The second play in the Signature Theatre Company’s Red Letter Plays
tandem productions was Suzan-Lori Parks’s Fucking
A, which began previews under the direction of Jo Bonney (see my reports on By The Way, Meet Vera Stark, 27 May 2011, and The Mound Builders, 27 March 2013) in the Pershing
Square Signature Center’s Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre, the company’s variable-space house, on 22 August 2017 and opened on 11 September. Extended a week from its original closing
date of 1 October, it had its last performance on 8 October; my friend Kirk (who
went to In the Blood with me, too) and
I saw it at the 7:30 performance on Wednesday evening, 4 October (after having
been canceled out for 13 September due to an undefined “actor emergency”). The Red Letter Plays were Parks’s final
productions in her 2016-17 Residency One at STC; she will be followed in that
slot for the 2017-18 season by Stephen Adly Guirgis. (Guirgis will be presenting three plays at
STC, starting with Jesus Hopped the 'A’
Train, which I’ll be seeing on 27 October; a report on that production will
follow soon after.)
Fucking A premièred at the
DiverseWorks Artspace in Houston, Texas, for Infernal Bridgegroom Productions
on 24 February 2000; directed by Parks.
It was presented Off-Broadway at the Public Theatre, opening on 25
February 2003; directed by Michael Greif.
The Signature’s staging is the first New York revival since the Public’s
production. (It’s also the first time
the two Red Letter Plays, which were written separately, have been staged in
tandem. For a brief description of Parks’s
account of how she came to write the two plays, see my report on In the Blood, posted on 12 October. There’s also a profile of the playwright in
my report on The Death of the Last Black
Man in the Whole Entire World on 1 December 2016.)
Like Parks’s In the Blood,
which was composed and staged first, Fucking
A is a riff on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter. (As
I said in my ITB report, it isn’t
necessary to have read The Scarlet Letter
to follow Fucking A. You can look the novel up for yourself, so for now, I’ll just say that it’s set in
Puritan Boston in the 1640s where Hester Prynne, married to a man believed lost
at sea, gives birth to a daughter whose father she refuses to name. Cast out of the community, she’s forced to
wear a red letter A for “Adulteress”
embroidered on the bodice of her dress.)
Neither play is an
adaptation of or sequel to Hawthorne’s novel; like its sister play, Fucking A, a tragedy with songs for
which Parks wrote the music and lyrics (played in lofts overlooking either side of the stage by cast
members doubling as musicians directed by Todd Almond), uses elements of the novel
to explore and examine modern-day issues Parks considers important to
contemporary society: poverty, class structure, marginalization, systemic
prejudice against women, motherhood, fatherhood, among others.
Set in an unspecified time and place, “a small town in a small country
in the middle of nowhere,” Fucking A
takes place in a dystopian world where towns are fiefdoms ruled by autocratic mayors. Hester Smith (Christine Lahti) is an outcast
living on the margins of her town’s society.
She bears the letter A branded
into the skin above her left breast.
Unlike Hawthorne’s Hester, though, Parks’s isn’t being punished for
adultery; her A is for “Abortionist.” The brand bleeds afresh every time a customer
comes, but her status is ambiguous: reviled in public for her trade, in private
she’s sought out and employed by the same people who shun her. The brand, which must by law always be visible,
serves as both an indictment and an advertisement, bringing customers to
her.
As Fucking A opens, Hester is
talking to her friend Canary Mary (Joaquina Kalukango) about the son Hester hasn’t
seen for 20 years. Boy Smith was sent to
prison as a child for stealing a piece of meat from the wealthy family where
Hester scrubbed floors, and Hester was forced to become an abortionist or join
him behind bars. The “little Rich Girl”
who fingered Boy is now the wife of the despotic Mayor (Marc Kudisch), who runs
the town like a tin-pot dictator.
