The Red Letter Plays: 'Fucking A'

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.’”)

'The Mound Builders'

The Mound Builders, currently on stage in the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre at the Pershing Square Signature Center on Theatre Row, is a relatively early entry in Lanford Wilson’s prolific catalogue of plays.  Written in 1975, when Wilson was 38, it was premièred at the Circle Repertory Company while the author was the company’s playwright-in-residence (1969-95), perhaps the eleventh script he’d written since his first works for the seminal Caffe Cino in 1964 (Home Free! and The Madness of Lady Bright, the Cino’s first popular success).  Wilson wrote about two dozen plays before his death in 2011 at the age of 73.  The STC revival of Mound Builders is the final production of the theater’s 2012-13 Legacy Program which has revisited the work of four artists who were previously presented as playwrights-in-residence at the theater.  Wilson was the subject of an STC residency in 2002-03 which included revivals of Burn This (1986) and Fifth of July (1978) and the New York premières of Book of Days (2000) and Rain Dance (2002). 

Less than a week after being at the Signature Center to see Bill Irwin and David Shiner in Old Hats (see my ROT report of 22 March), I was back again for the evening performance of The Mound Builders on Wednesday, 20 March.  Following its 1975 première, which won an Obie Award for Distinguished Playwriting, the Public Broadcasting System televised the play on Theatre in America in February 1976 (with much the same cast) and then Circle Rep revived the play in 1986 as part of a three-play repertory (with Albert Camus’s Caligula and Anne Chislett’s Quiet in the Land) at the Triplex Theatre of the Borough of Manhattan Community College in downtown Manhattan.  Other than that production, though the play is performed regularly around the country, the Signature staging is the only other major revival of the play in New York City.  STC’s revival started previews on 26 February and opened on 17 March; it’s original closing performance was to be on 7 April, but it’s been extended until 14 April.

Directed at STC by Jo Bonney, The Mound Builders is set in 1975 at the site of an archeological dig at Blue Shoals in southern Illinois.  A team of archeologists from a university (apparently U of I, Urbana-Champaign), is trying to save the artifacts of an ancient proto-Indian civilization known as the Mound Builders before a new dam causes the lake to inundate the site in Blue Shoals.  The play takes place in a house near the dig where the two archeologists, Professor August Howe and Dr. Dan Loggins, are living with members of their families, Cynthia Howe, the professor’s wife and the group’s photographer; their daughter, 11-year-old Kirsten; Dan’s pregnant wife, Jean, a gynecologist; and August’s sister D.K., or Delia, Eriksen, a globe-trotting erstwhile novelist who’s come to recover from her latest bout of substance abuse because the Cleveland hospital she was at couldn’t handle her.  A frequent, though not always welcome or invited, visitor is Chad Jasker, the son of the owner of the land on which the dig and the house are located who desperately wants to be accepted by the academics.  The scenes in Blue Shoals are introduced and interrupted by scenes set the following winter in Urbana during which August dictates into a tape recorder descriptions of the slides Cynthia had taken and narrates the events of previous summer. 

Neil Patel’s semi-realistic set is the living room, which is also the main work area for the scientists, of the house, furnished much like someone’s weekend or summer house at the beach or in the mountains—which is to say, rustically and, more to the point, sparsely so that there’s plenty of open space.  (New York Post reviewer Elisabeth Vincentelli wrote that “the place looks like a depressing modernist-rustic lodge.”)  Visible through a wide doorway upstage is the kitchen—the residents make frequent use of the fridge, which is all we see from our vantage point—and a long staircase comes down from the second floor at stage left at about a 30-degree angle.  The house is lit, by Rui Rita, in an often expressionistic style that can make it seem to be a break-away structure.  (The floorboards seem to almost disappear, and I couldn’t figure out how Rita and Patel accomplished that because the floor seemed quite solid when I looked at it under house lights at intermission.  I’m also unsure what this was supposed to indicate, on the assumption that it’s intentionally symbolic and not just an aesthetic effect Bonney liked.  Of course, the fact that it didn’t seem to me to fit is why I noticed it in the first place.)  And as long as I’m commenting on the physical production, I’ll say that Theresa Squire’s costumes were fine and both period and circumstantially appropriate without calling any special attention to themselves (except, perhaps, that young Dr. Loggins apparently favors shorts with work boots, a combination I never really understood—but then, I never worked a summer dig in southern Illinois).  One comment Mel Gussow made in his New York Times review of the Circle Rep première was that the set seemed cramped and “the projections are somewhat diminished.”  That wasn’t a problem in the Linney (although I’m not convinced that the slides—designed by Shawn Sagady and projected on the rear wall of the room upstage right—and the interruptions necessary to show them, are all that dramatic or even helpful).  The cast of seven is somewhat large by today’s standards, but even when everyone was on stage, which happens fairly often in Mound Builders, it never seemed crowded.  There were other problems generated by the number of characters—and their disparate needs—but crowding wasn’t one of them.

