Reaching Out

Review of Detroit ’67, Hartford Stage

In the summer of 1967, the city of Detroit exploded. There was looting and arson in black neighborhoods, where the racist treatment by the police incensed the residents into violence. The police, and eventually the National Guard and U.S. Army, retaliated. The rebellion played out over five days as the most destructive riot of the many that occurred that summer, and one of the worst in U.S. history.

Halfway through Dominque Morisseau’s Detroit ’67, playing through March 10 at Hartford Stage, directed by Jade King Carroll, the chaos in the streets starts and impinges on the story. At that point, the play, concerned with a drama of personalities, is set against a threatening background that will likely lead to death. If the role of the offstage violence in the play seems a bit convenient, its presence makes clear the kind of underground life these characters live, the risks they face, and the resentments below the surface.

Chelle (Myxolydia Tyler) in Hartford Stage’s production of Detroit ‘67 (photos by T. Charles Erickson)

Set entirely in the basement of the house Chelle (Myxolydia Tyler) and Lank (Johnny Ramey), short for Langston as in Hughes, grew up in, the action, initially, concerns the siblings’ efforts to earn money by hosting afterhours parties in the basement. To that end, Lank, contrary to his sister’s devotion to vinyl, has procured a new-fangled device: an 8-track player! Such details take us back to a different time, greatly aided by Dede M. Ayite’s period costumes and Leah J. Loukas’ hair and makeup design. The feeling of a bygone era is key to the play, recreating a world in which the greats of Motown—Martha & the Vandellas, Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, the Temptations, the Four Tops—are at the top of their game. As a defining export from black Detroit also beloved of white America, Motown was an important cultural ambassador, a fact which makes the hostility in the streets all the more searing.

Bunny (Nyahale Allie)

The long shadow of that era in popular culture means we feel we know these characters and how they interact. They’re familiar, whether it’s the clash between the siblings over how to spend their inheritance from their deceased parents—Lank wants to invest in opening his own club, Chelle is skeptical—or Lank’s smooth-talking buddy and would-be business partner Sly (Will Cobbs), who may be sweet on Chelle, or Chelle’s sassy and brassy friend Bunny (Nyahale Allie) who has “a lot to go-around.” Into this mix, even before we get to the riots, enters Caroline (Ginna Le Vine), a white girl in a go-go outfit whom Lank can’t help helping when he finds her wandering dazed, bloodied, and bruised in traffic.

Caroline (Ginna Le Vine)

Now we’ve got the makings for interracial romance, and that might be enough of a vehicle for revisiting the way black and white cultures didn’t cross lines much during those times. That they might and did was part of the thrill and risk when the races mixed, and Le Vine and Ramey do a good job of playing with a fire set on a low heat. It could catch, but there are many complications, not least Chelle’s aversion to Caroline—though she lets her stay and help with serving in the basement club—and Lank’s unease about going behind his sister’s back to buy a real club that’s up for sale.

Sly (Will Cobb), Lank (Johnny Ramey)

Director Carroll is skilled with a play that has a lot of episodic encounters, its characters chatting and sometimes grooving to the tunes, while having little moments of discontent or disagreement. The pacing, for a play that runs to two and a half hours, is nearly flawless. And, while we can feel the plot like a net closing in, there are many nice touches that keep our disbelief suspended. Not least is what strikes me as the heart of what Morisseau is getting at: a plaintive grievance that Chelle sounds to Bunny about what she sees as a kind of betrayal in Lank’s interest in Caroline. And that means that Lank is apt to fail his sister where it counts.

Chelle (Myxolydia Tyler), Lank (Johnny Ramey)

At the heart of the play, then, is Chelle, and Myxolydia Tyler lets us hear her, not least in a gripping moment when the seductive power of “Reach Out I’ll Be There” reaches catharsis. Cobbs, groomed to look perfectly the part, is suitably sly and sexy as Sly, and Allie’s Bunny offers both comic relief and canny appraisal of the others, the kind of friend you want on your side.

Chelle (Myxolydia Tyler), Sly (Will Cobbs)

The further plot elements—the vulnerability of the club during the disturbances, Caroline’s ties to corrupt cops, the doomed love aspects—begin to pile up as though Morisseau can’t resist reaching out, trying to bring in all the possible obstacles and upsets the time and place afford. If there were less story, there might be more time for the characters to complicate the roles they’ve been written into.

Bunny (Nyahale Allie), Chelle (Myxolydia Tyler)

An ambitious, at times meandering play, Detroit ’67 works at Hartford Stage in Carroll’s capable way with a capable cast, each contributing to an engaging ensemble. Like the five-part vocals of a song by The Temptations, Detroit ’67 gives each voice its space.