Hester tells Canary (who, incidentally, wears a bright yellow dress—which
Ben Brantley of the New York Times
called “curve-hugging,” and, man, is it ever!) that she writes to her son in
prison and had been saving her fees to buy Boy’s freedom, but in the meantime,
she’s paying installments into the Freedom Fund toward a “reunion picnic” with
him. (Some of Hester and Canary’s
conversation, as well as other dialogue throughout the play, is in a language
called TALK which only the women of the town speak—used principally when they
talk about sex or women’s private parts.
The English translation of these passages is projected on the back wall
of the set. The projections are designed
by Rocco Disant.) The two women’s banter
includes their calling each other “Whore” and “Babykiller.” Hester and Canary sing the “Working Womans
Song.”
Canary in turn reveals that she’s become the Mayor’s mistress and that
the First Lady (Elizabeth Stanley) can’t give her husband “an heir or heiress.”
The Mayor’s planning to “bump off” his wife and Canary thinks he’ll marry
her. Hester, who (like Hester, La
Negrita in In the Blood) is
illiterate, asks Canary to read her last letter from Boy and Canary gives her a
gold coin she’s gotten from the Mayor.
Hester goes to the Freedom Fund to make another payment towards her
reunion with her son. The Freedom Fund
Lady (Marlene Ginader), a figure certainly inspired by Kafka who keeps the
payment records, tells Hester that Boy’s “picnic price” has doubled because
he’s “committed a few crimes” since her last payment. Later, Canary walks through a park “in the
middle of nowhere,” where she meets an escaped convict from “up north,” Monster
(Donovan Mitchell). She notices a scar on
his arm he says is “from a long time ago.” After a few moments, she goes on her way.
In a tavern, three Hunters (J. Cameron Barnett, Peter Roman, Ginader),
fresh off a successful capture of an escaped prisoner (from whose mutilated
body they’ve kept souvenirs: his feet, a finger), lament that they won’t have a
shot at catching the “famous convict” Monster for the bounty since he escaped
“up north.” They sing “The Hunters
Creed.” Hester comes in looking for Scribe
(Kudisch) so he can write a new letter to her son. She meets Butcher (Raphael Nash Thompson),
who protects her from the abusive Hunters.
Following a confrontation with her husband and then encountering Hester
on the street, a distraught First Lady meets Monster in the park. They exchange some kind words and he remarks
on the same scar Canary had noticed. At
the end of their conversation, the First Lady asks if she can kiss Monster. He agrees, and they kiss.
Late at night in Hester’s house, she finds Butcher sitting in her front
room; they’re both wearing bloody aprons from their respective jobs. They talk about their children and we learn
that Butcher, too, has a child, a daughter, in prison. Hester learns that Butcher has been leaving
fresh meat at her door and he confesses that he’s attracted to her. He teaches her how to slaughter a pig by
slitting its throat so that “it never hurts.”
The next morning, Hester comes in from her back room to find that Monster’s
broken into her home and he threatens her and robs her of all her money except a
gold coin she has hidden in her boot. While
he’s holding her, Monster sees the scar on her arm that matches his, but he
doesn’t react.
Hester’s finally paid the Freedom Fund enough for her to have her
reunion picnic with her son. As she waits
in the prison yard, she lays out the picnic spread and the guard brings out a
prisoner called Jailbait (Roman), who Hester assumes is Boy. She embraces him
and tries to get him to show her his arm; earlier, Hester had told Bucher that
when Boy was arrested, she bit him to leave a mark on her son and then bit
herself to make an identical mark.
Jailbait’s more interested in the food, however, than he is in her, and Hester
realizes he’s not her son. Jailbait
claims he killed her son in prison;
Hester stares at him in shock. Jailbait
finishes eating and assaults Hester sexually and rapes her; too stunned to
resist, Hester lets him do what he wants.
She sings “My Vengeance.”
The First Lady has become pregnant by Monster and at first decides to
abort the child, but changes her mind at the last minute and chooses to pass it
off as the Mayor’s. Hester’s at
Butcher’s shop when the Mayor comes in for an order and announces that he and
the First Lady are expecting a child.