As I’ve noted before, the only review I read before I see a play is the Times because I subscribe, so I read Charles Isherwood’s critique two-and-a-half weeks earlier.  His chief complaint was about the directing and, particularly, the acting.  Now, I have serious objections to this play (which I’ll try to explain shortly), but it isn’t so much with the acting or the directing.  No one in the cast really stood out, but I don’t think Wilson wrote this play with star turns in mind.  (He apparently did write Delia for Tanya Berezin, the actress who was also a co-founder—with Wilson; Marshall Mason, the première’s director; and actor Rob Thirkield, who played August Howe—of Circle Rep, which is interesting but pretty much irrelevant here.  Delia’s a somewhat outrageous person, but she’s not any more important to this play than any of the other characters.)  There are characters whose importance I dispute—such as Kirsten, the Howes’ young daughter whom Wilson did cut from the ’86 restaging, and perhaps at least one of the two wives—but that’s not the fault of the actors or Bonney.  August’s dictation monologues are anti-theatrical, as I’ve said, but David Conrad did as well with them as any actor could have and Bonney staged them as strongly as I think is possible.  Conrad’s August is too much of a non-entity all through the play, but that isn’t his fault, either; I can’t imagine a way he or Bonney could have changed that, short of chewing the scenery.  In fact, Bonney kept the whole, meandering, amorphous blob of a play moving along for its 2¼-hour length (plus one intermission) in as lively a manner as she could have.

All the women—Janie Brookshire as Cynthia Howe, Lisa Joyce as Jean Loggins, Rachel Resheff as Kirsten, and Danielle Skraastad as D.K./Delia—captured their roles thoroughly enough, with Skraastad making a slightly greater impression because Delia has more quirks and a clearer intention, always much easier to play than a blank page.  (Delia has more heft as a character, perhaps, because Wilson’s original notion for Mound Builders was that the ad hoc “family” heals her over the summer and that she becomes the strong person in the group who nurtures the others in the end.  Aspects of this idea are left over, especially at the end of the play, but no longer have a rationale.)  The two characters with the most going for them (in terms of actability) are Dan Loggins, the younger scientist (Zachary Booth), and Chad Jaskers, the landowner’s ambitious son (Will Rogers).  Given more to play, these two actors attracted more of my attention than all the others (though, as I’ll try to explain in a bit, their roles weren’t any easier to figure out than the rest).  Booth made clear the youthful enthusiasm Dan has for the discovery of new facts, making the young Ph.D. seem even more like a brainy adolescent than he actually is, even if he was a little one-notish.  Booth’s Dan is an irrepressible puppy whose blindness to others’ perspectives precipitates the one actual act that comes at the play’s end.  Rogers makes Chad almost credible, another overgrown teenager (Chad’s in his mid-20’s), with dollar-signs in his eyes, but intellectual pretentions in his heart.  He also doesn’t see the point of view of the others and the lethal combination of him and Dan, who are as close to friends as any two characters in the play, ignites in the end, but Rogers may be a little too puppyish to carry off the emotional intensity that shows up at the end and his performance is a tad mannered. 

In 1975, Mel Gussow in the Times wrote that “Lanford Wilson’s multi-layered new play . . . challenges the actors and the audience.”  Gussow felt that this was due to the “weight and resonance” of Wilson’s subject, but 38 years later, reviewers of the STC revival gave a different evaluation.  In the current Times, Charles Isherwood complained that watching STC’s “slackly acted” revival “is like cracking open a time capsule that’s been buried for years.”  Its “contents,” pronounced Isherwood, “don’t prove as fascinating to us today as we had reason to hope.”  Wilson “gently probes” the “imploding American family of the late 20th century” with a blend of “lyricism and naturalism,” but the “understated emotional currents come through only hazily in Ms. Bonney’s production,” which “lacks the layered, resonant acting” necessary to bring them out.  “Too many of the performances here never suggest the reserves of feeling that are needed to give texture to the loose-jointed dialogue and lightly sketched-in relationships,” reported the Timesman.  Though I don’t categorically disagree with Isherwood’s evaluation, I find far more fault in the script than I do in the production which, I contend, has been ordained by the play that Wilson wrote.

