'Native Son' (Acting Company)

Nambi E. Kelley’s adaptation of Native Son from the 1939 novel by Richard Wright is currently having its New York début at the hands of The Acting Company.  The play has a historical connection, admittedly tenuous but nonetheless interesting, with the troupe.

In 1937, John Houseman (1902-88) and Orson Welles (1915-85) collaborated in the establishment of the independent repertory company, the Mercury Theatre, which expanded into film (Citizen Kane, 1941, and The Magnificent Ambersons, 1942) and radio (Mercury Theatre on the Air, 1938-40; most famous production: 1938’s The War of the Worlds, broadcast on Halloween night), as well as stage productions. 

In 1941, the Mercury Theatre presented an adaptation of Native Son, composed by novelist Wright (1908-60) and playwright Paul Green (1894-1981), which ran for 114 performances from March to June at the St. James Theatre on Broadway.  Produced by Houseman, the adaptation was directed by Welles and starred Canada Lee (1907-52) as Bigger Thomas.  (The production was subsequently revived  at the Majestic Theatre in 1942.) 

(Lee, a pioneer among African-American actors and a champion of civil rights in the 1930s and ’40s, had previously starred as Banquo—opposite Jack Carter, 1902-67, as Macbeth—in the famous 1936 production of the so-called Voodoo Macbeth, adapted and directed by Welles for the Federal Theatre Project of the Depression-era Works Progress Administration.)

In 1968, Houseman established the Drama Division of the Juilliard School and founded The Acting Company with members of its first graduating class in 1972.  Over half of the current Acting Company’s membership is comprised of recent graduates of Juilliard’s Drama Division. 

(Aside from the original novel, published in 1940, Native Son’s been adapted for film three times.  A 1951 film version, adapted and directed—in English—in Argentina by Pierre Chenal, starred Wright himself as Bigger—despite that fact that the novelist was playing the 20-year-old protagonist at 42.  The film wasn’t well received and Wright’s performance was especially criticized.  In 1986, playwright and screenwriter Richard Wesley penned another adaptation, directed by Jerrold Freedman for the Public Broadcasting System’s American Playhouse; Victor Love starred as Bigger.  A third film, released in April of this year on HBO, was directed by Rashid Johnson from a script by Suzan-Lori Parks and starred Ashton Sanders as Bigger.)

In 2014, Nambi E. Kelley’s adapted the novel anew.  (An earlier adaptation, after Paul Green’s collaboration with Wright, was staged in Seattle at the Intiman Theatre; it was written and staged by Kent Gash in 2006.)  The playwright had felt a connection to Wright’s novel from having read it in her youth and because of its setting in the city where she lived, its story had stuck with her.  The chance to adapt it for the stage brought Kelley back to one of her first literary lodestars.

Kelley’s new rendering for the stage premièred at the Court Theatre in Chicago (in a co-production with the American Blues Theater, 11 September-19 October 2014), the city in which the playwright grew up and trained as a dramatist, and in which the story of Native Son is set.  With Jerod Haynes starring as Bigger Thomas, the première of Kelley’s adaptation was directed by Seret Scott, who’s also mounting the Acting Company production, becoming the highest-grossing non-musical play in the theater’s history and going on to win multiple awards. 

The new had productions across the country: Stray Cat Theatre, Phoenix (10- 25 March 2016); Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley, Calif. (19 January-12 February 2017); New Theatre In The Square, Marietta, Ga. (20 April-9 May 2017); Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven (24 November-16 December 2017); Kiki & David Gindler Performing Arts Center, Glendale, Calif. (19 April-3 June 2018); Paul Robeson Theatre, African American Cultural Center in Buffalo (18 January-10 February 2019); Mosaic Theater Company in Washington, D.C. (27 March-28 April 2019); Center Theatre Group (20 April-28 April 2019) in Los Angeles, and more.  The PlayMakers Repertory Company, the professional theater at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will be presenting Kelley’s Native Son from 11 to 29 September 2019.  (In addition to the Chicago première, the Marin County and New Haven productions were all staged by Seret Scott before she mounted The Acting Company production.)

