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In jeans and tennis shoes, her hair pulled back to showcase her exhausted and worried face, Mrs. Washington hides no glamor of her seven seasons as political fixer Olivia Pope in "Scandal". She also does not have the finesse and power of Olivia. . All she has is a torrent of words, barely containing her rage: just for slapping a provocative sticker on her son's car, for her husband for leaving them, for the police for marching past its the same and for the story.
Although she speaks through Kendra's specific experience in lines such as "Everything is being undone", Mrs. Washington evokes a larger and longer disaster. No matter how you build your life to avoid it, its performance suggests, the day will come when your black son will be in danger. Maybe all your lures, all your success, will make this day come more surely.
It's a desperate message in a desperate piece, which makes the actual plot almost secondary. Indeed, after the first few minutes, we do not know much about what happened to Jamal before the last curtain. In the meantime, the distribution of micro-doses of calibrated information may seem manipulative. much could be easily revealed earlier.
But Mr Demos-Brown, who is white, is interested in the details of the procedure only as a power-on device. Its real purpose is obviously to change the discourse on the police and young black men from individual cases to universal feelings. It would be difficult for a parent not to be impressed by the terror that Kendra and Scott express in their own way by the disappearance of their child. The title of the play clearly expresses this generalizing intention.
This puts enormous pressure on production to keep personal material at the center of the discussion, lest everything should be controversial. Although I can quibble with certain stagings, which sometimes seem to get stuck behind furniture, this is the best work of director Kenny Leon to date: incisive and dizzying. If the police station established by Derek McLane is a bit big, he fills the Booth nicely and emphasizes Kendra's helplessness. And for the first time, if I remember correctly, a storm recreated on stage looks like a storm rather than a comment.
The cast manages a similar feat of naturalism: these are big but nuanced performances. Mr. Pasquale, for once ideally actor, fully inhabits the entity of a personality to Scott's personality, easy to live for about an inch and chaotic underneath. (Listen, if you can, for his last devastating lines.) Mr. Jordan, naturally insinuated on stage, cleverly uses this ingratiation to suggest a character who has never had to dig deeper. And as a police lieutenant arriving late, Eugene Lee makes a powerful figure of a conspiracy device.
