The 2019-20 Off-Broadway theater season begins with a quartet of productions exploring African-American identities through a variety of lenses—out-of-the-box deconstruction, autobiographical satire, traditional musical, and Shakespeare. The most original and frightening is Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer-Prize winning Fairview, now at Theater for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn following its run last summer at Soho Rep. This refreshingly different examination of how we perceive race begins conventionally enough, almost like a sitcom.
In Mimi Lien’s well-appointed, blindingly white living-room set, the Frasers, an upper-middle-class African-American family, prepares for the matriarch’s birthday party. Sisters quarrel over dieting, spouses bicker about grocery shopping, mother and daughter clash concerning college plans. All mildly amusing and somewhat routine, except for the occasional reflection on how the family members see themselves—foreshadowing the play’s main theme of identity.
The comic action reaches a climax with the hostess fainting due to a cake burning in the oven and the lights black out. Then things takes a decidedly bizarre and scary turn. The play begins again with the cast silently replaying the first act over the voices of four unseen white observers commenting on the proceedings and discussing the topic “If you could be any other race, which one would you choose?” At the performance attended, you could actually feel the audience grow increasingly uncomfortable as the disembodied white speakers spewed insensitive racial assumptions and stereotypes. To avoid spoilers, what happens next will not be revealed, but suffice it to say Sibblies Drury brilliantly turns theatrical convention inside out in a series of coups de theatre inventively staged by Sarah Benson and performed with double-edged precision by a cast playing both the cliched comedy and their awareness of being watched. Mayaa Boateng is particularly impressive as the daughter Keisha who steps outside this looking-glass world and into a new world of self-reflection.
