Death, life, conflict, love, family, legacy, ancestry and memory. These are but some of the central themes of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s provocative, disjointed and overstuffed War. It is most likely about the mystery of family and legacy, but then again: how do you explain the apes?
The play begins conventionally enough, in a Washington hospital room, where a woman, Roberta (Charlayne Woodard), lies in a bed, tubes in her arms, an oxygen mask strapped to her face. Roberta has suffered a severe stroke and her two adult children, Joanne (Rachel Nicks), the mother of a toddler, and Tate (Chris Myers), a political consultant, have arrived to tend to her. Both are surprised by the presence of a strange woman in the room, who won’t or can’t respond to their questions. They are even more perplexed when the woman, Elfriede (Michele Shay), claims to be their mother’s sister.
Then the scene changes. (Mimi Lien created the evocative and sculptural set design.) Roberta is out of bed, impelled forward into a misty realm. The other characters have seemingly transformed into apes, including one who calls himself Alpha (Lance Coadie Williams) and communicates with Roberta via shrugs and grunts. Is this some sort of zoological limbo? Are the apes representative of a primal, unacculturated self? Or are they an embodiment of slurs directed at people of African descent? Or are they just simply apes?
That the play, under Lileana Blain-Cruz’s direction, never entirely answers these questions is inevitable, if occasionally irritating. In previous works, Jacobs-Jenkins has sometimes introduced enjoyably vexed circumstances – the arrival of a family of minstrels, the discovery of a trove of lynching artifacts – without fully exploring, realizing, or solving the scenarios he establishes. Some of this is thematic; some of it is practical. Complicated situations resist resolution and two acts isn’t nearly enough time to wrap up centuries of violence and oppression. So expect a series of knots rather than a frilly bow.
This is very much the case in War, in which compelling ideas and events are introduced, then left dangling. Yet this is preferable to the handful of on-the-nose speeches in which Jacobs-Jenkins tries to explain notions or metaphors too explicitly. (“You feel humiliated, exposed, caged like some... some animal”; “Why is everything some war in this family?”) And the play is not best served by an ending that suggests, somewhat too patly, that we are all interconnected – cousins, lovers, animals, too – dismissing the aggressiveness of the title and the preceding scenes.
But Jacobs-Jenkins is a truly exciting playwright, capable of writing in an archly naturalistic mode and in ways that reach beyond realism, searching out the potentialities of theater as a symbolic space. However inchoate or unresolved War may seem, this is an artist who doesn’t monkey around.
