Dominique Morisseau is from Detroit, and she wants to be to her hometown what August Wilson was to Pittsburgh — the theater world’s teller of tales of the great city. However, her most recent play, Sunset Baby, is set in New York City, and she seems ill at ease. That’s not necessarily out of tune with the story she’s telling. She is writing about a family that has been transplanted to the Big Apple from the West Coast. Still, as I watched Jubilee Theatre’s production of this contemporary work, I couldn’t feel that that uneasiness was holding the show back.
The play begins with Nina Shakur (Whitney Coulter) opening the door to her apartment expecting to find her boyfriend Damon (Christopher Dontrell Piper). Instead, it is her father Kenyatta Shakur (William Earl Ray), a well-known 1980s black-power activist who has been released from prison after robbing an armored truck to fund Third World democracy efforts. Nina is quick to point out to him that the revolution he was trying to start hasn’t come to much. Her mother died a heroin addict, and Nina herself is a criminal who works with Damon to rob other criminals.
Under Vickie Washington’s workmanlike direction, the play has only one set, the dingy apartment where Nina lives and Damon sometimes stays. The scenes are broken up by interludes where Kenyatta sits in the wing in front of a camera and records video messages (projected on a screen at center stage) to his daughter. Most of the background music in the play is by Nina Simone, after whom Nina is named and whose musical legacy prompts more than one family discussion.
The story hinges on the treasure trove that Nina is sitting on, a cache of correspondence between her mom and Kenyatta that would be worth thousands to academics and historians, though Kenyatta is willing to pay for them as well. Morisseau tries, but she can’t invest that bundle of letters with enough dramatic weight to carry the play. The playwright’s rhetoric outmuscles the tension here — the characters here either go off on tangents, stubbornly refuse to get to the point (despite Nina’s exhortations), or hammer home the same point long after it’s made. The latter is especially true during a lengthy standoff at gunpoint, which helps explain why the play loses its zest during the second act.
Coulter does a fine job as Nina, a hurt little girl who armors herself in thigh-highs and a strawberry blonde wig. Yet the spotlight is frequently pilfered by Piper, who puts in an intriguingly complex turn as a self-aware, well-read thug who’s capable of tenderness, but cunning and manipulative, too, as he longs to leave his life of crime behind for a beach in Brazil. When Damon learns about the letters’ existence, the question of whether he’s willing to either betray Nina or play Kenyatta becomes a compelling game. Simmering with impatience and discontent, Piper gives the proceedings a jolt every time he’s on stage.
Less happy is the performance by Ray in the play’s most difficult role. He has the general demeanor down of a stiff, militant intellectual who keeps his guard up at all times because his brothers-in-arms betrayed him in the past. Yet he never quite finds his way into Kenyatta’s deep, inchoate desire to connect with the one person left who matters to him. At heart, Sunset Baby is the tragedy of a man who sacrificed his family for his cause and mistakenly thought he knew what he was giving up. Despite some honest efforts, Jubilee Theatre’s production never quite brings that pain to life.
[box_info]Sunset Baby
Thru Jun 28 at Jubilee Theatre, 506 Main St, FW. $18-22.
817-338-4411.[/box_info]
