Tweet
By BEN BRANTLEY
People do what they need to do in “Sunset Baby,” Dominique Morisseau’s smart and bracing new play about two generations of urban outlaws struggling to stay afloat in the lower depths. That can mean, among other things, lying to, stealing from, blackmailing and pulling a gun on your nearest and dearest.
The show’s shrewd protagonist, a drug dealer named Nina (DeWanda Wise), sums up her boyfriend’s sex appeal in three syllables: “Survivor.” Love, you’ll learn, is a word she tries to stay away from.
“Sunset Baby,” which runs through Dec. 8 at the Bank Street Theater, infuses old-fashioned generic staples with hot new blood. In form, this compellingly acted three-character work, directed with a sure and steady hand by Kamilah Forbes, brings to mind the socially conscious family melodramas of the Great Depression. As in those plays, people face off in searingly articulate confrontations that reveal how an oppressive world has warped them.
The central plot pivot here reaches back even further, to the 19th century. At the center of “Sunset Baby” is a cache of letters, written by a dead woman, that a whole lot of people want to get their hands on. Letters, really, in the age of email? How Henry James. And those letters, in turn, become a means of considering — à la Ibsen — how the sins of parents are visited upon children, in this case when a long-absent father re-enters his daughter’s life.
Yet in performance, there’s nothing musty about “Sunset Baby,” a production of the Labyrinth Theater Company. The show’s conventional story functions as a stress test for the people who act it out, illuminating their strengths and weaknesses as moral beings and, yes, survivors. During this process, each of them is seen with a remarkably clear gaze that avoids both easy cynicism and easy sentimentality.
The characters themselves might to be said to share this point of view. Listen to Damon (a sensational Harvey Gardner Moore), Nina’s lover and partner in crime, complaining about the mother of his 7-year-old son. She is always, he says, “making me out to be the bad guy, when I’m only half-bad.”
That kind of self-awareness is shared by all the play’s inhabitants. They even take apart and weigh the words they use to describe themselves and one another. (Damon does a marvelous semantic riff on “bitch” as a compliment and an insult.) But knowing why they do what they do — and probably where they’re going to end up — isn’t necessarily redemptive. It’s not consciousness that’s going to save anyone here. It’s toughness.
I don’t think it’s a spoiler to reveal that, as is often the case, it’s the woman who’s the toughest of them all. Nina has grown a hard, nigh-impenetrable shell since her mother, Ashanti X, died, leaving a sheaf of unmailed love letters written to a man in prison.
That would be Kenyatta (John Earl Jelks, excellent), Nina’s father and a fabled leader of a black-power underground movement several decades earlier. (He was incarcerated for robbing an armored truck.) Kenyatta has come to Nina’s shabby, sooty New York apartment (designed with harsh photo realism by Lee Savage) to ask for those letters and to see what’s become of his only child.
Nina, who is wearing a whore’s wig, war paint and killer heels, puts her father in the picture bluntly and quickly: I sell drugs and rob my own people, she says, and my mother died an addict. And now here’s daddy “coming back here to be sentimental.” She concludes with a withering epitaph: “Ain’t nothin’ sentimental about a dead revolution.”
She is no more sentimental, it seems, about being Bonnie to Damon’s Clyde. He, on the other hand, is growing dangerously soft, though he can still cast a web of menace around Nina when he wants to. “Say you need me,” he says quietly, his arm wrapped possessively over her slender neck. “Say you love me.”
Nina obliges, but when she does, she sounds like a robot. Ms. Wise, a beauty, makes us see and feel just how ugly Nina is at such moments. She also insists that we understand why Nina behaves that way. Despite the references to gangland killings and robberies, there’s very little of what a movie director would call action in “Sunset Baby.” The play unfolds as a series of one-on-one dialogues and, from Kenyatta, poetic monologues delivered to a camcorder. But there’s such vibrancy in this talk that the show never feels static.
Without ever sounding merely expositional, on the one hand, or dialectical, on the other, the conversation covers vast acres of social and political ground. Among the subjects: the parallels between criminal acts in the name of revolutionary change and plain old street crime; the changing and unchanging face of paternal absenteeism; and the toll on trust — and the possibility of love — taken by a culture of survival.
“You talk a lot,” Kenyatta says to Damon. They all do. But this is talk that’s not only dynamic; it’s also dynamite, and it explodes when you least expect it. The best dialogue of all is given to Mr. Moore, who finds the very rhythms of a downhill life in Damon’s seductive cadences.
Seeing Nina after she’s had a rattling first encounter with her father, Damon bristles at the idea that someone else could get under her skin: “I’m the only one supposed to know that code. I’m the only one supposed to have the key to unlock all that attitude.”
That’s the key that Ms. Morisseau holds, regarding all three of her characters. And, yes, she knows the code for getting under our skins, too.
Sunset Baby
By Dominique Morisseau; directed by Kamilah Forbes; sets by Lee Savage; costumes by Esosa; lighting by Jen Schriever; sound by Amatus-sami Karim Ali; projections by Kate Freer; production manager, Peter L. Smith; stage manager, Stacy Waring. Presented by Labyrinth Theater Company, Mimi O’Donnell, artistic director; Danny Feldman, managing director. At the Bank Street Theater, 155 Bank Street, West Village, 212-513-1080, labtheater.org. Through Dec. 8. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
WITH: John Earl Jelks (Kenyatta), Harvey Gardner Moore (Damon) and DeWanda Wise (Nina).