Hester hatches a plan for revenge against the First Lady for putting Boy
in prison so long ago and enlists Butcher and Canary to help her kidnap
the First Lady and abort the baby so that the First Lady can echo the pain that
she caused Hester all those years ago. The
next night, Canary and Butcher bring a drugged First Lady to Hester’s house,
where Hester aborts the baby, not knowing that it’s her own grandchild.
After Butcher and Canary leave, Monster runs into the house, trying to
escape the Hunters. Hester has begun to
piece together the evidence and realizes that Monster is actually her son, but has trouble accepting that he’s no longer the “angel” she believed he was. He sings “The Making of a Monster.” The barking of the Hunters’ dogs gets louder
and Monster tells Hester that when they catch him, they’ll torture him to a
gruesome death. He begs Hester to kill
him; though at first she resists, she finally slits his throat like Butcher showed
her. The Hunters enter and although they
are disappointed to find that Monster’s already dead, they drag his body away
because there’s “plenty of fun still to be had.” Hester sits alone in her house for a moment, reprising
“Working Womans Song.” Soon Hester’s
back doorbell begins to ring insistently, but she ignores it and gets her
abortion tools and goes into the other room to continue her work. Even after all she’s suffered, life simply
goes on for Hester as it has for 20 years.
(A few words about casting in Fucking
A and the STC staging: In In the Blood, Parks specifies the race
of three of the characters, including Hester, La Negrita, leaving the rest open
to the directors’ choices. In Fucking A, the dramatist puts no
restrictions on the racial make-up of the ensemble. At Signature, for instance, Hester Smith is
white, Canary is African American, and the First Lady is white; at the Public
Theater in 2003, Hester was African American [S. Epatha Merkerson], Canary was
Latina [Daphne Rubin Vega], and the First Lady was African American [Michole
Briana White]. In Signature’s revival, Christine Lahti’s “son” is African
American while the prisoner she thinks is her son, Jailbait, is Caucasian; in
2003, both men were black [Mos Def and Chandler Parker, respectively]. There’s nothing in the text to contradict any
combination of actors’ backgrounds.
(In addition, when the production at STC was extended past 1 October,
three members of the original cast left the show and their roles were
recast. Ruibo Qian, Brandon Victor
Dixon, and Ben Horner were replaced by, respectively, Marlene Ginader, Donovan
Mitchell, and Peter Roman. Early press
coverage of the production, including most reviews, will feature the first trio
of actors.)
Signature’s Fucking A, which is
composed in 19 scenes in two “parts” with an intermission after scene 12 and
runs two hours and 15 minutes, is performed on a unit set (designed by Rachel
Hauck and lit moodily by Jeff Croiter) that serves as all the play’s
locales. It’s a generally realistic
two-story architectural wall with doors, staircases, and landings, but
generalized so that it doesn’t represent any place in particular. It could also
be from nearly any period from the Renaissance (say, Hester Prynne’s 17th
century) to today. This confirms that Parks
means us to be displaced in time and space—neither the program nor the
published text makes any mention of the setting, not even in the vague terms of
“Here” and “Now” as in In the Blood. (There are several mentions of characters going
to Europe, so the locale is probably not on that continent—but anywhere else is
possible.) Only Emilio Sosa’s costumes
give us an occasional hint about the time; most could be of any period as well,
but the First Lady’s scarlet dress and Canary’s yellow one are definitely
contemporary. Those costumes are also
the only splashes of color in the otherwise bleak landscape of Hester’s
homeland. The set is painted a dull,
institutional green—“puke green,” we
used to call it: the color of school hallways and hospital corridors in
the ’50s.
Drawn from the same source of
inspiration, In the Blood and Fucking A couldn’t be more
different. Still, there are
similarities, marks of Parks’s art and dramaturgy. Like ITB,
Fucking A is a contemporary tragedy,
ending with a horrific act which Parks has rendered completely understandable,
if no less shocking, by her storytelling.