Whatever errors Bonney and her cast made in mounting the STC revival of The Mound Builders, I found that the main problems were endemic to Wilson’s dramaturgy.  Three main faults seem insuperable to me: it’s endlessly talky without seeming to lead to an action; the various speeches and conversations all seem unconnected to anything, much less one another—each character has his or her own topic of concern; and the final, devastating event, which happens off stage, seems to come out of nowhere, as if Wilson were dropping a bomb.  It was as if Wilson had decided that at two hours the play had gone on long enough and he had to end it, so he slipped in a cataclysm to finalize the plot.  Now, possibly Bonney and the actors could have led up some to the explosion in the end, showing aspects of the characters and their relationships that might suggest that something was building up, but the other two script problems are pretty much outside their control.  (It may be significant that the video of the PBS adaptation of the play is available in a 90-minute version, suggesting that the play can be cut by three-quarters of an hour without serious damage, essentially turning it into a one-act.  At the performance, in fact, I said to my companion that the whole play happens in the last two, two-and-a-half scenes and could be a one-act.) 

Apparently Wilson, who reportedly regarded Mound Builders as his favorite among his own plays and possibly his best work, was trying to get at some thoughts about the nature of civilization, both the small, family-circle kind and the larger, historico-anthropological sort, as well as the way people can be so absorbed in their own worlds that they don’t comprehend or even perceive that others also have points of view that may not agree with their own.  The little society of the Howes, the Logginses, and Chad Jasker has fault lines in it and ultimately splits apart, leaving almost as little behind as the Mound Builders’ culture did.  The fault that causes the breach is the way the scientists, especially Dan, are so absorbed in the discoveries they expect to make, the preservation of the archeological evidence they’re finding that they have no concept that Chad and the people of Blue Shoals he stands in for (read: the “real” world) are looking forward to the big, new lake and the interchange for the Interstate that are going to destroy the dig site because to them, it means tourists, prosperity, and progress.  (The academics are looking for the past, but the locals are looking toward the future.)  There are hints, not all of them subtle, in the early scenes of The Mound Builders that this dichotomous worldview persists, but little is made of them either in Bonney’s production or, really, in Wilson’s script; they’re easy to miss if they’re not punched up in production.  While the play is unfolding, I never noticed them, leaving me with the impression, as I stated, that the climax comes out of the blue (until I thought it over afterwards, and, I confess, began to read some of the criticism of the play, both reviews and literary notes).  The actors didn’t have to hit these points with sledges, but a little tap would have been dramatically helpful; the cast, however, seemed to be intent on keeping all their characters playing on a single note. 

Wilson said that he structured Mound Builders the way archeologists uncover the history of a vanished civilization, by meticulously peeling away layer after layer of dirt to unearth the facts.  The play, which Wilson asserted was “one of the few real stories I've written,” was assembled “in pieces, bits.”  As the scientists examine the artifacts left behind by the Mound Builders, we’re supposed to be discovering their relation to ambition and the future.  But just as the artifacts of the ancient peoples has been interred over time by the remnants of later inhabitants, what Wilson wanted us to uncover is buried deep within a surfeit of what ends up sounding like aimless talk.  “[W]hy were the scenes so—what?  Fragmented,” asked Wilson as he rushed to compose the script by Circle Rep’s deadline.  Was he using August’s dictation and narration, a “common (and lousy) way of connecting disparate scenes,” the playwright acknowledged, as an easy solution to the problem of discontinuity?  The draft of the script had been full of the annotation “bridge to come” between scenes, which Wilson explained was “Circle Rep slang for ‘later.’” 

In the end, the dramatist decided, “It was not in fragments, it was in shards.  It was not a lousy way of telling a story, it was logical, it was organic.”  But my impression is that Wilson was simply mollifying his own concerns, putting aside his initial doubts in order to meet Marshall Mason’s rehearsal schedule.  (The production had already been postponed once and Wilson handed in the second act while the work was already underway and the actors were awaiting the new scenes.)  The scenes are fragmentary and the narration is undramatic and untheatrical.  The bridges never came. 

