision amid the cocaine pacing.
So it’s dispiriting to report that most of the CAST cast fails to tune in to Greenridge’s frazzled wavelength. You can blame Simmons for not getting through to his less experienced actors, or you can blame Greenridge for setting down storylines that are too disjointed to be easily grasped.
Brian Daye is the brightest spot onstage as the lumbering, lascivious dad who belatedly discovers his daughter’s pathetic plight — and the simple rewards of fatherhood. Corlis Hayes, though somewhat over-directed, brings occasional warmth and nuance to the barren Caribbean housemaid.
Nuance seems an alien concept elsewhere, and the monochromatic portrayals become increasingly wearisome as we trudge through the Miracle Gro thickets of Act 2. Rodena Barr’s shrill rendition of the mom is particularly irksome — I might spare Marie Antoinette for the privilege of beheading this self-centered screamer.
Though I’m uncertain whether she blinks all evening, Paris Riché Simpson is the most tolerable of the others as the sensual, exotic Charlotte, obsessed with historical and botanical Afro roots. Simpson also scores extra kudos for her costume designs.
The sans-culottes of the French Revolution personified the grassroots patriotic fervor that careened out of control during the Reign of Terror. Until all of the actors can fully connect with the struggles of their upwardly mobile brothers and sisters in America, it will remain difficult for audiences to care.
At key points in Suitcase or, those that resemble flies from a distance, the two dysfunctional couples substitute a cappella song for dialogue. Then in the signature scene of Melissa James Gibson’s deconstruct of New Age living and communicating, the two men and two women do nothing but call out each others’ names — for minute after minute in a dizzying medley of inflections and possible intentions.
In a useful note from the playwright in the BareBones Theatre Group playbill, Gibson sees life as “a struggle among airborne wants.” Hitching rides onto Gibson’s playful use of language, tracing graceful curlicues of candid expression, coy evasion, confused interruption and guarded emotion, those wants sometimes disintegrate into the pure chaos of sound. Opera for the new millennium! Or a U-turn back toward the grunts of the Cro-Magnon Age.
The paradox of this atavism is that all four of the characters are so articulate that they can use euphemistic language to deflect intimate relationships — and the onset of adulthood — from their doorsteps. Jen stands at the vortex of all the inertia and anomie, a black hole of indifference into which all the other characters futilely toss their affections or confidences.
Jen has locked herself into her sloppo apartment, slumped amid the garbage her hapless boyfriend devotedly drops at her doorstep — for a doctoral dissertation that school officials have told her she must abandon. She’s afraid to call her advisor, who might be able to jumpstart her stalled project, because this might also mean decisive closure. Similarly, admitting that Karl is her boyfriend would be an uncomfortable step forward.
While Jen is attempting to prove that people’s identities can be accurately gauged by what they discard, her friend Sallie is dissertating on the different ways — besides the usual sequence of beginning, middle and end — that narrative can unfold. Because both Jen and Sallie have closed their doors indefinitely to their boyfriends, the struggle of their airborne wants becomes pictured like the physics of desire. Slowly, the guys breach the barrier of the outside door to their girlfriends’ apartment building, coming in from the cold only to encounter a more stubborn barrier: the locked doors to the women’s nests.
Wielding her comedic cutlass all the while, Gibson focuses our attention irresistibly on the question of whether the guys will breach that last barrier and achieve actual contact with their gals. If the baroque euphemistic language of their dialogue makes us pause occasionally and consider whether we’re watching real people, so much the better.
The BareBones production, directed by Allison Modafferi, is as tight as anything in town. Greta Marie Zandstra wraps Jen in a chilling coldness as she accords equal attention to her friends, her nails and the discarded Christmas cassette tape of a family she’s never met. A fascinating monster.
Amy Campbell gives Sallie a cuddly softness that humanizes her trepidation and her verbose evasions. Lee Thomas, long a fixture in the local comedy firmament, complements this sweetly whining Sallie with a winsome loneliness of his own as Lyle. As the jittery, neurotic Karl, Glenn Hutchinson rounds out the cast with his best effort ever.