The text of Kelley’s adaptation of Native Son was published in an “acting edition” in 2016 by Samuel French.  (The Acting Company has trimmed Kelley’s script a little, deleting several characters who are still mentioned but never appear on The Duke’s stage.  Director Seret Scott’s mounting runs 90 minutes, but I gather from annotations about the published script, that’s how long the full script runs as well.)

The Acting Company is producing Native Son at The Duke on 42nd Street (229 W. 42nd Street) in rotating repertory with Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (see my report, posted on Rick On Theater  on 14 August).  The production started previews on 17 July and opened on 25 July.   My frequent theater partner, Diana, and I caught the 8 p.m. performance on Friday, 16 July;  the production is scheduled to close on 24 August. 

I included a brief history of The Acting Company in my report on Desire, the last time (not counting last week’s Measure for Measure) I saw the troupe on stage, so I recommend the curious reader refer to that (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2015/09/desire.html).  The Duke on 42nd Street, a project of The New 42nd Street, formed in 1990 with the mission of the cultural revival of West 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues, is a 199-seat black-box rental theater that offers nonprofit and commercial companies the opportunity to perform on famed 42nd Street, the heart of Manhattan’s Theatre District.  

Housed on the second floor of the New 42nd Street Studios, opened in 2000, The Duke, named in recognition of a grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, features customizable seating for various actor-audience relationships.  (It’s set up in a thrust configuration for The Acting Company’s rotating rep, with two small seating areas to the right and left of the performing space and a larger, main seating section in the center.)

Aside from The Acting Company, the theater, has hosted such companies as Playwright’s Realm, Red Bull Theater, Primary Stages, Transport Group, Theatre for a New Audience, Lincoln Center Theater LCT3, The Royal Court Theatre, Steppenwolf Theater Company, Armitage Gone! Dance, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Naked Angels, Classical Theater of Harlem, and the National Theater of Great Britain. 

Nambi E. Kelley was born in New York City on 8 January 1973.  Leaving New York at the age of 3, Kelley’s family moved to Chicago, where Kelley grew up across the street from Chicago’s Ida B. Wells housing projects on the city’s South Side.  An excellent student, Kelley won a full scholarship to the Theatre School at DePaul University where she studied playwriting.  Graduating in three years with a bachelor of fine arts degree in playwriting (1995), Kelley embarked upon the professional world of the stage as a writer and actor.  The playwright-actor subsequently received an MFA in interdisciplinary arts from Goddard College in Vermont (2011); she was a member of the Goodman Theatre’s Playwright’s Unit for the 2011-2012 Season. 

Kelley has composed plays for Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Goodman Theatre, and Court Theatre/American Blues Theater in Chicago, Lincoln Center Theatre Company in New York, and internationally with LATT Children’s Theatre/Unibooks Publishing Company (South Korea) Teatri Sbagliati (Italy), and The Finger Players (Singapore).  She was named playwright-in-residence for the 2017-2018 Season at the National Black Theatre in New York.  

The Acting Company’s Native Son takes place over “two cold and snowy winter days in December 1939,” according to Kelley’s note in the published text, in what the playwright calls “Chicago’s Black Belt”—or, as Kelley also says: “a split second inside the leading character’s mind. 

Bigger Thomas (Galen Ryan Kane), a 20-year-old African American who lives in the impoverished South Side neighborhood, is employed as chauffeur and all-around handyman by a family of wealthy white philanthropists, the Daltons.  The money Bigger makes at his new job will be used to supplement his mother’s income; she’s raising Bigger and his sister, Vera (Katherine Renee Turner), and his younger brother, Buddy (Lorenzo Jackson), without their father, who was killed in a riot when Bigger was 8.  (In the novel, the father was lynched in Mississippi, where Bigger was born.)

As a chauffeur, he’s directed by Mrs. Dalton (Laura Gragtmans) to take Mary, the daughter (Rebekah Brockman), to the university.  Instead, Mary decides to pick up her communist boyfriend, Jan (Anthony Bowden), and to spend the time drinking and partying someplace “where colored people eat.”  The young whites treat Bigger as a friend and comrade, Mary naïvely and Jan earnestly, which clearly makes the chauffeur uncomfortable—a state to which the white couple are oblivious. 