If sifting through the layers of earthen cover to find the revealing bits and pieces of the Mound Builders’ lives and culture is hard and painstaking work, sitting through more than an act-and-a-half of verbiage to get to the kernel of truth in Wilson’s play is hard work, too, and it defeated me before the payoff came.  When it did, it was a shock to me and I sat up, saying to myself, ‘What?  Where did that come from?’  If Bonney and the actors were supposed to fix that, I’m not sure it’s fair to blame them if they didn’t.  (From what I read of the ’75 and ’86 productions, neither did Marshall Mason and his casts.  Frank Rich, for instance, in his 1986 Times review, wrote: “Audiences who visit the Circle Repertory Company's new and revised revival of Mr. Wilson's 1975 play had better plan on doing some hard digging themselves.  There are some fragments of interest in ‘The Mound Builders,’ but they are buried beneath mounds, if not mountains, of talk.”)

(That revision Rich mentioned, by the way, was specifically undertaken for the ’86 restaging and never made it into a published edition of the script.  It included, among other changes, deleting the character of Kirsten and rewriting some of the text to make the play “more melodramatic, less metaphysical,” according to Newsday’s Linda Winer.  Though Gussow, re-reviewing the new staging, asserted that this “minor” reworking made the text “sharper,” Winer pronounced it a “no-more-popular version” than the short-lived 1975 première.)

Dubbing The Mound Builders “a complex play,” Daily News reviewer Joe Dziemianowicz observed, “It takes a fine-tuned ensemble to breathe believable life into” it but that the “actors relate to each other awkwardly and too loudly.”  The STC revival, an “aimless excavation,” wrote Dziemianowicz, needs a cast “who always seems to be thinking, not just saying lines.”  In the New York Post, Elisabeth Vincentelli complained, “The archaeologists in ‘The Mound Builders’ spend a lot of time talking about their work.”  It’s a “meandering show” and “overly dour,” she observed, in which many of the elements “look good but . . . they aren’t strictly necessary.”  In conclusion, Vincentelli asserted that in the end “the show, like the archaeologists, has dug itself into such a deep hole, it can’t get out.”  Winer proclaimed in Long Island’s Newsday, “‘The Mound Builders’ always was one of Lanford Wilson's Big Question plays—easier to admire, perhaps, than to embrace.”  Winer found that “the revival at the Signature Theatre digs passionately for signs of what we've been missing after the loss of Wilson” but “still doesn't pull together the many exquisitely considered threads” of the play.

“Wilson's dark, down-home tragedy” which is “tossed at you in fragments,” observed Michael Feingold in the Village Voice, “infuses a puzzling form with a Chekhovian spirit.”  Feingold explained that “the play's jagged shape and overlapping dialogue make its narrative tricky to parse.”  Though the Voice review-writer felt that the production “lacks vibrancy,” he also declared that “the play, big, powerful, and quirky, demands to be seen.”  The New Yorker dismissed Mound Builders by declaring, “The cultural, historical, and economic issues raised by the play hit their targets, but the emotional ones misfire.”

In Back Stage, reviewer Erik Haagensen asserted that “the show takes too long to start cooking” because, though “the playwright’s subtle slices of exposition [need] to be delivered with maximum clarity,” that doesn’t always happen in the STC revival.  While he pronounced Mound Builders “minor Wilson,” however, Haagensen concluded that “even in a flawed production it packs a walloping final payoff.”  David Cote called Mound Builders “a fitfully compelling but schematic piece” in Time Out New York, but characterized Jo Bonney’s STC revival as a “warm, cohesive production.”  “Wilson’s careful mapping of his characters’ inner territories” is “impressive,” insisted Cote, but “the play wobbles between self-conscious poetics and highbrow soap opera.” 

On line, the reviews were mostly parallel to the printed press.  In the Huffington Post, however, David Finkle heaped high praise on the play, spending half his column on the play’s and Wilson’s virtues and the playwright’s and script’s history with the Circle Repertory Company.  Dubbing Mound Builders Wilson’s “best work” (alongside another neglected script, 1998’s Sympathetic Magic), when Finkle finally got around to writing about the STC revival, he stated, “it does very little to recapture Wilson's memorable achievement.”  He insisted that “the finesse required to maximize Wilson's manuscript is completely lacking” compared to the Circle Rep première, for which he blames a cast who “don't rise to the occasion.”  (Finkle actually ended by recommending watching the video of the 1976 PBS Theatre in America broadcast.) 