I’ve noted above some of the topics Parks explores in the Red Letter
Plays, but in the end, Fucking A is about the gap between the classes more than the
races, which has been more familiar territory for Parks in the past. In the
Blood can be seen as the struggle of a poor black woman to survive and take
care of her family in the face of systemic discrimination, but Fucking A depicts a struggle in a world
controlled by those with power and wealth for those who have none to subsist.
Furthermore, both plays’ plots are astonishing in their
unpredictability—one of Parks’s most noteworthy gifts is her boundless, and
perhaps restless, imagination—while the plays remain absolutely logical. As one writer has it, “We cannot predict the
stories she’ll tell us or even how she’ll tell them”—but once the playwright
spins her tale, I nod and think, ‘Well, it couldn’t happen any other way.’
Parks has also employed some distancing techniques as in In the Blood. The race- and gender-blind casting (one of
the Hunters is a woman and one of Hester’s waiting clients is played by a man) could
be seen as a Brechtian application, though it’s no longer so striking as it
once was on New York stages, but the Kurt Weill-like songs dropped into scenes
that are largely naturalistic in style are definitely dissociative. When the characters stop to sing, all other
action ceases. The ambiguity of the time
and place, the character labels instead of names—Butcher, Freedom Fund Lady, Scribe—and
the secret language of the women and the projection of the translations are
other Brechtian touches. Despite their
theoretical origins, though, Parks makes her dramaturgical techniques entirely
her own.
All that said, I found Fucking A
less appealing as a theatrical experience than In the Blood. (I don’t want to say “enjoyable,” because neither
play is intended to be an evening’s entertainment—despite considerable
humor.) It’s not that Fucking A wasn’t engrossing or
intellectually stimulating—it was—but I found it much more set-up—constructed—than
In the Blood, at least in the way the
two plays were presented at Signature. I
didn’t see either play in its first New York production, so this response may
be due to the two STC directors’ concepts—though I don’t think that’s so. Both plays have been described as fables, but
it may be that Fucking A is just
enough more fable-like than ITB and
therefore too much removed from my experience—too distanced, perhaps. (I’ve read the dystopian novels of Aldous
Huxley, George Orwell, and Franz Kafka and been engrossed by them, but the
films adapted from them have never been as engaging. I confess, I didn’t see the recent stage
version of 1984 that ran on Broadway
this summer and fall, so I don’t know how well it was translated into
performance. I have seen Sidney Kingsley’s
stage adaption of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness
at Noon and I recall that worked for me, but that was in the early 1960s
and I was a teenager, which may account for its affect on me at the time.) Whatever the reason, I found Fucking A considerably chillier than In the Blood.
One explanation for that may be my response to Christine Lahti as an
actress. I’ve always found her cold and
hard (if you want to check me out, look back at my blog report on Adam Rapp’s Dreams of Flying Dreams of Falling,
posted on 6 November 2011). As Hester
Smith, she was the warmest, most sympathetic, and most relatable I’ve ever seen
her on stage or on screen. (This is also
the first time I’ve seen her play a character outside the upper-middle social
class. Maybe that’s part of the
explanation: get her out of her acting comfort zone, and she gets real.) Lahti, however, is still her own Verfremdung Effekt. I can imagine her being excellent in several
true Brecht roles, such as Mother Courage or Jenny in The Threepenny Opera.
(Several reviews of the 2003 Public Theater production remarked on the
warm and human qualities of S. Epatha Merkerson’s Hester; from her other work,
I imagine she’d have been more empathetic—but that’s admittedly only in my
mind’s eye.)
