Tag: Nancy Medina

Two Trains Running at the Royal and Derngate review ***

Two Trains Running

Royal and Derngate Northampton, 12th September 2019

Another instalment in August Wilson’s Pittsburgh cycle though, four in, the Tourist still has some way to go. Two Trains Running premiered in 1990 and is set in the turbulent 1960s – remember each of the ten play series covers one of the decades of the C20 and all bar one (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) are set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh.

All the action in TTR, well words really, for August Wilson’s plays prize dialogue and character over plot, both their strength and their weakness, takes place in 1969 in the neighbourhood diner owned and run by Memphis Lee (Andrew French). The 1960’s saw the economic decline of the Hill District, once a byword for prosperity and cultural relevance in Black America, accelerate, prompting intervention from the Pittsburgh Urban Development Authority. Vast swathes of the neighbourhood were demolished to be replaced by a white elephant Civic Arena and failed public housing projects. Many residents were displaced and the redevelopment became an object lesson in how not to do “urban renewal“. Memphis’s business has seen better days but now he is holding out for the price he thinks it is worth from the City authorities, not just for the money but also to take a stand for the overlooked and disparaged community. He dreams of returning to his Southern roots from where he and so many others were compelled to escape in earlier, darker, decades. Frankie Bradshaw’s set captures this transition with the beautifully detailed diner sporting a hole in its roof above which is suspended a massive wrecking ball.

Memphis is assisted by cook and waitress Risa (Anita-Joy Uwajeh) who constantly has to push back against her boss’s criticism and the sexist comments and assumptions of the regulars. These include the assured West (Geoff Aymer), the local undertaker whose business is thriving, hustler Wolf (Ray Emmet Brown), who uses the diner’s phone to run a numbers racket, and the stoic Holloway, an unemployed painter and decorator, (Leon Herbert). Most poignant though is Hambone, (the excellent Derek Ezenagu), brought low by his obsession with getting fairly paid by the white butcher customer for work he did twenty years ago. The outside world relentlessly encroaches upon the lives of the company, first when the animated ex-con Sterling (Michael Salami) returns to the Hill looking for work and for Risa, and as the rallies, protesting racial injustice, increase in intensity.

Impossible to fault all the performances or the careful direction of Nancy Medina, who was similarly adept with Dael Orlandersmith’s Yellowman at the Young Vic and, I gather, Inua Ellams’s The Half God of Rainfall at the Kiln. Easy to see why she has won both the Peter Hall Directors Award and the Genesis Future Director Award. The lighting and sound design from other young talents Amy Mae and Ed Lewis was equally accomplished. Which means the somewhat discursive nature of events of stage is down to August Wilson alone. That is not to say that the lyrical dialogue, what and how the characters say, isn’t pitch perfect. Just that there is rather to much of it. Too many layers if you will. This is true of the other plays in the cycle I believe but here the contrast of individual reversals with societal transformation is just a little too carefully wrought.

As a production it matches the high standards previously set by English Touring Theatre. As a play maybe not quite as convincing as the others in the cycle I have seen. Still very keen to see further instalments however and given the resonance of the parts that AW wrote for black actors I expect I won’t be waiting too much longer for just such an opportunity.

Yellowman at the Young Vic review ****

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Yellowman

Young Vic Theatre, 29th November 2017

From what I can see American playwrights don’t like to arse about too much with the play, either in terms of dramatic form or the subject, the family history in one form or another. Why not, given the history of American gifts to the theatrical world, and if that’s what the punters want. From this apparent straightjacket have emerged some cracking plays, from the C20 masters as well as in recent years. It would seem that a recommendation from the journos and academics which make up the Pulitzer judging panel is as good as recommendation as any as to what to see. And that basically is all I had to go on prior to booking Yellowman.

Dael Orlandersmith’s two hander was a Pulitzer finalist from 2002 which tells the story of Eugene and Alma, from childhood into adulthood, from rural South Carolina to New York and back again, through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Most importantly, as the Yellowman of the title, Eugene is tall and light skinned, like his grandfather and mother Thelma, though not his father Robert, whilst Alma is large and dark skinned like her mother Ophelia. The actors play all the male and female characters (including Alton and Wyce, Eugene’s friends), with rapid, though sharply delineated, shifts between these characters.

The relationship between Eugene and Alma moves from simple childhood friendship, through mutual dependence, to teenage love then sex, engagement and pregnancy. This, on its own, would be enough to enjoy given the quality of the writing, but over the 100 minutes or so we get an incisive dissection of “blackness”, beauty, gender, domestic violence, generational division and abuse, inheritance, poverty and class. Very, very occasionally. Ms Orlandersmith’s writing lapses into saccharine cliche, but more often that not, this serves a colouristic purpose and can be forgiven. The deliberate repetition reinforces the deep-rooted identity conflicts that lie at the heart of the play and ensures the six characters as well as the two principals truly come to life.

About from a mottled, mirror floor and some subtle but effective lighting from Nao Nagai, the Clare studio space in the Young Vic had nothing else to work with for the two actors, bar script and audience. So they needed to be good, very good. They were. Christopher Colquhoun, (a long way from Weatherfield), brought an awkwardness and innocence to Eugene which heightened the tensions in key scenes with Alma, his father, Wyce and, latterly, grandfather. Nicola Hughes, if anything, was even more striking, turning Alma into a woman of power and dignity who rises above the self-hate others would have her internalise, and eliciting pity for Ophelia. One of the fiercest performances I have seen this year. I would dearly love to see her in more “straight” drama roles beyond the musicals she is renowned for.

It is easy to see why Yellowman has been so frequently revived since its premiere and why the talented young director Nancy Medina would choose to take it on. Its setting may be specific in terms, of time, place and community, but its insights are universal and the humanity of its love story is palpable. Yet this, if I am honest can be found elsewhere on screen, stage or page. What makes this really, really special for me is Ms Orlandersmith’s gift for dialogue and image. The five sections of the play are distinct by chronology, but is the skill with which the author paints in the detail that made going to see this one of the best decisions I have made this year. And all for £15.