While Mound Builders “does indeed contain a few glimmering gems,” affirmed Matthew Murray on Talkin’ Broadway, he added, “Good luck, however, locating meaning—or anything else—beneath the teeming excesses of this simultaneously overwrought and underthought production.”  Though Bonney “coaxed workable designs” for the revival’s physical production, she “hasn’t fused any of the other elements into an evening cohesive enough to bring alive either history or those seeking to understand it.”  Murray put some blame on Wilson because, the reviewer asserted, “[t]he play itself does [Bonney] few favors, wobbling as it does unconvincingly between” two disparate locations, but the production doesn’t help as “none of it has the impact it might because Bonney and the actors conduct the action as though they’re sleepwalking through a Bertolt Brecht rehearsal.”  Still, Murray conceded that Mound Builders is “still a well-rounded piece with plenty to excavate.  Unfortunately, it’s difficult to imagine a flatter or more hollow rendering of it than this one.”  On TheaterMania, Brian Scott Lipton described the play as “dense and layered” with “many keen, lyrical speeches and the numerous inherent lessons Wilson wants us to contemplate.”  Lipton warned, however, that Mound Builders “can come off as talky, pretentious, and slightly perplexing.” 

Here's an odd conundrum: I generally don't like clowning, but I delighted in Old Hats.  I generally like Lanford Wilson, but I was completely put off by The Mound Builders.  Despite Wilson’s own putative devotion to the play, it’s generally admired for its intellectual ambitions but not beloved as a stage work.  According to several commentaries, the play is more highly regarded by readers of the published text than by people who’ve seen it staged.  As George Bernard Shaw said of democracy, The Mound Builders apparently “reads well; but it doesn’t act well.”

[STC's The Mound Builders is one of two Lanford Wilson revivals on the boards in New York City now.  The Roundabout Theatre Company is currently presenting Talley's Folley, Wilson's 1979 romantic comedy, at the Laura Pels Theatre on W. 46th Street.  The original Talley's Folly premièred on Broadway on 20 February 1980, won that year's Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and ran for 286 performances.  It is the second play in the Talley Trilogy which also includes Fifth of July (1978) and Talley & Son (1985).  I said that I liked Lanford Wilson’s plays; Talley’s Folly, which I saw on Broadway with Judd Hirsch and Debra Mooney (who replaced Trish Hawkins) in October 1980, is one reason I do.  The Roundabout production of Talley's Folly opened on 5 March and is scheduled to run through 12 May.]

'By The Way, Meet Vera Stark'

Last Thursday, 19 May, my theater companion, Diana, and I went uptown to the Second Stage Theatre’s home on West 43rd Street to see the highly-praised production of Lynn Nottage’s comedy-drama By The Way, Meet Vera Stark, a world première (Nottage’s last New York production, and her last play, was Ruined, the Pulitzer Prize winner for 2009, at the Manhattan Theatre Club.) For the first time in a long time, I can’t argue with the acclaim the play and the production have garnered in the press. (And, for the first time in a long time, Diana and I agreed!) If I taught playwriting—for which I have no qualifications, so it’s unlikely—Vera Stark would be one of the models I’d promote in class. It’s a perfect example of top-flight dramaturgy (helped immensely by an all-around excellent production, which I’ll get to shortly). Here’s what I mean:

As readers of ROT will know by now, I have a short set of criteria for what I consider good theater. A good play has to do something more than just tell a story and it must do it theatrically. The first part’s probably self-explanatory, but all I mean there is that the play has to have a point of some kind, say something, profound or trivial. Storytelling’s a noble art of its own, but in itself, it’s not theater. As for theatricality, what I mean is the play must use the attributes of the live stage to accomplish its task. I don’t want a play to try to replicate a movie, a TV show, or a concert, though it can use the techniques of those arts; I want a play to be a play, live and, when necessary, overcoming that limitation by imaginative means. Nottage’s play and Jo Bonney’s staging do both of those things in spades.

