| Author |
Barfield, Tanya |
| Year |
2006 |
| Publisher |
: Dramatists Play Service |
| Number of pages |
72 |
| ISBN |
9780822222095 |
| Keywords |
|
Abstract
NY Times Theatre:An African-American math professor struggles with an equation he
cannot solve to his satisfaction in “Blue Door,” a small but densely packed new play
by Tanya Barfield that opened last night at Playwrights Horizons in the Peter Jay
Sharp Theater. The challenge he faces isn’t professional but personal. Smart, successful
and self-consciously erudite, he is forced to confront the riddle of his identity
when his white wife announces she is leaving him, essentially because he won’t participate
in the Million Man March on Washington.Readers’ OpinionsForum: TheaterHow’s that?
“Also because of housework,” she adds as the door slams.Lewis, the mathematician,
played by Reg E. Cathey with a stiff-backed gravity that gradually softens as his
character does, is left alone to confront an empty house and a mind filled with turmoil
at the sudden implosion of a 25-year marriage. The dirty dishes are a red herring
of course. And the Million Man March is just a symbol.What Lewis really must grapple
with is the accusation that he has cut himself off from his personal and his cultural
history in an effort to escape the pain of the past. He has smoothly assimilated into
white culture, where the harrowing ghosts of history can be more easily ignored because
no one else in the room sees them. Now, in the silence of his solitude, they come
back to haunt him during a long, sleepless night. Four generations of ancestors and
relatives — all portrayed by a magnetic young actor named André Holland — take up
residence in Lewis’s grieving psyche and give him a good talking-to.Ms. Barfield’s
thoughtful play deals with themes central to the work of August Wilson, but the dramatic
format she has chosen for “Blue Door” is strikingly different. Mr. Wilson examined
the African-American experience through a wide-angle lens, filling his work with dozens
of characters struggling to come to terms with the troublesome legacies of the past.
Ms. Barfield concentrates on the same battle but locates it in a single man’s soul.Not
that Lewis is particularly willing to take up arms against his demons. For much of
the play, directed with care by Leigh Silverman, he sits in the shadows, a quieted
consciousness, as other men’s stories take center stage in his mind’s eye. Only when
his brother, Rex, struts into view and accuses Lewis of “turning your back on everything
that make you black” is he roused to verbal combat.“If I’m turning my back, I’m turning
it on the excuse of failure, oppression,” he retorts. “Oppression is not an excuse.”But
the belligerent Rex, who failed in all the ways Lewis succeeded and died of a drug
overdose, insists that Lewis acknowledge that oppression and failure are only half
of the family history. Lewis’s success rests on the incremental victories of his forebears,
whose suffering and endurance must be accepted and honored.A century of African-American
experience is embodied in Simon, the brothers’ great-grandfather, who was born into
slavery but learned to read and write (from a man who also sexually abused him); Simon’s
son Jesse, who spent more than a decade in prison for the crime of trespassing in
a white church and was brutally murdered by a lynch mob for trying to vote; and Lewis
and Rex’s father, Charley, who witnessed his own father’s death, led a disappointed
life and became an abusive alcoholic.The concentration of violence and exploitation
related in these histories is a little high for a 95-minute play. Ms. Barfield comes
dangerously close to overloading “Blue Door” with woeful incident, turning it into
a four-man march through the most grotesque excesses of American racism. (The title,
incidentally, refers to the belief of the brothers’ great-great-grandmother that painting
a doorframe blue could ward off evil spirits.)But Mr. Holland’s impassioned performance
keeps his monologues from becoming litanies of horror. With a few strokes he brings
each of these characters (and some others) to distinct theatrical life, and infuses
even the darkest passage with flickers of humor and a warm-blooded humanity. These
briefly
