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.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner **

In this stage adaptation of Alan Sillitoe's 1959 story about class in England, now at Atlantic Stage 2, playwright Roy Williams has moved the action to the present and changed the race of the protagonist to black to add an additional level of conflict. This transposition might have worked better if it had been more fully developed. Sheldon Best plays the title character Colin with more stamina than clarity of motivation. The flashbacks that punctuate the play, showing him in short scenes with his parents, best friend, girl and fellow residents of the juvenile facility seemed scatter-shot and did not have cumulative impact. There are several scenes between Colin and Stevens, the social worker who urges him to run in a race against a local private school. Granted that Stevens is supposed to be smarmy, in his portrayal by Todd Weeks he comes across as little more than a buffoon given to bombastic declamation. A general lack of nuance hurts the production. In the strong supporting cast, Zainab Jah, Joshua E. Nelson and Jasmine Cephas Jones stood out. The spare set by Lauren Helpern and projections by Pauline Lu and Paul Piekarz are effective, as are the costumes by Bobby Frederick Tilley II. Leah C. Gardiner directed.  I really wanted to like the play, but even at 80 minutes felt it dragged.