In the first instance, Nottage, a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (the “genius” grant), is showing us the Hollywood of the 1930s, especially the place of black actors in that world. (A subtitle for this report might be “Slaves With Lines”; that’s the exclamation the would-be African-American actors at the center of Vera Stark utter when they learn that a Southern epic, The Belle of New Orleans, is being cast.) We may know about the tribulations of now-famous actors like Butterfly McQueen, Stepin Fetchit, Hattie McDaniel, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Louise Beavers, and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, who, like the black characters in Vera Stark, have, and often demonstrate, more dignity and depth than the roles to which they were assigned (on screen, but also in life) allowed them to reveal. But Nottage also shows us what it was like off the sound stages. Later, we see the playwright’s take on how we mythologize those groundbreakers after they’ve become icons. Nottage says that, fascinated with old Hollywood, she wanted to look at where she thought the movie business was heading in terms of race relations before the Hays Code was enforced in 1934, the year after the fictional Belle of New Orleans was made. The Motion Picture Production Code, as it was officially known, changed the way African Americans were (permitted to be) portrayed on screen, condemning black actors to careers as “enthusiastic and obsequious servants.” The playwright said that her intent was “to use the fast-paced humor of the period to irreverently explore the legacy of racism in Hollywood”—and, by extension I’d say, the rest of our society (especially the non-Jim Crow North with its less-blatant discrimination). By displaying the past, Nottage hopes that we’ll examine our present in comparison. She doesn’t think all that much has changed, for all the successful black filmmakers like Spike Jones and Tyler Perry, especially in the way African-American women are portrayed on film and TV.

But what makes this treatment of our history (and the subsequent rose-colored nostalgia) stageworthy is that Nottage doesn’t just tell us or even simply illustrate her ideas, she demonstrates them for us, and she does it with great (and I do mean great) humor. The first act, set in 1933, is a true laugh-riot—chockablock with jokes, gags, and comic turns, often in the low-comedy mold, but all for a serious and honest point, which Nottage never lets get away or treats trivially even as the audience howls with glee. (A couple of women behind Diana and me seemed even to anticipate the jokes before they arrived, almost as if they’d seen the play before and knew what was coming. Their joy was contagious, but it made it hard for me to catch some of the funny lines because the women were already laughing loudly. That’s the breaks, though.) Nottage said that she wanted to “pay homage to the screwball comedies of the 30’s” which she “adored.” Vera Stark’s second act moves up to 2003 as we attend “Rediscovering Vera Stark,” a conference on the actress and the movie that made her famous and beloved. We also visit, via live reenactment, 1973, when Vera made an appearance on The Brad Donovan Show, a kind of Mike Douglas or Merv Griffin celebrity talk show. The self-important panelists at the conference—a lesbian slam poet in combat boots and camouflage field jacket; a somewhat pedantic academic; and the host, a fey, prissy film geek—parse Vera’s every comment and gesture, each to support her or his private theories. For two simultaneous scenes in which the characters are all mostly sitting around and talking, it was remarkably dynamic and engaging.

That last attribute was, of course, in large part thanks to the acting and directing. Let me get to that. First, the production couldn’t have been cast better. No one hit a single false note or faltered—and most of the actors played two roles (except the two playing Vera and Gloria Mitchell, the Hollywood star who had the title role in The Belle of New Orleans and employed Vera as her real-life maid—who served as Gloria’s best friend and confidante), and each of them created two delightful figures, portraits of recognizable types who nevertheless never descended into stereotypes or clichés. (They were, however, caricatures, but the good kind—the kind that makes you recognize people and laugh at them.) I’ll get back to the acting shortly, but let me cover some of the other aspects of the production that helped raise it above the norm, despite the opportunity to turn it all into a travesty of one of those “where are they now?” or “whatever happened to . . .?” TV bios that cram the cable dial. (When Gloria shows up at the Brad Donovan interview, it was reminiscent of that oldie, This Is Your Life.)

Before I return to the acting, I have to cover the physical production (which is actually quite complex technically). Neil Patel, one of our most accomplished stage designers, especially for realistic or semi-realistic sets, realized a wonderfully evocative fantasy-‘30s environment for act one. To start the performance off on the right note and prepare the audience for the world we’d be entering, Patel designed a false proscenium arch for the stage, embellishing the frame with an art deco border and installing a purple velvet drape that rose in scalloped swooshes when the play opened. For the moment, the normally high-tech, metal-clad Second Stage theater became a depression-era playhouse. The centerpiece—of the whole play, really, but especially of the first act—was the salon/sitting room of the Hollywood home of Gloria Mitchell, “America’s Little Sweetie Pie.” (The Shirley Temple allusion is almost certainly intentional, considering the little moppet’s screen relationship with Bill Robinson.) It was all cream and white, with a plushly upholstered chaise in the center—not a real living space, but one that might have appeared in one of the movies of the era, like The Thin Man or My Man Godfrey. The contrast this set up from the first scene in the salon to the second in the shabby apartment Vera shares with Lottie and Anne Mae, two other aspiring actresses, was striking, the little flat being all greens and browns and sparsely furnished. Even the studio lot was really a kind of fantasy, with the prop palm tree, wooden stand in plain view, and the studio floor lamp on casters standing idle (as if a piece of electric equipment might be left out in the elements). All that was missing was a Godzilla or a gladiator walking through. The effect of it all was subtle and sly, a commentary that didn’t call attention to itself but communicated nonetheless.