Scenes of Bigger, Mary, and Jan driving through Chicago and drinking alternate with scenes of Bigger and Buddy planning to stick up a deli.  When Buddy taunts his brother for being scared, Bigger and Buddy fight and Bigger grabs his 16-year-old brother in a bear hug (the fights were choreographed by Emmanuel Brown).  “I can’t breathe!” calls out Buddy.  The line immediately registered as an evocation of Eric Garner’s cry when he died from being put in a choke hold by a New York City police officer on 17 July 2014.  This incident, which made “I can’t breathe” a protest chant for the #BlackLivesMatter movement, occurred two months before Kelley’s Native Son premièred in Chicago, but the final disposition of police officer Daniel Pantaleo was in the news at the very time I saw The Acting Company’s performance.

(Later in the play, when Bigger pulls a gun on Jan, the young communist utters “Don’t shoot,” another iconic slogan—”Hands up, don’t shoot”—from the same movement, a reference to the 9 August 2014 death of Michael Brown at the hands of a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer.  Brown’s and Garner’s deaths, following upon the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on 26 February 2012 in Sanford, Florida, started the #BlackLivesMatter movement, and whether or not Kelley intentionally called the deaths to mind, the words she wrote did just that, at least for me—and, I daresay, many others.)

Mary gets falling-down drunk and when Bigger gets her home (in the scene we’re shown when the play opens), he must carry Mary, who’s become increasingly amorous and aggressive, to her bedroom without being detected.  Mrs. Dalton, who’s blind, enters the room and Bigger panics at the thought of being caught with a white woman.  He accidentally smothers Mary by placing a pillow over her face to keep her quiet.  Terrified at what he’s done and the consequences of a black man killing a white woman even in an accident, Bigger disposes of Mary’s body in the furnace. 

At first, Jan is suspected by the police for Mary's disappearance and Bigger tells them, when he’s questioned, that it was Jan who carried Mary to her room.  Over several scenes of inquiries by a private detective (Henry Jenkinson) hired by Mr. Dalton and then the police (also Jenkinson), the remains of Mary’s body and an earring identified by her mother, are discovered in the ashes of the furnace and the search for a missing young woman becomes a hunt for a murderer. 

Suspicions turn to Bigger, who goes on the run through Chicago with his girlfriend, Bessie (Turner), in tow.  The trial of the novel takes place in Bigger’s imagination.  He takes refuge in a vacant tenement but, realizing he “Can’t leave her here and I can’t take her with,” Bigger beats Bessie to death with a brick and drops her body down an airshaft.  After fleeing to the roof, in a struggle with police, he falls (or is pushed) to his death.

Bigger’s last word as he falls is “. . . Fly,” an image of unattainable freedom for Bigger.  Early in the play, he expresses fascination with planes and flying, complaining bitterly that “white folks” won’t let him fly planes.  The notion of flying returns several times in the dialogue.

Kelley doesn’t tell the story chronologically or in Wright’s Social Realism style, but out of order and Expressionistically.  For example, she starts the play with a scene that belongs chronologically later in the plot; she calls it a flashback in the script, but it’s more like a flash-forward.  Her Scene One won’t make complete sense until Scenes Twenty Eight and Twenty Nine.  The chronology is disjointed throughout the performance and events, as Kelley presents them, are internal and non-linear.

Wright’s Bigger looks at himself in the mirror and what he sees staring back at him is a “black rat sonofabitch”—he’d killed just such a beast in his family’s apartment in the early pages of the book—the reflection created by the others that he’s come to accept is who he is.  It is a principal aspect of Kelley’s play that the Black Rat is embodied on stage by an actor (Jason Bowen) who shadows Kane’s Bigger, personifying the voice inside Bigger’s head.  Sometimes the Black Rat tells Bigger what he should do (not always wisely) and sometimes he voices what others will say, think, or do—sometimes in the guise of people whose words Bigger hears. 