The other members of the ensemble were excellent, with stand-out turns
by Joaquina Kalukango as Canary Mary and Raphael Nash Thompson as Butcher. Kalukango played Canary as confident and
unabashed—even when she acknowledges, “I am a whore”—and at the same time,
sensible and charming, even breezy. Her
rendition of “Gilded Cage,” a ballad lamenting the loss of freedom, was wise
and clear-eyed. Thompson was easily the
most ingratiating personality on the Linney stage, making Butcher not just a
nice man (somewhat bizarrely when he teaches Hester how to slit a throat
painlessly, though Thompson handles this almost sweetly), but a devoted
protector and guardian. He, too,
revealed much in his solo, the tongue-twisting “A Meat Man Is a Good Man to
Marry,” a proposal of marriage from a committed carnivore—but Thompson actually
makes it sound endearing. In her one
scene as Freedom Fund Lady, Marlene Ginader (who also played one of the Hunters
and one of Hester’s clients) cut a
disconcerting figure in Fucking A, a
chatty, friendly personality that disguises a Kafkaesque soul. Freedom Fund Lady has the mind of Joseph
Heller’s Milo Minderbinder (from Catch 22)
with the instincts of Dracula, and Ginader played her so coolly it sent a chill
up my spine.
Based on 30 published reviews, Show-Score computed an average rating of
72 for Fucking A. The highest-scoring review was a 92 for Reviews Off Broadway backed up by three
90’s (including New York magazine and
Stage Buddy) and the lowest scores were two 40’s earned by Edge New York and Broadway Blog followed by three 45’s (The Hollywood Reporter, The Wrap, Lighting & Sound America); the breakdown was 66% positive
notices, 17% mixed, and 17% negative. My
survey includes 18 reviews from the print and cyber media; some of the notices
are the same ones I covered In the
Blood because the reviewers wrote omnibus reviews of The Red Letter Plays.
In the U.S. edition of the Financial Times, Max McGuinness asserted
that Fucking A “tries to turn the
story of a beleaguered small-town abortionist . . . into a universal parable of
sexism and racism.” He added that “Parks artfully exposes the hypocrisy
of those who denounce Hester as a ‘baby killer’ one minute, then anxiously
knock on her door the next.” The second
Red Letter Play, however, “becomes overstuffed as prostitution, lynching, mass
incarceration and Homer’s Odyssey are
all thrown into the mix,” complained the FT
reviewer. “Moreover,” he continued, “under Jo Bonney’s
direction, the stylised dialogue, broadly sketched characters, and off-key
musical interludes feel like Bertolt Brecht-by-numbers.” While he praised Christine Lahti for Hester’s
“sour wit and brittle dignity,” McGuinness posited that “Fucking A has a lot of points to make, but they’re a little too
blunt.”
Matt Windman of am New York described
Fucking A as “an explosive
combination of gory 17th-century revenge tragedy, ‘Sweeney Todd,’ cabaret
performance, confrontational direct address and class warfare.” (Kirk and I both also glommed onto Stephen
Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd as soon as
the performance was over.) Jo Bonney’s direction
“gives the production an electrifying edge,” added Windman, “with the broad
performances of the supporting players (including Marc Kudisch as the local
mayor) played against the protagonists’ grim circumstances.” Overall, the amNY reviewer affirmed, each of the Red Letter Play productions “is
an outstanding staging of a bold, difficult and provocative work. When viewed together, ‘The Red Letter Plays’
proves to be one of the most interesting and rewarding theater events of the
fall.” Barbara Schuler’s “Bottom Line” on
Long Island’s Newsday read: “Suzan-Lori
Parks delivers powerful riffs on ‘The Scarlet Letter.’” In this second of two “powerful pieces,” Lahti
played Hester “with a potent mix of strength and vulnerability.”