The design of the second act, which combined the conference stage on the left, just three nondescript chairs as if the session were taking place in a Y or a community center, and the TV set on the right, slightly above the conference panel, far more colorful in the ‘70s style of pop psychedelia. The technical complexity came from the backing of the two sets—a large screen that doubled as a movie screen where we see the final moment, the death scene, from The Belle of New Orleans, a black-and-white melodrama (created by Tony Gerber) in the vein of, say Raintree County or Jezebel, and a TV monitor on which we were supposed to be watching the tape of The Brad Donovan Show. (The TV show is performed live for us, but when the tape is “stopped” so the conference panelists can discuss some small point, the screen displayed a frozen moment of the show as the live actors struck and held the same pose. It was a clever little gimmick, as designed by Shawn Sagady, and I imagine not too easy to accomplish smoothly.) So, we have the live medium of the stage along with evocations of both film and television; there were also some still photos projected on the screen as the panelists touch on some of Vera’s private life off the screen. Some of this may sound gimmicky, but it all worked—and in such an innately static act, it added the illusion of movement—while still being theatrical. (See what I mean? If someone had done such a scene in a film, it would have just been real, not intriguing or interesting, just plain real—a movie within a movie and a TV show in a movie. This was not real, but it was genuine nonetheless.

The costumes, by ESosa (for Emilio Sosa), were just as appropriate as the sets, and like the sets, the most impressive (and delightful) were the ‘30s designs of the first act. Starlet Gloria’s gowns were stunning, and bore the same slightly fantasy gloss as did Patel’s first-act sets. Vera and her friends also wear clothes that, though they may be less glamorous, are still part movie dream and part reality. (Anne Mae’s dress in her first scene, when she’s getting ready for a date, is especially evocative. She’s getting by by passing herself off as a Brazilian exotic, and the frilly, layered skirt has just a touch of Carmen Miranda—without gaudy colors or the bananas on her head.) In act two, the costumes become more grounded, though their evocation of character is just as strong—the aggressive poet’s combat motif, for example. The one stand-out exception is Vera’s costume—and Vera, the character, is wearing a costume—for the Brad Donovan interview. A little drunk and 40 years older than she was in act one, Vera totters onto the talk show set in a pink-and-green-and-yellow-and-God-knows-what-all caftan-cum-muumuu (with matching headband) which flutters pretty much on its own, though Vera gives it a lot of help. If the woman weren’t the center of attention on her own, that get-up would have done the trick! Like the set design, Sosa commented on the characters and the circumstances without being blunt about it.