Kelley frequently uses theatrical methods like the Black Rat conceit in her plays.  Since this device is an invention of Kelley’s and doesn’t exist in Wright’s novel, It’s not necessarily easy to interpret unless a theatergoer has read or heard about it before seeing a performance.  (I’d read about the construct in the New York Times, the one review I read before seeing a performance.  It’s also mentioned on the webpage for the play on The Acting Company’s website.)  Otherwise, it could be seen as confusing and intrusive—or as insightful and revealing.

With such alterations as the Black Rat, the non-linearity, and the 90-minute, one-act abbreviation of the  novel, Kelley’s adaptation changes the focus of Native Son  from the environmental circumstances of brutalization and poverty that cause Bigger to make the choices he makes to his internal struggle.  Thus, while Wright’s Native Son is an examination of racism in the U.S., Kelley’s take is an exploration of how racial oppression determines Bigger’s fate. 

I won’t recap here all the complaints critics of the novel, both black and white, have had over the years, but I’ll say that Kelley’s adaptation retains many of the faults reported.  Most salient is the character of Bigger Thomas.  He’s a thoroughly unsympathetic person—a coward, liar, violent young man who’s angry (not without cause, granted), impulsive, and inclined to commit armed robbery.  (I’m not sure how significant it’s meant to be, but the deli Bigger and Buddy are planning to rob is called “Blum’s Deli,” suggesting it’s owned by a Jew—so there’s at least a hint that Bigger has a touch of anti-Semitism in his character.)

Second, we see that not just white bigots like Britten, the detective, and the police who are chasing Bigger, have deliberately pushed him down, or even the ostensibly well-meaning whites like the Daltons, Mary, and Jan, but even his own family treats him with disrespect.  His mother and sister disparage him, Buddy teases him at every opportunity, and his girlfriend, Bessie, herself an alcoholic, berates him.  The Bigger we see isn’t oppressed by white people so much as by everyone in his life.  It’s little wonder that he thinks of himself as “a black rat sonofabitch.”  But putting the blame solely on white society rings false in the play, coming off more like scapegoating.  I’m not sure that’s what either Kelley or Wright had in mind for their points.

The play also adds some problems to those inherent in the novel because of Kelley’s abridgment of the plot (one of the main reasons I have difficulties with stage adaptations of novels), because of the Expressionistic style she employs over Wright’s Social Realism, and because of her shift in the point she makes over Wright’s intention (the reason for the style shift).  (The Acting Company’s mounting is a double adaptation, you’ll recall: Kelley’s adaptation is edited further.  I don’t think scenes have been cut, but characters have been deleted.)  

In the end, there are two serious problems for a drama: its point is cloudy and weak—like the book, this is a play with a social-criticism message—and, even at 90 minutes, the point is too insubstantial to sustain the performance so it comes off padded and attenuated.  For me, there’s a lot of what radio people would call “dead air.”  (It doesn’t help that, even without knowing the book, it’s so obvious pretty quickly what’s going to happen that I kept thinking, ‘Come on, get on with it!’  That’s usually not a good sign.)

Still, as a performance, The Acting Company’s Native Son was much better for me than its Measure for Measure.  Even  Neil Patel’s unit set—the same concrete staircase and platforms that Measure for Measure used—worked better here than in the Shakespeare.  Evoking the back alleys of Chicago’s South Side, basements, and tenement stairways, it sets the action in the world Bigger inhabits both in reality and inside his head.  Alan C. Edwards’s bleak, nourish lighting and Fred Kennedy’s soundscape together helped create the atmosphere that tells part of Native Son’s tale.  Sarita Fellows’s costume designs were appropriately and evocatively of the play’s period, milieu, and class distinctions.

Perhaps most remarkably, the acting was far more convincing and revealing than these same actors exhibited in Measure for Measure.  (Only one member of the cast, Rosalyn Coleman, who plays Hannah Thomas, Bigger’s mother, isn’t in the other play.)  I’d guess, from my experience as an actor, that the reasons are that the play’s closer to contemporary, especially in terms of language but also with respect to the situations and issues that play out in Kelley’s script, and that those issues, which have present-day resonances and echoes, are more meaningful to the performers and the director than those of Measure, even if you assert parallels between the plight of Isabella and the perfidy of Angelo and events of today. 

