Powell
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Joined: 27 Nov 2004
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 Posted: Mon 25 Aug 2008 03:29 Post subject: New play promotes "one drop" |
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| Quote: | August 21, 2008
THEATER REVIEW | 'NOON DAY SUN'
That Southern Belle of Detroit Is a Woman of Mystery
By NEIL GENZLINGER
The melodrama is high, and so is the cliché count in “Noon Day Sun,” an exploration of racial identity and related themes that is as seductive as a soap opera: the story pulls you in but doesn’t tax you much.
The play, written by Cassandra Medley and staged by the Diverse City Theater Company at the Beckett Theater, centers on Zena (Gin Hammond), a light-skinned Southern black woman who boards a northbound train in 1947 and is mistaken by the conductor for white. He puts her in the whites-only car, and that starts her on a life of “passing.” We next meet her in Detroit in 1957, married to a white man, Brian (Michael McGlone), who doesn’t know she is black.
How do blacks alone produce all those "pass for white" people? Are we supposed to believe they are mutations without predominate white ancestry? That conductor on a train plot comes directly from "Pinky." I find the Detroit setting interesting, since Detroit is NOW almost synonymous with "black." I believe the current Detroit is what the author wants the audience to think about.
They are at an auto show where Brian hopes to make a big jump up the career ladder, but also on hand is a black janitor, Reuben (Ron Cephas Jones), who knows Zena’s past.
It’s a promising premise, but Ms. Medley and the director, Victor Lirio, fall back on a lot of easy caricatures. The most egregious involve Brian and his boss (David Newer), who are the same slick, materialistic suits who turn up every time the Eisenhower era needs to be invoked. Ms. Hammond too is asked to play a type, that exaggerated Scarlett O’Hara version of a Southern belle. Sure, these people are supposed to be shallow, but they seem too lazily constructed to warrant our interest.
Perhaps that’s why Ms. Medley crams the story full of subplots: dead twins, defective auto parts, fortunetellers, religion. It’s all in the service of her main point, a fairly obvious one: Zena isn’t the only person in this story who is “passing.” Everyone — Brian, Reuben, Reuben’s girlfriend (Melanie Nicholls-King, in the play’s best performance) — has to decide whether to be true to his or her real self.
If "black" is Zena's "real self," perhaps "non-Aryan" would be her "real self" if she were Jewish.
Not a bad structure for a play. If only it had been executed more subtly.
“Noon Day Sun” continues through Aug. 30 at the Beckett Theater, 410 West 42nd Street, Clinton, (212) 279-4200, ticketcentral.com. |
http://theater2.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/theater/reviews/21noon.html?ei=5070&emc=eta1 |
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