In the Times, calling the
Signature production of Fucking A
“compelling revival” and a “vibrantly reincarnated work,” Brantley affirmed
that the “forthright, comfortably uncomfortable” opening scene
demonstrated that “those involved . . . know what they’re doing.” The Timesman
asserted that Fucking A “is a dark,
didactic entertainment deliberately in the mode of Bertolt Brecht,” whom he
affirmed is “difficult for American theater artists to get right.” (Brantley quipped that this was “probably the
best American production I’ve seen of a Brecht play that wasn’t written by
Brecht.”) He continued, “It would be all
too easy for any interpreters of [Fucking A] to be overwhelmed by the play’s disparate
influences and intellectual self-consciousness,” but the STC revival,
which the review-writer described as “as harrowing as it is witty,” “is light on
its feet—quick, sharp and perfectly paradoxical.” The production “has the
look of a noir fairy tale. It is steeped, visually and verbally, in Brothers
Grimmsian images of slaughter and torture” and the “cast brings humanizing
shades of pain, greed and longing to symbolic figures, without ever tearing the
play’s somber folk-tale fabric.” Brantley
singled out Lahti for her “fierce portrait of ravaging maternal obsession” as
Hester. The Times reviewer summed up his assessment with:
Ms. Parks is best
known for her dense, expressionistic studies of black lives trapped in the
nightmare of American history. [Fucking A], with its color- and
gender-blind casting, is untethered by topical sociology. But those looking for parallels to an angry
contemporary world divided between rich and poor won’t have to strain.
The New Yorker’s Hilton Als
characterized the play as a “story of romance-as-blight” in which there are
“[s]o many frustrated dreams” even though “love or the dream of love won’t let
anyone go.” He praised Lahti for the way
she “was able to use her body to show how Hester Smith’s slow manner was born
out of necessity: her gruesome instruments are heavy in more ways than one, as
is her letter ‘A.’” The New Yorker reviewer’s further remarks
concerned both plays and I summarized them in my report on In the Blood (http://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-red-letter-plays-in-blood.html).
Sara Holdren, noting that Fucking
A “is closer kin to Brecht than to Hawthorne,” wrote for Vulture/New York magazine that the play is “a fiery, raw-throated shout in
the face of hypocrisy, privilege, and injustice.” It’s “an explicit . . . examination of the
class struggle and its brutalities,” Holdren declared, “eschewing the
colloquial and familiar for a mode of theatricality that calls attention to its
own artifice. It’s a heightened,
dangerous world—and a gut-wrenching one.”
The dramatist “revels in stark, often crass language that cuts across the
fourth wall,” she asserted. “Her
characters speak directly to us and, when impassioned, break into ragged bursts
of song providing commentary on their actions and social positions.” Holdren observed:
It takes the ear a
moment to adjust at the play’s beginning, but Bonney and her actors handle the
blunt, clipped rhythms of the text with confidence. They don’t overplay the style, nor do they try
to force it into naturalism. They trust
that we as an audience will listen and will learn the language. And we do.
Holdren lauded Lahti for portraying Hester “with fearsome monomania and
frighteningly dead eyes” and complimented Kalukango for a Canary who “is
rich-voiced and winning, a striking contrast to the flinty, brooding Hester.” In conclusion, she proclaimed:
Fucking A is
a rare play in our contemporary landscape. It reaches across genres and performance
styles—musical, Jacobean revenge play, Brechtian epic theater—drawing on the
gifts of a multitalented ensemble to touch something frighteningly prescient
about a world twisted by inequity and disenfranchisement, a world in which
resentment and hatred can bloom into a cancer. The fiery Russian poet and playwright
Mayakovsky, in defiance of Hamlet’s famous dictum to “hold a mirror up to
nature,” once wrote: “The theatre is not a reflecting mirror, but a magnifying
glass”—it can enlarge and, held at the right angle, it can burn. In the hands of Jo Bonney and company, Fucking
A both amplifies specific brutal aspects of the society it observes
and leaves a smoldering mark.