Now, to the acting. I don’t remember seeing a play in quite some time in which the entire ensemble was all working on the same level as consistently as this one. We hadn’t gotten farther than the second and third scenes when Diana and I were whispering to each other how good the actors were. (It started with the appearance of Lottie, played by a remarkable Kimberly Hébert Gregory—who returned as Carmen Levy-Green, the academic in the act two conference.) Though Sanaa Lathan as Vera gives a stunning and flawless performance, as strong and determined as she is emotionally vulnerable—and her turn on the talk show as a kind of Eartha Kitt on speed is priceless—her castmates each give her a solid and engaging base to work from. (I can only assume that Nottage chose the title character’s name on purpose: Vera means ‘true’ in Latin and Italian and Stark means ‘strong’ in German. Vera’s a woman who’s true and strong.) I should refine a remark I made earlier while discussing the writing: the characters may be intentional caricatures of types we’ve all seen often, but the performances are not clichéd or stock. Gloria, the sweetie pie starlet, may be written so that she could be played as a stereotype, but Stephanie J. Block’s rendition is genuine and sympathetic. The affection she shows for Vera as her friend—who happens to be her maid—and support is real and her angst over the role of the New Orleans belle is almost frightening. Between the actors, the director, and the playwright, all the characters are rendered with just the right recipe of parody, sincerity, and sympathy. In this cast of standouts, some that had very special moments were Daniel Breaker as Leroy Barksdale, the film director’s “man Friday” in act one, and Kevin Isola as a British rocker with a Dr. Pangloss coiffure, in the second act talk show. Breaker, who also plays the conference host (a blend of Gene Shalit and Cornel West, The Hollywood Reporter described him), makes the smarmy self-promoter with genuine ambitions an engaging and charming man (who becomes Vera’s first husband between the acts). He looks brash and aggressive—his marcelled hair is just right—but his tone is almost suppliant, as if he were saying that he truly liked Vera and really hoped she’d like him. Isola, in an altogether different vein, was a demanding and insistent Russian-émigré movie director, but his turn at Rhys-Davies (shades of the Profumo sex-for-info scandal in ‘60s Britain!) was part strutting Mick Jagger and part lizard-tongued Gene Simmons. Lathan’s talk-show turn as Vera is a showstopper, but she and Gregory have an inspired moment in act one when they transform themselves before our very eyes from self-possessed servers at a Hollywood party into hunched, downtrodden “Negroes of the earth” and then launch into a blues number to convice director Maximilian Von Oster they should play slaves in The Belle of New Orleans. (Sincerity? Yeah, I can fake that!) This isn’t fair, I know, because all the others had terrific moments, too—David Garrison as producer Frederick Slasvick and TV host Donovan and Karen Olivo as Anne Mae and the lesbian poet—but Breaker and Isola just had a couple of marvelous scenes, thanks to Nottage and Bonney. One impressive aspect of this work, as I suggested before, is that all the actors who played two roles not only differentiated between them, as any competent actor could do, but created two perfectly apt and well-defined characters—an accomplishment for which I give great credit to Bonney along with the actors. (It’s also important to note that Nottage did a wonderful job of separating the period sensitivities and outlooks, down to the vocabulary, among the three decades—like role-players in historical reconstructions.)

Most reviews of the New York world première production of Vera Stark were extremely positive, especially about the first act, though Ben Brantley of the New York Times had reservations, calling it a “fitful comedy” and asserting that the broad humor and the “grittier emotional detail” never quite mesh. In The Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney describes Vera Stark as “clever yet frustrating” and writes that it takes “an unsatisfying turn” when the second act moves into the 21st century and the play “deflates.” Rooney also had trouble reconciling the cartoonish humor of the screwball send-up and the analysis. Variety had similar criticisms. I disagree with these cavils. Nottage got the tone right for both her spoof of ‘30s film comedy and for the serious point she made through the humor and ridicule. (Isn’t that a time-honored literary tradition—to poke fun while making serious observations? Some guy named Swift did it—and Twain, just to mention two. Not a few dramatists, too, like Molière and Shaw—or, more currently, Yasmina Reza.)

The apparent disconnect, as Michael Feingold has it in The Village Voice, between act one and act two, when the style changes some, didn’t pull me up—all three scenes (the 1933 Hollywood, the 1973 talk show, the 2003 academic conference) were all satires, filtered through the sensibility of each era. What reviewers like Rooney seem to have missed is that Nottage isn’t just sending up the Hollywood of the ‘30s or examining the lives on the African-American actors trying to navigate the gated world. In the second part of the play, she’s looking critically at the way we turn flawed people into legends and use them as vessels for our own aspirations and agendas. That’s what Brad Donovan and Peter Rhys-Davies do in 1973 and the three conference panelists do in 2003—and Nottage is showing us how we all do it. Vera may be little more than a washed up drunk pretending she’s still 25, but we project onto her a whole wealth of fun-house nostalgia because we need her to have been a hero so we can stand on her shoulders. The first act of Vera Stark isn’t just a funny send-up of screwball depression Hollywood. It’s the material on which act two comments, like the commentary in the Talmud or the critical analysis that follows and draws on a piece of literature. The two parts of Vera Stark aren’t discontinuous; they fit together like two halves of a torn photograph. Besides, what saved even the frisson of discontinuity from splitting the play, is the way Nottage got her critical intent across by means of the jokes and parody not around or in spite of them. “Clever” is something of a put-down; By The Way, Meet Vera Stark is far more than merely clever. It has something to say, and it does so very successfully as far as I’m concerned—anything to the contrary is just bitchin’ and moanin’.