All in all, the company was more comfortable on stage in Native Son than I felt they were in Measure.  Kane’s Bigger, even though he’s not a sympathetic and innocent victim, creates a strong and vivid character, all his faults and failings laid open.  Bowen’s Black Rat, though he’s more disruptive and interruptive than revelatory, makes contrast to Bigger’s outward persona that sometimes parallels his alter ego and sometimes conflicts with it.  The two actors also worked the paring well off one another, which I imagine isn’t as easy as they make it look.

Jenkinson oversells the bigotry of both Britten, the PI, and the cop he plays, but I blame the script for that more than his performances.  To paraphrase Jessica Rabbit, they’re drawn that way.  Jan and Mary are almost clichés—the earnest young Red and the naïve, liberal-minded girl—but Bowden and Brockman pull the portrayals off well enough not to seem entirely flat or one-dimensional.  Gragtmans comes off as sincere as Mrs. Dalton despite the systemic racism of her class and the white privilege she can’t help demonstrating. 

As Buddy, Jackson depicts an almost prototypical little brother (that is, if your little brother plans a robbery with you) whose admiration for Bigger is undermined by his big bro’s constant failures.  Mother Hannah, as drawn by Coleman, is almost cruel in her chastisement of her older son and Turner’s Bessie is so hard, cold, and self-centered I had to wonder why Bigger would want to be with her even for the sex.

Despite Native Son being a better production and performance than Measure for Measure, it was still ultimately unsatisfying.  I haven’t read the novel, but I have read some of the critical commentary, and it isn’t universally applauded.  (Some analysts insist it was written for a white audience, not a black one—to reveal the life of a black American in an oppressive society.)  Neither Kelley nor Scott fixed this to my (or Diana’s) satisfaction.  Perhaps we’re more cognizant today of the points Wright wanted to make—I certainly hope so—and we know from very recent events that circumstances are only marginally better since Wright’s era.  The Acting Company’s Native Son, however, doesn’t really advance the conversation or suggest any routes to a solution. 

To paraphrase the Kennedy brothers—all three of them said this, originally quoting George Bernard Shaw: it’s one thing to see things as they are and ask ‘why?’; it’s another to dream things that never were and ask ‘why not?’  Kelley does the former, even though I think we already know the truth of what she says.  I wish she’d have suggested at least a little of the latter.

Native Son got more critical coverage than the company’s Measure for Measure.  (A couple of reviews of Measure appeared on the ‘Net after I posted my report.  Some Native Son notices also came out over the past 10 days.)  I found 12 reviews that I’ll summarize for ROTters.  (I remind readers, as I explained in my report on Measure, https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2019/08/measure-for-measure-acting-company.html, that Show-Score no longer scores the published reviews, so the stats that I habitually reported are no longer being calculated.)

In the U.S. edition of the Financial Times, Max McGuinness interpreted Native Son as the embodiment of the lines in W. H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939,” “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”  Kelley and Scott’s shift from Wright’s “naturalist style” to “a fragmented narrative structure” creates “a haunting, enigmatic aura that offsets the deterministic thrust of Wright’s story,” thought McGuinness.  “It’s not quite enough, however, to make up for the theatrical limitations of their material.”  The FT reviewer found, “The essential problem is that, in keeping with Wright’s own portrayal, Bigger remains a cipher throughout” the play, adding that “Bigger’s near total absence of psychological complexity and self-consciousness make him an unengaging protagonist.”  Even with the Black Rat verbalizing Bigger’s “interior monologue,” Bigger’s “internal life still seems too barren to carry the play while the supporting characters . . . tend to be rather caricatured.”  McGuinness concluded, “There’s a lot of truth here, but not enough dramatic balance.”

Alexis Soloski of the New York Times announced, “‘Native Son’ . . . is a murder story without a mystery.”  Soloski called the adaptation “fluid, vigorous and somewhat nonlinear” and affirmed that it “neatly intercuts violent external events with Bigger’s equally violent internal landscape.”  Then she backed off, advising that “you won’t feel that you’ve faced anything particularly harrowing, either.”  The Times reviewer explained that “this ‘Native Son’ is so brisk and so film-noir stylish that you are more likely to applaud its theatrics than feel shaken by its implications.”  The missing speeches from the trial, Soloski asserted, “are among the elements that shift the novel from the particular to the general, from the story of one marginalized man to a story about all marginalized men.”  Kelley’s adaptation of Native Son “makes Bigger’s story fleet and lively.  It also makes it smaller.” 

