Fonseca Theatre's 'Mud Row' a generational family drama that generates too much for its package
My recent acquaintance with the work of Dominique Morisseau took on seminar status with the opening night Friday of her "Mud Row" at Fonseca Theatre. Another of her plays, "Skeleton Crew," is halfway through its run at Phoenix Theatre in a Summit Performance Indianapolis production. For a short time, then, local theater-lovers get a chance to compare two Morisseau plays and two ways of doing them.
I got the uneasy feeling while thinking about the excellent "Skeleton Crew" that Morisseau may have a tendency to overload her characters, shining lights on racism through them. Directorial control is essential in maintaining forward momentum and making sure so much information out of the characters' mouths feels essential in portraying talkative people rather than creative self-indulgence or padding. "Skeleton Crew" was subject to such control, fortunately.
My second "seminar" session was more revealing about how thoroughly Morisseau applies her insights about the status of Black America to the characters she creates. "Mud Row" is clearly more challenging as far as reining in the playwright's excesses is concerned. In both plays, Morrisseau wants to use her characters as prisms through which major social issues involving race can be refracted across a full spectrum. In "Skeleton Crew," the issues center on the declining Detroit auto industry. In "Mud Row," the historical threats to cohesiveness in the Black family are wrapped up in housing discrimination and the persistent difficulty of passing on a legacy of even modest wealth and real property.
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| Frances is shocked at evidence Elsie has been abused. |
It takes a while to register the different time strata of these two sisters' story and that of a pair of sisters two generations away with far different attitudes about the disposition of Grandma Elsie's house not long after the matriarch's death. Though much of the use of an upstage screen, including recurrent montages of family photos, is good, slide projections that include views of old Indiana Avenue are misleading. It's obvious this production wants to pick up on Morisseau's determination to link the individuals she presents with national social issues. The play's setting is West Chester, Pennsylvania, a prosperous small city near Philadelphia in which Blacks are restricted to a neighborhood known as Mud Row.
The house poses a question of inheritance for the successful Regine (Aniqua Sha'Cole), but it's also the
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| Regine and Davin are used to building upon success. |
place that the drug addict Toshi (Anila Akua) and her boyfriend, Tyriek (Brenton Anderson), have appropriated as squatters. She has put aside her rootless ways, she says, and sees the place as a way to focus her life securely. Urban development has posed the question of whether the house can be saved at all. A parking lot is planned for the location, once appraisal is out of the way. Regine and her husband, Davin (Marcus Elliott), enter the home to form their own assessment of its condition and value. They notice signs that someone else is living there. The suspense and even comic possibilities of the two couples' use of the place are touched on, but could have been exploited more fully.
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| Toshi and Tyriek have issues to settle about stability. |
The cast works hard to embody all facets of six characters in conflict with each other and with the system that has determined so much of their lives. I'm sure credit must go to director Josiah McCruiston for the full-on commitment he has elicited from the cast in putting the characters across. I don't intend to label the performance I saw with a new title: Six characters in search of a director. They clearly had guidance insofar as their investment in their verbally rich, varied roles is concerned.
But the directorial hand could have been firmer and more resourceful. Allowing for the health-conscious disturbance of the stage illusion by face microphones and clear mouth shields, there was too much dialogue delivered at fever pitch and at unvarying close quarters. The confrontation of Regine with Toshi early in the second act was relentlessly toe-to-toe; their second long conversation was much more flexibly handled. The near-fatal tussle between Tyriek and Davin near the end of the first act had the right close-quarters mastery, though.
When you have such an appropriate set — Bernie Killian's design was sadly uncredited in the printed program — use it for more than places to stand amid its furniture and exit and entry points. Far too many hand gestures pervaded the performances, and more ways ought to have been found to convey vocal intensity without pumping up the volume. On the other hand, soft, tender or reflective dialogue, while welcome and suitable at times, unfortunately ran into problems of intelligibility in part because of those face shields.
What I see as flaws, however, are attached to a script that seems unwieldy, for all its relevance to what the playwright wants to say. It's not for nothing that August Wilson has immortal status in the history of Black American theater, despite his verbosity: his play's narratives and their construction are spellbinding, and he folds his sense of the woes and triumphs of the Black experience into the characters' lives. I've rarely felt that Wilson was spinning his wheels or mounting a soapbox, using the characters as handy workhorses for his message.
In launching its 2022 season, Fonseca Theatre Company has placed this production first to sound the theme of healing. This fractured family is indeed in need of a healing that comes through over the course of "Mud Row." Luckily the difficult convalescence is forcefully presented, but it has a lot of underbrush to clear on its journey. True, some of that tangled vegetation was already there in the text
before McCruiston and his cast got to work. Nonetheless, the show champions that work with spirit and impact.
[Photos by Ankh Productions]
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