Bella: An American Tall Tale

C+

What are the odds that two shows about 19th-century black women with large derrieres would arrive on Theatre Row within a month of each other? And yet the revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus at Signature Theatre has just been followed by the New York premiere of Kirsten Childs’s musical at Playwrights Horizons. I skipped Venus, because the prospect of watching an innocent woman being exploited and forced to appear in a freak show sounded too depressing. Although Childs’s work also includes a segment when the title character becomes a circus attraction, the prevailing spirit is far from depressing. Bella (Ashley D. Kelley) is a naive girl from Tupelo, Mississippi with a rich fantasy life who is forced to leave town after injuring a rich white man who was trying to rape her. She heads by train toward New Mexico, where her boyfriend Aloysius (Britton Smith) is a Buffalo Soldier. On the train she is looked after by a protective porter (Brandon Gill). After a fanciful adventure I will not describe, she ends up as a circus attraction who becomes a big star in Europe but, a la Josephine Baker, was scorned when she returned to America. There are many other characters: Ida Lou (Marinda Anderson, a black widow heading to Kansas where she thinks life will be safer; Miss Cabbagestalk (Kenita R. Miller), an old maid on her way to likely servitude as the mail-order bride of a widower with six children; a kindly couple, an inept gang of robbers, Bella’s mother (Miller again) and Aunt Dinah (Anderson again) and the grandmother (Natasha Yvette Williams) who is succumbing to dementia. Finally, there is the Spirit of the Booty (Williams again), whom you must see to believe. The cast of twelve are all talented, with Kelley and Miller the standouts. The production is lavish: Clint Ramos’s set has a Western-themed proscenium with a red velvet curtain. a painted scrim, a stage within a stage that moves back and forth and a revolving platform. [Was there a sale on stage turntables this spring? This is the fifth play I have seen recently with a revolving stage.] Dede M. Ayite’s costumes are inspired. Camille A. Brown’s lively choreography adds a lot to the production. Robert O'Hara (Bootycandy) directed. Childs’s music mixes many styles and occasionally seems derivative: there is a song near the end that sounds very similar to the disco anthem “I Will Survive.” A hilarious number in the second act called “White People Tonight” got a big reaction. It all goes down easy, but seems muddled and overstuffed. It has already shed 20 minutes in previews but could profitably lose a few more, preferably in the first act. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including intermission.

The Royale ***

After the success of The Great White Hope, Howard Sackler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1967 play about the career of early 20th-century black boxer Jack Johnson, starring James Earl Jones and Jane Alexander, it takes an act of bravery to write another play on that subject. Playwright Marco Ramirez’s drama, now in previews at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, focuses on the attempt to arrange an interracial championship bout between the black champion, called here Jay “The Sport” Jackson, with Bixby, the retired world champion. We meet Jay (Khris Davis); his trainer Wynton (Clarke Peters); Fish (McKinley Belcher III), Jay’s sparring partner; Max (John Lavelle), his white manager; and Nina (Montego Glover of “Memphis”), his sister. The emphasis is on what motivates Jackson and what collateral damage he is willing to overlook. The play would be rather pedestrian if not for the superbly stylized direction by Rachel Chavkin (“Preludes” and “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812”) which dramatically elevates the material. No choreographer is listed so the credit for staging the almost balletic fight scenes must belong to Chavkin. Punches are percussively replaced by claps and stomps. The staging of the climactic match is even more surprising. The production is enhanced by Nick Vaughn’s monochromatic brown plank set and Dede M. Ayile’s period costumes. The actors mostly succeed in enlivening their rather generic characters. Although the material is a bit thin and formulaic, Chaikin's energetic staging made me more than willing to overlook the play’s flaws. Running time: 85 minutes, no intermission.

Ugly Lies the Bone ***

With this new play by Lindsey Ferrentino, now at the Black Box Theatre, Roundabout Underground continues its commitment to presenting emerging young playwrights, an effort that has previously paid off with playwrights Stephen Karam and Joshua Harmon. Jess (Mamie Gummer), a soldier badly burned by an IED in Afghanistan, has just returned to her small town on Florida’s Space Coast after a year and a half in a military hospital. She is a participant in an experimental study of virtual reality as a non-drug pain management treatment. Caitlin O’Connell plays the unseen experimenter. Jess shares the family home with her sister Kacie (Karron Graves), a schoolteacher. Their mother has been institutionalized for reasons unspecified. Katie has a dodgy boyfriend Kelvin (Haynes Thigpen) whom she met online. We also meet Jess’s former boyfriend Stevie (Chris Stack), now married and clerking at a convenience store, and eventually learn the reasons for their breakup. Just as Jess has suffered grievous injuries, the town has been devastated by mass layoffs when the shuttle program ended. We follow Jess’s struggles to find a way forward with her life. The cast is mostly strong, especially Gummer. Thigpen's approach to his character, particularly in his early scenes, is too broad. Tim Brown’s set looks lived in and authentic. Dede M. Ayite’s costumes are spot-on. The prosthetics designed and created by Vincent T. Schicchi and Thomas Denier Jr. are convincing.The projections by Caite Hevner Kemp are effective. Patricia McGregor’s direction has a few bumpy spots. I would call the play a diamond in the rough. Running time: 75 minutes, no intermission.

brownsville song (b-side for tray) **

If good intentions and heartfelt sincerity were all it took to write a successful play, Kimber Lee (who apparently has an aversion to capital letters) would have hit the jackpot with her drama at LCT3’s Claire Tow Theater. We know before the play begins that Tray (Sheldon Best), an 18-year-old black Brooklynite just finishing high school, is dead. The play opens with a grief-filled monologue by Tray’s grandma Lena (Lizan Mitchell) advising us that Tray’s life is worth far more than the few lines the newspaper will devote to his senseless death in a street shooting. After this strong start, the play moves backward and forward in time to describe Tray and the effects of his death on his grandmother, his beloved little half-sister Devine (Taliyah Whitaker), his long-estranged stepmother Merrell (Sun Mee Chomet) and, to a lesser extent, his friend Junior (Chris Myers). Unfortunately, the play begins to lose its course and ultimately resorts to some manipulative sentimentality. A few things puzzled me. What happened to Tray’s biological mother? Was the choice of an Asian-American actor to play Merrell an indication of his stepmother’s ethnicity or just a bit of nontraditional casting? (I concluded it was the former.) Some of the plot points stretched my willingness to suspend disbelief too far. Merrell’s reappearance, first as a tutor for Tray’s college admission essay, and then as a job applicant at the Starbuck’s where he is a barista, seemed too pat. The play’s sentimental but nonetheless wrenching ending reinforces our sense of tragic, senseless loss. The production is first-rate: the cast is very good, the set by Andromache Chalfant is excellent, the costumes by Dede M. Ayite are apt, the lighting by Jijoun Chang and the sound design by Asa Wember are effective and the direction by Patricia McGregor is assured. Would that the playwright had been able to maintain the high level of the play’s opening scene. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes, no intermission.