Jackie Sibblies Drury’s 2018 drama “Fairview, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize the following year, is a shape-shifting work that eludes an audience’s assumptions at every turn.
The play is divided into acts that I think of as movements — each distinct segment radically altering our perception of what has come before. The theatergoer who walked out in the middle of the first movement last weekend in the play’s L.A. premiere run at the Matrix Theatre left with a false impression of the work.
This Rogue Machine production, directed by stage and screen veteran Oz Scott, may struggle with the slipperiness of Drury’s writing. The dramatic construction, however, is solid enough to withstand some of the overly broad strokes of the staging.
The play begins in the mode of a Black sitcom, but this is an elaborate ruse for a theatrical dissection of the subjects of race, representation, spectatorship and control. Don’t mistake the play’s opening facade for what is in fact an intricate and multi-layered performance work.
In classic television comedy fashion, we are welcomed into the home of Beverly (Marie-Françoise Theodore), who is in a frenzy preparing a birthday dinner for her mother. Everything has to be perfect, yet nothing seems to be going right.
Dayton (Marco Martínez), her loving husband, would rather get snuggly than be conscripted into her catering army. Her sister, Jasmine (Jasmine Ashanti), a wild card auntie, arrives with wine and a saucily uncooperative attitude. Keisha (iesha m. daniels), an overachieving high school senior, has news that she knows is going to upend her mother.
The elements are in place for a middle class retread of “The Cosby Show.” But something in the presentation seems askew. When I saw the world premiere production at Berkeley Rep (a collaboration with Soho Rep, where the play had its debut), I was tantalized by the way the sitcom was subtly placed in italics.
Sarah Benson’s pitch-perfect direction made the most of Mimi Lien’s perspective-altering living room set, forcing audience members to question the lens through which they were viewing the stage action.
In the play’s second movement, Drury pulls the carpet out from under everyone with a conversation of unseen viewers discussing what it would be like to be another race. This fantasy chat plays out in all its white cluelessness as the sitcom rewinds and repeats on mute.
What in the world is going on? Part of the pleasure of experiencing “Fairview” for the first time is not understanding the rules of the game. Theatergoers have to improvise their own interpretive strategies as the play shifts and shifts again.
Those opinionated voices fantasizing about what it would be like to be Black, Latino or Asian invade the family comedy just at the point where things left off at the end of the first movement, after a series of mishaps causes Beverly to faint.
The grandmother, who has stubbornly remained in her room upstairs, finally makes her grand entrance. But the odd thing is that she’s neither Black nor old. She’s played by Suze (Daisy Tichenor), who was one of the more self-consciously liberal voices reluctantly participating in the sport of racial tourism.
The less scrupulous voices also invade Beverly’s meticulous household like bulls in a suburban china shop. Jimbo (Tyler Gaylord) impersonates Beverly’s late-arriving lawyer brother as though he were a rap star ready to make TMZ headlines. Mack (Michael Guarasci), exuberantly crossing race and gender, plays Keisha’s friend who arrives with a pregnancy test that ushers in a plotline that Keisha feels helpless to reject. And then Bets (Gala Nikolić), a Slavic-sounding grand diva with little regard for American-style identity politics, challenges Suze for the right to play the grandmother — in a far less restrained manner.
I won’t spoil how the play proceeds but it doesn’t so much conclude as combust. Keisha is the only character on stage who doesn’t understand why these strangers are pretending to be family members. She’s also disgusted by the way they’re imposing ludicrous scenarios that don’t have anything to do with the actual identities of her family members.
Drury (“Marys Seacole,” “We Are Proud to Present…”), one of the most innovative American playwrights working today, sets in conceptual, layered motion what it’s like to be in a Black body surrounded at all times by the white gaze. “Fairview” challenges the spectator’s authority to determine meaning. The play subverts itself, never allowing an audience to gain a commanding foothill, even at the end when (suffice it to say) the watchers become the watched.
Anyone who reads “Fairview” will understand the challenge of producing it, but I don’t think I fully appreciated how much stylistic nuance is in play. The problem with Rogue Machine’s production is one of calibration. The sitcom is played not in italics but in neon. (The fault isn’t with the actors, all of whom are excellent, but with the exaggerated tone that has been set for them.)
The voice-over exchange on racial identity is played as obvious parody — the satire screaming its head off in case anyone should question the play’s point of view. I’m grateful that Rogue Machine has brought “Fairview” to Los Angeles. But I’m not sure that I would have thought as highly of the play had this been my first experience of it.
“Fairview” is as much a performance work as a play. Subsequent productions are never going to have the same coordination between playwright and theatrical interpreters as the world premiere.
Still, Keisha’s final monologue is devastating in its plea for perceptual equity, and daniels’ performance grounds the play in something urgently human. The heightened nature of Gaylord’s and Nikolić’s performances, off-putting in the voice-over scene, are a blast when the worlds of the play finally merge. And Ashanti’s self-adoring Jasmine steals every scene where she’s front and center, a nonnegotiable requirement of her character.
Mark Mendelson’s scenic design, more elaborate than most Rogue Machine offerings, doesn’t achieve the oblique effect of the original production but sets the stage in vivid detail. The food fight that explodes in the play’s third movement is conducted with comestibles so rubbery they might be part of a clown show. But it’s clear at this point that what we’re watching is meant to be understood as a flagrant simulation.
Drury wants us to question not only our eyes but our paradigms for viewing. And on that score, “Fairview,” even in a somewhat cloudy production, succeeds magnificently.
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