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Los Angeles Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
I attended a Black Out performance and, as a white critic, it opened my eyes in an unexpected way
'Berta, Berta,' a two-character play by Angelica Chéri, was inspired by a prison work song from Parchman Farm, the notorious Mississippi State Penitentiary whose harsh conditions and history of forced labor extended the nightmare of antebellum slave plantations into the 20th century. The play, which is receiving its West Coast premiere in an Echo Theater Company production at Atwater Village Theatre directed by Andi Chapman, is set in Mississippi in 1923. The action takes place in the home of Berta (Kacie Rogers), a young widow who's awakened in the middle of the night by a visitor from her past. Not just any visitor, mind you, but the love of her life. Leroy (DeJuan Christopher) arrives at the threshold of her small, well-cared for home in a clamorous uproar. He's filthy, his white shirt is covered in blood, and Berta can't tell if he's possessed by the devil or out of his mind. It turns out that he's killed a man who claimed, falsely, to have slept with her. Berta is horrified that Leroy has done something so rash and violent. He holds it as proof of the depth of his love for her. But why, Berta wants to know, did he not get in touch with her after he was released from Parchman? The crime he's committed will only send him back to where, in Leroy's own pained words, 'they take the colored man to kill him from the inside out.' Berta and Leroy exchange grievances over the futility of their love. He can't understand how she could have married; she's bewildered that he could have expected her to wait indefinitely for a ghost. Their passion, however, won't be denied, no matter how angry they make each other. The play is pitched for maximum intensity, and Chapman's direction encourages a mythic scope — a wholly appropriate approach for a drama that leaps over the safety of realism. Amanda Knehans' beautifully designed set, as snug as it is appealing, grounds the action in a clean and cozy domesticity. But this is just an illusion, as the production makes clear through the expressionistic wildness of the lighting (Andrew Schmedake) and sound design (Jeff Gardner). The couple has been granted a brief reprieve from their separation. Leroy, observing an old superstition, made an oath to the awakening cicadas that he will turn himself in if he's given the chance to make peace with Berta. She has made her own pact with the insects, asking them to restore the life of her stillborn baby, whose corpse she has held onto in the hope that the cicadas will answer her prayer. The pressurized, supernatural stakes in such tight quarters sometimes encourage Christopher to push a little too vociferously. Berta's home is too small to contain Leroy — and Christopher's performance never lets us forget it. But the turbulent charge of Leroy's voice and body language serves another purpose: keeping the character's history as an oppressed Black man cruelly cut off from his soulmate ever in sight. Rogers' Berta, comfortably situated in her domestic nest, scales her performance accordingly. She is our anchor into the world of the play, reacting to Leroy's tumultuous intrusion with suspicion and alarm. But as the intimacy grows between the characters, the performers become more relaxed and playful with each other. The Wagnerian nature of Berta and Leroy's love settles down without losing its miraculous mystery. The Sunday matinee I attended was a Black Out performance — an opportunity for a Black audience to experience the play in community. Playwright Jeremy O. Harris championed this concept during the initial Broadway run of his groundbreaking drama 'Slave Play.' There was backlash to the idea in London, where some critics found the practice racially exclusionary. But anything that promotes the communal embrace of art, particularly among historically underrepresented groups, ought to be celebrated. I wasn't the only white person in the audience at 'Berta, Berta' on Sunday, but I was one of just a few. When I had initially learned from the show's publicist that the performance was specially designated, I offered to come at another time, not wanting to take a seat from a community member. But I was assured that there was room and that I was most welcome. Listening to the play in this special environment, I was more alert to the through line of history. Although set in the Deep South during the Jim Crow era, there appeared to be little distance between the characters and the audience. Berta and Leroy's tempestuous love games were met with amused recognition. And the threats facing the couple, to judge by the audible response to the work, were received with knowing empathy. At a different performance, I might have been more impatient with some of the strained dramatic turns. But the production's living bond with the audience opened my eyes to the realism inherent in this folktale romance, laden with history and floating on a song.
Los Angeles Times
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
All's unfair in love and identity politics in Echo Theater Company's ‘One Jewish Boy'
Before 'One Jewish Boy,' a play by Stephen Laughton, even had its premiere in London in 2018, the playwright and the play were besieged by antisemitic trolling and threats. Jesse, the play's Jewish character who is the victim of a hate crime, would not be at all surprised. 'One Jewish Boy,' which is making its West Coast debut in an Echo Theater Company production at Atwater Village Theatre, wrestles with the burden of antisemitism in the relationship between a young Jewish man and a mixed-race woman. The play begins at a marital crisis point in 2020 and unwinds all the way back to the couple's first meeting in Ibiza in 2004. Progressive Londoners Jesse (Zeke Goodman) and Alex (Sharae Foxie) love Bjork, getting high and calling out each other's blind spots. They're pretty sure they're cool and enlightened enough to handle their cultural differences. But intimacy has a way of drawing out latent political tensions and making them intensely personal. Directed by the Echo's artistic director, Chris Fields, 'One Jewish Boy' tightly focuses on the conversational push and pull between Jesse and Alex as they try to work through their points of conflict. The debate between them is handled with admirable complexity, but the characters don't have enough room to develop beyond the central argument of the play. Jesse, understandably, has become more defensive about antisemitism since he was brutally attacked by thugs who singled him out for being Jewish. This violent event flashes onstage in the manner of a traumatic memory, with Goodman's Jesse writhing on Justin Huen's impressionistic urban set as lighting and sound designer Matt Richter underscores the hallucinatory nature of the assault with strobe effects. It's one of the few breaks in the play's running stream of strained lovers' chat. Sensing antisemitism on the left as well as on the right, Jesse resents being called upon to justify Israeli foreign policy. Why should he, a 'diaspora Jew' from a proud line of 'left-wing Jews,' have to account for the living conditions of Palestinians when he is not a 'blatant Zionist' and is vehemently opposed to the Israeli government's policies? Alex tends to think he's overreacting, but with antisemitism rising all over the world, no one can convince Jesse that he's being paranoid. While sympathetic to Jesse's post-traumatic recovery, Alex worries that he's letting this one incident define his life. She also feels stifled by the way he uses his Jewish identity as a trump card. She's opposed, for example, to having their son circumcised. But Jesse, while pretending to be open to a discussion, signals that this is a non-negotiable issue. Jesse is particularly incensed by the antisemitic trope that sees Jews as 'powerful, dominating and privileged' and therefore not worthy of the protections of other marginalized groups. Alex might be more sensitive to a critique aimed in her direction if Jesse weren't so quick to overlook the oppression she experiences on a daily basis as a woman of color. Laughton effectively embodies and personalizes the deeply felt dialectic between Alex and Jesse. If Alex has a bit more credibility, not being as intractable in her positions, both have a tendency to come off as disagreeable in their incessant bickering and self-righteousness. But characters in drama don't have to be likable. They do, however, have to be convincing. And here is where 'One Jewish Boy' lost me. There's something forced in the scenic snapshots of the couple laughing, dancing and romancing. The actors themselves seem perpetually on a first date — and not just with each other but also with their characters. The drama struggles to find momentum. Part of this is a result of the play's tricky chronology. Part of this is the sluggishly incremental nature of Laughton's writing that filters everything through seesaw dialogue. And part of this is a production that fails to infuse the action with the necessary theatrical fire. The conflict at the heart of 'One Jewish Boy' is vast, but the modest scale of the direction seems measured for TV viewing.