Many would find Gibson’s playful sublimation of courtship puzzling and repellent. Others who are more likely to venture into SPAC and SouthEnd will realize that sexual intercourse is the very essence of Gibson’s abstraction. Pretty cool once you get the hang of it.
With customary ease, Actor’s Theatre ascends to the top rung among local Black History Month celebrations, bringing Ernest J. Gaines’ award-winning A Lesson Before Dying vividly to life. I first became acquainted with Romulus Linney’s superb stage adaptation more than two years ago when Triad Stage offered an absolutely stunning production at its new downtown venue in Greensboro.
In some respects, the current Actor’s Theatre version actually eclipses the noteworthy Triad production of November 2002. Terrell Dulin gives an extraordinary performance as Grant Wiggins, the schoolteacher recruited to the difficult task of imparting manhood to a hapless black prisoner who has been sentenced to die in the electric chair for a murder he didn’t commit.
With Sidney Horton making a thoughtful directorial debut at Actor’s Theatre, we see the two concurrent themes more clearly. While Jefferson is learning to be the hero his people need — rather than descending to the bestiality of a hog (as he’d been described by his inept defense attorney) — Grant is also learning a lesson or two. First, he discovers that the downtrodden Jefferson can rise to the occasion. In the process of helping the condemned prisoner, Grant also comes to see that the humble community that raised him has a legitimate claim upon his talents.
Horton’s blocking is often too tidy, and the former CL Actor of the Year allows his cast to miss a couple of the most telling subtleties in our journey back to segregationist Louisiana in 1948. But Nicholas L. Johnson delivers some explosive moments as Jefferson and Brett Gentile’s powerhouse rendition of Sheriff Sam Guidry reaffirms how lucky we are to have this actor in Charlotte.
Kim Watson Brooks spans the range of Jefferson’s girlfriend Vivian, combining idealism with saloon hall sensuality. I’d like to see a more venerable tinge to Emma Glenn, the guardian who cajoles Grant into his samaritan chores, but Dorothy J. Morrison’s maternal warmth is never in doubt. Neither is the rectitude of Michael L. Nesbitt as Rev. Moses Ambrose, a rod of god who views salvation as more important than manhood.
It doesn’t get any better than the moment when the righteous Rev deigns to turn on Jefferson’s radio. That quaint little portable becomes a holy relic in this touching Actor’s Theatre presentation.
Two more perennials opened last week. Moving Poets has brought back its Fowl Play from a few years back under the more familiar title of Swan Lake. While we miss Rob Simmons’ charismatic presence as the Rock Baron, the new version with an eclectic score by Tom Constanten is unquestionably an upgrade.
Joseph Curry dances the central role of Ziggy Prince, proving to possess formidable acting skills in the process, while Miranda Haywood is a haunting White Swan. But it’s the Black Swan pas de deux with Curry and Sarah Emery that achieves maximum heat, simply the best fusion of rock and ballet I’ve ever witnessed.
You can’t argue with the success of CPCC Theatre’s revival of Fiddler on the Roof, sold out for last Saturday night’s performance. Costumes by Suzie Hartness are the best I’ve seen from a Metrolina company for this musical, and Ron Chisholm’s recreation of the original Jerome Robbins choreography is spectacular.
Jim Kidd isn’t the most jovial Tevye you’ll see, but he puts plenty of spirit into the dairyman — and a strong, steady voice into the trusty showstoppers. Tom Hollis’s direction is most imaginative in “The Dream,” with a ghostly Fruma-Sarah who nearly reaches the ceiling at panoramic Pease Auditorium. Elizabeth Miller makes a vivacious impression as Tevye’s eldest daughter Tzeitel, nicely complemented by Ashby Blakely’s wholesome Motel the Tailor. Pat Heiss as Yente and Cedric Guthrie as Lazar Wolf prove themselves warm and dependable with the right comic touch.
This article appears in Feb 16-22, 2005.
