Ever since Aeschylus wrote the first Greek tragedies back in
the fifth century B.C., playwrights have been creating works that wrestle with
the pressing issues of their time. One of the most troubling issues of the last
few years has been the murder of young black men by law enforcement officers. Those
tragedies inspired the Black Lives Matter movement and now they've spawned a crop
of audacious plays.
I saw two of them—Scraps and The Revolving Cycles Truly and
Steadily Roll’d—earlier this month. Each has its faults and they won't appeal to all theatergoers but both knocked me out
with their commitment to confronting the subject and their fearlessness in
breaking established forms to do it.
Geraldine Inoa, the inaugural winner of a fellowship for
“unsung voices” created by the TV writer and producer Shonda Rhimes, focuses on
the aftermath of a police shooting in Scraps, which closes at The Flea Theater
in TriBeCa tonight.
Scraps opens four months after Forest Winthrop, a college
football player home during a school break, was shot to death by a cop while he
was running to the store to buy diapers for his infant son. Traumatized by Forest’s
death, his friends struggle to cope in various ways.
Aisha, the mother of his child, can barely suppress the rage
she feels toward white people and even toward Forest, whom she had cautioned to
be careful. Their neighbor Jean-Baptise seeks relief in smoking pot and
composing rap lyrics about racial oppression. Forest’s best friend Calvin tries
to deal with his grief by assimilating as much as he possibly can into the Ivy
League world of Columbia University where he’s a scholarship student.
But most affected is Aisha’s sister Adriana, who has spiraled
into a depression so severe that she’s given up going to her classes at NYU and
barely washes or dresses in anything other than pajamas. The biggest fear they
all share is that a wrong step by any of them could result in another premature
death, a concern heightened when a menacing white cop appears on their
block.
The second half of this 90-minute drama skips ahead a few
years and becomes surrealistic as Inoa plunges into the nightmares of Forest’s
now eight-year-old son who is trying to understand the cause of his father's death and who
is terrified that the same thing will happen to him.
The boy is played by the adult actress Bryn Carter, who,
under the finely-edged direction of The Flea’s artistic director Nigel Smith,
gives a devastating performance as does the entire cast, all members of The
Flea’s resident company The Bats (click here to read more about the making of the production).
I want to see all of them again and I plan on seeing the
other two plays about race that The Flea is featuring in what it's calling its
“Color Brave” season.
The Playwrights Realm, the company dedicated to supporting
playwrights at the beginning of their careers, has opened its new season with Jonathan
Payne’s The Revolving Cycles Truly and Steadily Roll’d, which is playing at The
Duke on 42nd Street through Oct. 6.
Payne’s story centers
around the quest of a street kid named Karma to find her foster brother who has
been missing for weeks. They've grown up in The Oblong, a poor and dangerous
neighborhood whose most successful resident is the local undertaker because so
many young people there die before their time.
Taking more than a few pages from Brecht's playbook, Payne
names the mortician Profit and blames the Oblong's woes on the ruthlessness of
capitalism. He also breaks the fourth wall with direct interactions with the
audience. During one meta-moment an actor steps out of character to complain
about what the playwright has him saying and doing.
The result is a play that's even messier and more in-your-face than
Scraps. It isn't the kind of theater I usually like but I was fascinated by
the passionate intensity with which Payne, who has a day job as a social
worker, makes his case about the not-so benign neglect of these young people.
Under Awoye Timpo's energetic direction, the cast, most of them playing multiple roles, transforms his thesis into vivid life. Kara Young is particularly effective as Karma, capturing the simultaneous toughness and vulnerability that put so many black youths at risk.
Under Awoye Timpo's energetic direction, the cast, most of them playing multiple roles, transforms his thesis into vivid life. Kara Young is particularly effective as Karma, capturing the simultaneous toughness and vulnerability that put so many black youths at risk.
Eager to engage with their subject matter—and to force audiences to do so as well—both Scraps and Revolving
Cycles undercut some of their power by trying to do too much. But this is the
kind of misstep nearly all starting playwrights make and in these cases, the
talent is sharp enough and the messages important enough for the errors to be
forgiven.
Each show made some people in the audience around me visibly uncomfortable. But shaking people up is what they intend to do. I've tweeted and Facebooked about these shows but I wish I had
written here about them sooner because, to paraphrase a wise man, attention to plays like these should be paid.