In Time Out New York, Raven Snook affirmed that the “expressionistic
and politically charged exploration of class, family and violence, studded with
jarring bursts of humor and song” that is Fucking A “owes more to Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The
Threepenny Opera than to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel.” The woman from TONY, cautioned theatergoers that director Bonney “struggles to
establish a cohesive tone,” but reports that “Fucking A’s
alternations between pain and entertainment are never boring.” Snook concluded: “Like Hester’s bloodily
branded A, the play leaves an indelible mark.” Marilyn Stasio
of Variety deemed that Bonney “runs
with the play’s sense of menace” and Lahti’s “fiercely drawn Hester is a
survivor, but so consumed with equally balanced passions of love and hate you
can’t tear your eyes away from her.”
Frank Scheck, in one of Show-Score’s low-rated notices, stated
bluntly in his “Bottom Line” in the Hollywood
Reporter: “F—ing no.” (In case some readers hadn’t noticed, many
publications, including the New York Times, TheaterMania, and Variety, among others, won’t
print the vulgar participle that forms half of Parks’s title. It’s somewhat amusing how the editors and
publishers twist themselves into pretzels to come up with an
alternative—amusing, that is, until you try to find the coverage in a search
engine or database!) Noting that the
“elements of Jacobean revenge tragedy and the plays of Bertolt Brecht” Parks
inserted in Fucking A “should be enough to create an engaging theatrical
experience,“ Scheck felt however that the play “never manages to transcend its
derivative, ersatz feel.” He complained that “the work comes across like
the thesis playwriting project of a zealous grad student.” Though the production is “suitably visceral,”
the HR reviewer contended, “It may occasionally succeed in its goal of
shocking the audience, but for long stretches this play just never comes to
theatrical life.” The playwright,
asserted Scheck, “occasionally delivers here the sort of virtuosic writing that
rouses our attention[, . . . b]ut F—ing A becomes bogged down
in borrowed stylistic devices.” The
reviewer continued that though “the play traffics in important, urgent themes,
its affectations prove its undoing.” Director
Bonney “infuses the proceedings with intense theatricality,” while the actors “tear
into their schematic roles with energy and conviction,” said Scheck, praising
Lahti as “the standout with her fiercely commanding turn.”
On TheaterMania, Zachary
Stewart called the STC production of Parks’s Hawthorne riff “a powerful revival”
of a play that “asks if we've really progressed beyond the cruel puritan
society of the early Massachusetts Bay Colony.”
Director Bonney “elicits a believable hunger from the cast” and Stewart
reported that Lahti played Hester “with a motherly combination of vulnerability
and ferocity.” Carol Rocamora of Theater Pizzazz characterized the Red
Letter Plays as “wildly original” and “provocative,” and labels Fucking A “compelling.” Parks’s play, “with its rich characters and
gripping plot,” presented Rocamora with a number of Brechtian references which
she saw as aspects of the playwright’s “bold and fearless inventiveness.” The Theater
Pizzazz writer affirmed, “Under Jo Bonney’s masterful direction, the play
is gripping and darkly entertaining despite its traumatic content” and she
pronounced Lahti’s Hester “superb.”
Joel Benjamin had quite a bit
to say on TheaterScene.net about Parks’s writing and the Red Letter
Plays as a pair, which I reported in my ITB write-up and won’t repeat
here. Of Fucking A, Benjamin said
that Bonney “turns it into a blood and guts oversized verismo opera
in which passions and revenge drive the plot.”
(According to The American Heritage Dictionary, verismo is
“an artistic movement of the late 19th century, originating in Italy and
influential especially in grand opera, marked by the use of common, everyday
themes often treated in a melodramatic manner.”
I had to look it up, too.) On Broadway
World, Michael Dale called the play “sardonically abstract” and Bonney’s
production “chilling.” Lahti played
Hester “with determined grit,” Kalukango is “wryly humored” as Canary, and Kudisch‘s
Mayor is “grandly hammy.” Rocamora
particularly relished the “lengthy, crazily off-beat” speech of Butcher in
which he lists all his daughters crimes, delivered “beautifully” by Thompson.