Detroit ‘67
By Dominique Morisseau
Directed by Jade King Carroll

Scenic Design: Riccardo Hernandez; Costume Design: Dede M. Ayite; Lighting Design: Nicole Pearce; Sound Design: Karin Graybash; Hair & Makeup Design: Leah J. Loukas; Fight Director: Greg Webster; Vocal Coach: Robert H. Davis; Production Stage Manager: Heather Klein; Assistant Stage Manager: Nicole Wiegert; Production Manager: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scoy; Associate Artistic Director: Elizabeth Williamson

Cast: Nyahale Allie, Will Cobbs, Ginna Le Vine, Johnny Ramey, Myxolydia Tyler

Hartford Stage
February 14-March 10, 2019

Wrestling Chekhov

The final thesis show of the Yale School of Drama’s 2011-12 season finds director Alex Mihail wrestling with Anton Chekhov’s classic comedy The Seagull, much as Jacob wrestled with the Angel: I will not let thee go except thou bless me.  What might Chekhov’s blessing look like?  I found myself wondering about this very question and have to say that waiting for the outcome provided, for me, a good deal of the drama of watching this production. The play itself is one of those signal works of the late 19th century that aimed to confront its audience with changes in the purposes of art, in this case theater.  To call it a comedy, as Chekhov does, is to distort its audience’s expectations somewhat, perhaps leading viewers to find funny what they might not otherwise.  But that designation also lets us know that the author himself does not take his characters too seriously and asks us not to as well. All of which is to say that the tone of the play is elusive, that outright silliness and comic vanity share the stage with poignant evocations of aging and frailty, that ruined expectations and sad resignation occur amidst family farce and romantic misprisions, and suicide.

From its very design, this production establishes its interrogatory tone—instead of an estate with a lake in the distance where young Treplev, aka Kostya (Seamus Mulcahy) puts on his symbolist play for a skeptical audience led by his actress mother, Arkadina (Brenda Meaney), Scenic Designer Kristen Robinson gives us a traditional interior, minus the fourth wall, that also is an exterior when need be, and is situated so that we, the audience, are seated in what should be the lake, while the distance, seen through the door when open and at times above the walls, is comprised of a theater with a long center aisle and rows of empty seats.  On stage, a rather Godot-like tree remains in place throughout both Parts, most of the time hovering above the ground, and across the windows of the interior—which includes an upright piano and a desk—play various projections (Paul Lieber, Projection Design), including a wandering deer, snowfall, and dancing lights.

As we are self-consciously in a theatrical space throughout, one could say the play takes place in a sort of Chekhov set of the mind, asking us to wonder what it is exactly that realist drama symbolizes.  And if that’s the sort of question that young, earnest and possibly deluded Kostya would ask, so be it.  Which is another way of saying that the play feels like it’s very much in the mind of Kostya, that, as a would-be playwright wrestling with the need for “new forms,” he stands-in both as Chekhov’s and his director’s double.  Indeed, Mihail never lets us forget Kostya’s centrality, allowing him to be present throughout the play, even for scenes he’s not scripted to be part of.  Mulcahy brings to the role endless energy: he hovers, he witnesses, he reacts, he mimicks, flies into rages, pouts, and playacts an artist playacting being an artist.  It’s exhausting.

That level of energy extends to the rest of the cast as well—as it must, since Chekhov tends to write sprawling plays in which people walk in and out and never quite come to saying what they mean, and when they do it’s easy to miss it because someone is always interrupting.  The first half, in which the actors establish their roles, can sometimes be slow going, but in the second half our familiarity with them all allows things to sharpen up considerably.  We have to live with these people a while to get anything from them.

As Arkadina, the leading lady, Brenda Meaney is a grande dame all the way, never letting us forget that, for Kostya’s mother (apt to start playing Hamlet’s mother apropos of nothing), she is always the central figure of every scene.  Everyone else should be willingly eclipsed.  Will Cobbs, as her increasingly decrepit brother Sorin, declines with a comic edge that keeps the character mischievous.  Chris Henry plays successful and fatuous author Trigorin with perhaps more winning a personality than one expects; his best scene is with Masha (Carmen Zilles).  As a single woman in love with Kostya, Masha has to spill her guts and keep herself buttoned up at the same time—Zilles does a capable job in a role no one under thirty should be asked to play.  As the man she marries, because he loves her, Josiah Bania’s Medvedenko is a constant figure of fun, always good for a laugh.  In the roles of Masha’s parents, Winston Duke and Sheria Irving flesh out scenes with, from Duke, a boisterous, life of the party feel (his “caught in a crap” anecdote is great fun), and, from Irving, a pointed pining for the ladies’ man Dr. Dorn (Max Roll, as dapper and jaded a country libertine as one could wish).  Finally, Jillian Taylor as Nina, would-be actress, and muse to those dueling writers Kostya and Trigorin, matches Mulcahy in energy and achieves, in her final transformation, something extraordinary.

Which is to say: the blessing comes late, but it does come.  When Nina reprises, at the end of the play, the grandiose speech from Kostya’s play that she delivers early in Part One, she suddenly renders the absurd lines with a passion that the intervening two years of hardship makes both poignant and transcendent.  And then we get the moment I can’t get out of my head, the moment of pure theater: Kostya’s long walk up that central aisle, followed by the rush of a descending curtain.  Bam!

Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull Translated by Paul Schmidt Directed by Alexandru Mihail

Yale School of Drama January 24-28, 2012