A case for ‘Crumbs From the Table of Joy' as a great American play
History doesn't happen in great sea changes above our heads. It's whether one Black family decides to migrate north. It's which stranger you let talk to you on the train.
And in 'Crumbs From the Table of Joy,' it's which ideas and experiences a girl hears over the breakfast table in her humble Brooklyn apartment — and how they inflect what she sees as possible for herself.
Lynn Nottage's 1995 play about a postwar Great Migration family, whose Aurora Theatre Company production opened Thursday, May 1, could have been written today. Grieving widower Godfrey (David Everett Moore) is in thrall to a charlatan spiritualist, making excuses whenever his great leader doesn't deliver on promises. Communist Party footsoldier Aunt Lily Ann (Asia Nicole Jackson), taking it upon herself to move in with her brother-in-law and take care of his girls, keeps urging the family to unshackle themselves from servile capitalist ideology. As for her own joblessness, she says, 'Nobody wants to hire a smart colored woman.'
And when daughters Ernestine (Anna Marie Sharpe) and Ermina (Jamella Cross) suddenly get a new stepmother in Gerte (Carrie Paff), a white German expat scarred by wartime privation and chaos, the conversations between her and Lily Ann feel startlingly 2025. They play the oppression olympics. They debate Gerte's assertion that 'When I see you I see no color' and just how much the world will allow any person of color to achieve — professionally, romantically. But it's never philosophical or abstract; it's grounded in romantic jealousy and insecurity that tick like a time bomb.
Elizabeth Carter's production can feel a little stagey and clumsy sometimes. Some monologues that are supposed to be devastating have all the humanity of a foghorn, and light cues practically galumph in and out.
But watch Sharpe and Cross as the two sisters. In physical comedy, Cross — one of the Bay Area's rising stars — has the precision of a gymnast or a figure skater. Slithering away from the singeing clutches of Lily Ann's hot iron comb, she makes the inanimate object into an enemy snake; each fresh crackle of burning hair is an escalating battle in that war known to every child: between common sense and adults' incomprehensible whims.
And Sharpe makes Ernestine the poetic, impressionable sort who gulps down experience with her eyes and lets it suffuse her being. As the play's narrator, she gives Nottage's intricate, redolent text an easy buoyancy, trotting out lines like 'I want to go someplace where folks don't come home sullied by anger' with a winsome earnestness that makes the highfalutin natural.
If there's an old-fashioned discursiveness to the script — it's the kind of play that feels like it ends three times over — Nottage constructs such a multilayered, expansive world that she earns the right to linger on the theatrical equivalent of sustains and fermatas. Here, the microcosm and the macrocosm are the same: The question of whether social change comes from revolution or everyday individual choices somehow equates to one girl's choice between following the humdrum path her father has paved for her or imagining something more.
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