“Fucking A is a
dystopian fable,” declared Elyse Sommer on CurtainUp. Though “relentlessly downbeat and bloody as
any Greek tragedy,” STC’s Fucking A “has been given a production that
works well on all levels.” The CU
review-writer reported that Bonney directed “with a sense for the rhythm to
keeps it flowing” and the “cast, top to bottom, is up to giving fresh,
meaningful life to” the play. Like other
reviewers, Sommer singled out Lahti as “gut-stirring” and Kalukango for “a
lovely, bouncy performance.” In the lowest-scored review (40), Samuel L. Leiter
bluntly proclaimed on The Broadway Blog:
Barely any of the show works and, while the
play and production, energetically directed by Jo Bonney, have their fervent
admirers, I found Fucking A’s two hours and fifteen minutes hard to
sit through: pretension, illogicality, artificiality, exaggeration, and
banality will do that to you.
Leiter complained that “the goal of creating a ‘this is theatre, not
life’ atmosphere succeeds only in underlining the dialogue’s affectation” and
he contended, “A feminist subtext is ticking beneath the surface but the play’s
embellishments prevent it from exploding.”
In addition, the BB reviewer charged that “the score is as dully
ersatz as the writing and contributes little to the narrative or thematic
continuity.” He called the plot
“clumsy,” the characters “stereotypical,” and accused he actors of
“overacting.” The Broadway Blogger protested
(“for literal-minded people like me”) Bonney’s alogical interracial casting
(particularly Hester’s confusing the white Jailbait for her black son). “Colorblind casting is commendable,” Leiter
acknowledged; “in this case, it’s a distraction.” His “big regret,” though, was “that Christine
Lahti, unattractively bewigged, made up, and costumed . . . in Mother
Courage-like basic drab, retains an aura of speech and sophistication that
suggests she’s playacting rather than fitting seamlessly into Hester’s more
life-battered skin.” Leiter concluded, “Without
a Hester to believe in, there’s no way one can grasp just what Parks wants to
say about class, gender, sex, and motherhood, much less believe she’s said it
in Fucking A.”
On Talkin’ Broadway, Howard
Miller reported that STC’s Fucking A
“unfolds with the inevitab[ility] of a Greek myth, with a low-key style of
performance that would seem to be intentional on the part of director Jo
Bonney.” Miller complained that for this
reason, “and after so much set-up, the act of revenge is rather anti-climactic.
There is no catharsis for Hester or for
us.” Kathryn Kelly warned us on Stage
Buddy, “If you are convinced society has progressed beyond Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s vision in The Scarlet Letter, Suzan-Lori Parks has an
offering to prove otherwise.” Of course,
she was referring to Fucking A, “a
staggering work of expert storytelling and captivating performances brought to
life by Jo Bonney’s direction.” The cast
is “exemplary,” most “seamlessly” playing several roles as well as performing
the music. Kelly pointed out, “The journey
to knowledge is difficult and ends in a heartbreaking climax, comparable to the
most searing of Greek tragedies, but the lessons are necessary.” She ended by urging, “Don’t miss this
experience.”
The top-scorer among Show-Score’s review assembly was Scott
Mitchell’s notice on Reviews Off Broadway
(92). In it, he insisted that Fucking A “honors Nathanial Hawthorne’s
work” and that Bonney “gets great performances from the cast, and the pacing of
this piece works beautifully.” Mitchell
felt that Lahti “does a remarkable turn bring[ing] Hester Smith to life.” (On Show-Score’s website, the quotation for this
entry didn’t match the ROB website,
so I went in search of the source. It
turns out, Mitchell also uses Facebook to post some of his opinions, and the
single paragraph on Fucking A is a
little more specific: “Christine Lahti and Brandon Victor Dixon [replaced at
the performance I saw by Donovan Mitchell] stand out in an excellent cast in ‘F**king
A’, a searing play based on the themes found in ‘The Scarlet Letter.’”)
