This play by Jackie Sibblies Drury is tricky to write about. It arrives from New York garlanded with praise including the Pulitzer prize for drama. We are asked to reveal as little as possible about its endless surprises. And, since one of its key ideas is that black experience is expected to conform to white perceptions, any reservations I have would seem to reinforce its thesis. Yet, while I loved its intellectual cleverness and theatrical daring, I found myself wanting to argue with it.
It starts conventionally enough. We are in a well-off African American household, sumptuously designed by Tom Scutt, preparing for a grandma’s birthday. Beverly, the hostess, is in a state of high anxiety which her husband, Dayton, vainly seeks to calm. But Beverly’s sister, Jasmine, arrives and exudes a cattily stylish superiority. Things only get worse when Jasmine intrudes in a debate about whether Beverly’s daughter, Keisha, should be allowed a gap year, and when grandma’s birthday cake goes up in flames.
This is the kind of situation – the family reunion that goes wrong – that we’ve seen countless times before. But that is part of Sibblies Drury’s point: a staple of the traditional white sitcom is being applied to a black family as if the experiences were interchangeable. Sibblies Drury then goes much further in ways impossible to describe without ruining the experience. I will only say I found echoes of Caryl Churchill’s Blue Heart in the way the first scene is mimetically replayed. But, while the actors mouth the words, we hear an overlaid audio-track in which four white people debate which race they would opt for if they had a choice.
Sibblies Drury develops this idea in stimulating ways. If the play has an obvious forebear, it is Branden Jacob-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (also premiered at New York’s Soho Rep), which subverted the idea that racial identity can be defined by easy labels. But Sibblies Drury’s argument about the unchallenged autonomy of white narratives comes at an odd time. Hamilton, a hit on two continents, presents a slice of American history from people of colour’s perspective. A current New York musical, Soft Power, hilariously reverses The King and I to show Hillary Clinton being re-educated by an Asian. And Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide, written in 1976 and lately revived, offers a moving, unfiltered portrait of black experience.
Difficult as it is for me to question Sibblies Drury’s argument – about what an American critic called “the warping power of the white gaze” – I feel her play takes little account of shifts in contemporary culture. It is, however, brilliantly directed by Nadia Latif and buoyantly performed. Nicola Hughes (Beverly), Rhashan Stone (Dayton), Naana Agyei-Ampadu (Jasmine) and Donna Banya (Keisha) excellently show an affluent family in the process of disintegration. Esther Smith, Julie Dray, Matthew Needham and David Dawson represent a white society that seeks to interpret or appropriate them.
This is definitely a play to see, if you can, and to argue about afterwards. It will also induce unease in white, middle-class liberals. Whether it will shock you into a new awareness – at a time when there is, especially in theatre, a hunger for inclusiveness – is something only you can decide.
• At the Young Vic, London, until 18 January.