Maya Phillips asked in the New Yorker, “How does one adapt Richard Wright’s classic novel for the stage?”  She reported that Kelley’s adaptation “attempts a solution in the form of a new character, the Black Rat (Jason Bowen), a tipped-hat, deep-voiced, film-noir rendering of Bigger’s interiority.”  Phillips complained, however, that “Galen Ryan Kane’s Bigger lacks the dynamism of the book’s character, informed by Wright’s musings on racial and social consciousness, and the production veers between being too on the nose in its racial ironies and too stylized in its drama.”  She concluded: “A mixed-up chronology and whiplash-fast scene changes, with the help of verbal cues—repeated words, echoed reactions—enliven the plot, but what’s lost is Wright’s hard edge and bite.”

On TheaterMania, Pete Hempstead characterized Kelley’s script as “a smart, at-times-confusing adaptation” but lamented that the production never “really wows.”  Hempstead did allow that “Kelley’s adaptation captures its hero’s interior life better than [past film] attempts.”  Scott “does a decent job blending scenes seamlessly as they pass through Bigger’s mind . . .,” acknowledged the TM reviewer, but adding, “Not so effective is the noirish atmosphere that she creates for this already lurid tale.”   In the end, Hempstead admonished, “Bigger’s story is bigger than this.”

Carole Di Tosti of Theater Pizzazz immediately complimented the “superb cast” of The Acting Company’s repertory and dubbed the production “astounding” and “dispel[s] any thought that Wright’s complex excoriation of racism in America makes the protagonist Bigger Thomas a stereotype.”  Di Tosti felt that “Kelley configures Thomas as a whole being” and “reveals his internal psyche, emotional being, the inner consciousness.”  She found, “We empathize with Bowen’s Black Rat and Kane’s Thomas and understand through their portrayals the emotional power inherent in every human.”  She offered high praise for both Kane’s and Bowen’s performances and labeled Scott’s direction “insightful and exciting.”  The TP  writer summed up by stating, “The ensemble . . . are uniformly brilliant as is the evocation, stylization and artistic rendering of this gobsmacking must see production.”

William Wolf of Wolf Entertainment Guide dubbed Kelley’s Native Son as “a harrowing, well-acted version” of the novel and called the director’s style “free form.”  Wolf reported, “It is a tribute to the production that there is consistent plot clarity as the tragic events relentlessly unfold.”  The WEG blogger further asserted, “The play creates tension all the way, fueled by Kane’s excellent acting” and that Scott’s “staging has the power to keep one riveted.” 

“If one didn’t know better, Nambi E. Kelley’s searing ‘Native Son’ . . . might seem like a ripped-from-the-headlines inspired drama,” declared Brian Scott Lipton on CititourNY, calling it a “bleak portrait of institutional and societal racism” which “remains all-too-shockingly relevant today.”  Lipton found The Acting Company’s production “imaginatively directed” and characterized Kane’s performance as Bigger “uncompromising” and Bowen’s Black Rat “equally excellent.”  He added, “The entire ensemble does fine work.”

On TheaterScene.net, Victor Gluck reported that Kelley’s adaptation of Native Son is “an ambitious work for the stage” but “is faithful to the spirit of the novel.”  Gluck, however, found that “one problem with the play is that Kelley’s expressionistic style goes counter to Wright’s mainly naturalistic writing.”   The TS.net review-writer asserted, “If one has not previously read the novel, it would be very difficult to put the pieces of this 52-scened play in order,” adding that ”Kelley has also made significant changes to the characters which are even more problematic.”  (Gluck gave a run-down of the story as told in the novel and then noted the variations Kelley made in her adaptation.)  While decrying many of the changes the playwright made, the reviewer praised the invention of the Black Rat as a “clever device . . . to give Bigger an alter ego.”  He backed off, though, complaining, “Unfortunately, she fails to give The Black Rat much to say or do so that the device is rather moot.”  Kane’s Bigger “is very low key,” Gluck found, “never showing us the seething confusion inside of this character.”  By contrast, Coleman’s Hannah and Turner’s Bessie “give the impassioned performances that heat up the play.” 

Gluck’s bottom line was: “Nambi E. Kelley’s adaptation of Native Son is an interesting attempt to put a dense and long novel on the stage.  However, in stripping the Richard Wright novel down to its basic elements, it eliminates most of the feeling of Chicago in the 1930’s as well as making Bigger a stand-in for all of the disaffected African American youth of his time.”  The TS.net editor-in-chief concluded by stating, “Despite the expressionistic and experimental nature of Kelley’s adaptation which dilutes the novel’s effectiveness, it is a laudable attempt to tell this powerful story of the effects of racism in our own time of the Black Lives Matter movement.”

Calling Kelley’s version of the story an “expressionistic fever dream” on Off Off Online, James Wilson (like many of his colleagues in the reviewing dodge) quoted W. E. B. Du Bois’s statement on the “fragmented black identity”: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”  Wilson asserted, “As directed by Seret Scott, this Native Son does not linger on metaphysical quandaries.  The action moves at a breathless pace as the play hurtles to its foregone conclusion,” benefiting, however, “from exceptional performances.”  The review-writer’s last word was: “Richard Wright’s Native Son first appeared more than two decades before the advent of Civil Rights legislation.  Sadly, the current adaptation demonstrates that the work is as relevant today as it was nearly 80 years ago.”

Gregory Wilson of CurtainUp (in the same review in which he covered Measure for Measure) pointed out that plays seen “in rotating repertory” can cause “even a familiar work [to] be seen in a new light when it’s placed in proximity (and dialogue) with another.”  He found this true of The Acting Company’s Measure for Measure  and Native Son, rendering “them more powerful through juxtaposition.”  Wilson went on, “The experiment is an admirable one, and at least partially successful.  But the danger of this approach is that it can minimize the complexity of the works in question.”  He lamented, “Ultimately, Wright and Shakespeare are larger than these interpretations give them credit for.”  The production “zoom[s] in on what [Kelley] view[s] as the critical aspects of [the] play” and “[t]he acting and directing are excellent.”  

Wilson continued, “The virtue of this approach, of course, is focus,” but “there isn’t even time to consider other aspects of the work.”  The CU reviewer emphasized, “everything boils down to one continually repeated idea, and the effect is unnecessarily reductive.”  Nonetheless, the review-writer felt the play was “solid, well-directed and acted,” and Wilson liked “the idea of juxtaposing” the two plays in rep.  He concluded, however: “But if it’s important not to lose the forest for the trees, it’s also important to avoid cutting down most of the trees for the sake of what one thinks is the forest. Richard Wright and William Shakespeare are justly praised for their depth and breadth of thought; I wish that in the zeal to focus them on single concepts, these productions didn’t reduce their works as much as they do.”

On Woman Around Town, Alix Cohen called Kelley’s adaptation a “first-rate interpretation” that “is taut and unnerving.”  Cohen characterized Scott’s staging as “creative,” “skillful,” and “inspired,” propelling “a relentless trajectory.”  Kane’s performance is “authoritative, . . . offering multiple shades of fury, resentment, desperation, and confusion.” The reviewer declared the production “never less than riveting” and reported, “Craft is not just excellent, but interesting.”

                               

Dan Rubins’s “Bottom Line” on Theatre Is Easy was: “[O[nly one of The Acting Company’s pair of productions burns bright: Nambi E. Kelley’s passionate adaptation of Native Son.”. He labeled Scott’s staging of Native Son a “taut, tense . . . production” and Kelley’s adaptation “ferociously theatrical.”  (In an interesting characterization, Rubins asserts that Bigger, “given seething, sorrowful life by Galen Ryan Kane,” is an “Othello with Iagos both inside his head and all around him.”)  In conclusion, the Theasy.com reviewer proclaimed The Acting Company’s Native Son “a searing, edge-of-your-seat ride through the psychological trauma of our nation’s past and present.”