People do what they need to do in “Sunset Baby,” Dominique Morisseau’s smart and bracing new play about two generations of urban outlaws struggling to stay afloat in the lower depths. That can mean, among other things, lying to, stealing from, blackmailing and pulling a gun on your nearest and dearest.
The show’s shrewd protagonist, a drug dealer named Nina (DeWanda Wise), sums up her boyfriend’s sex appeal in three syllables: “Survivor.” Love, you’ll learn, is a word she tries to stay away from.
“Sunset Baby,” which runs through Dec. 8 at the Bank Street Theater, infuses old-fashioned generic staples with hot new blood. In form, this compellingly acted three-character work, directed with a sure and steady hand by Kamilah Forbes, brings to mind the socially conscious family melodramas of the Great Depression. As in those plays, people face off in searingly articulate confrontations that reveal how an oppressive world has warped them.
The central plot pivot here reaches back even further, to the 19th century. At the center of “Sunset Baby” is a cache of letters, written by a dead woman, that a whole lot of people want to get their hands on. Letters, really, in the age of email? How Henry James. And those letters, in turn, become a means of considering — à la Ibsen — how the sins of parents are visited upon children, in this case when a long-absent father re-enters his daughter’s life.
Yet in performance, there’s nothing musty about “Sunset Baby,” a production of the Labyrinth Theater Company. The show’s conventional story functions as a stress test for the people who act it out, illuminating their strengths and weaknesses as moral beings and, yes, survivors. During this process, each of them is seen with a remarkably clear gaze that avoids both easy cynicism and easy sentimentality.
The characters themselves might to be said to share this point of view. Listen to Damon (a sensational Harvey Gardner Moore), Nina’s lover and partner in crime, complaining about the mother of his 7-year-old son. She is always, he says, “making me out to be the bad guy, when I’m only half-bad.”
That kind of self-awareness is shared by all the play’s inhabitants. They even take apart and weigh the words they use to describe themselves and one another. (Damon does a marvelous semantic riff on “bitch” as a compliment and an insult.) But knowing why they do what they do — and probably where they’re going to end up — isn’t necessarily redemptive. It’s not consciousness that’s going to save anyone here. It’s toughness.
I don’t think it’s a spoiler to reveal that, as is often the case, it’s the woman who’s the toughest of them all. Nina has grown a hard, nigh-impenetrable shell since her mother, Ashanti X, died, leaving a sheaf of unmailed love letters written to a man in prison.
That would be Kenyatta (John Earl Jelks, excellent), Nina’s father and a fabled leader of a black-power underground movement several decades earlier. (He was incarcerated for robbing an armored truck.) Kenyatta has come to Nina’s shabby, sooty New York apartment (designed with harsh photo realism by Lee Savage) to ask for those letters and to see what’s become of his only child.
Nina, who is wearing a whore’s wig, war paint and killer heels, puts her father in the picture bluntly and quickly: I sell drugs and rob my own people, she says, and my mother died an addict. And now here’s daddy “coming back here to be sentimental.” She concludes with a withering epitaph: “Ain’t nothin’ sentimental about a dead revolution.”
She is no more sentimental, it seems, about being Bonnie to Damon’s Clyde. He, on the other hand, is growing dangerously soft, though he can still cast a web of menace around Nina when he wants to. “Say you need me,” he says quietly, his arm wrapped possessively over her slender neck. “Say you love me.”
Nina obliges, but when she does, she sounds like a robot. Ms. Wise, a beauty, makes us see and feel just how ugly Nina is at such moments. She also insists that we understand why Nina behaves that way. Despite the references to gangland killings and robberies, there’s very little of what a movie director would call action in “Sunset Baby.” The play unfolds as a series of one-on-one dialogues and, from Kenyatta, poetic monologues delivered to a camcorder. But there’s such vibrancy in this talk that the show never feels static.
Without ever sounding merely expositional, on the one hand, or dialectical, on the other, the conversation covers vast acres of social and political ground. Among the subjects: the parallels between criminal acts in the name of revolutionary change and plain old street crime; the changing and unchanging face of paternal absenteeism; and the toll on trust — and the possibility of love — taken by a culture of survival.
“You talk a lot,” Kenyatta says to Damon. They all do. But this is talk that’s not only dynamic; it’s also dynamite, and it explodes when you least expect it. The best dialogue of all is given to Mr. Moore, who finds the very rhythms of a downhill life in Damon’s seductive cadences.
Seeing Nina after she’s had a rattling first encounter with her father, Damon bristles at the idea that someone else could get under her skin: “I’m the only one supposed to know that code. I’m the only one supposed to have the key to unlock all that attitude.”
That’s the key that Ms. Morisseau holds, regarding all three of her characters. And, yes, she knows the code for getting under our skins, too.
Sunset Baby
By Dominique Morisseau; directed by Kamilah Forbes; sets by Lee Savage; costumes by Esosa; lighting by Jen Schriever; sound by Amatus-sami Karim Ali; projections by Kate Freer; production manager, Peter L. Smith; stage manager, Stacy Waring. Presented by Labyrinth Theater Company, Mimi O’Donnell, artistic director; Danny Feldman, managing director. At the Bank Street Theater, 155 Bank Street, West Village, 212-513-1080, labtheater.org. Through Dec. 8. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
WITH: John Earl Jelks (Kenyatta), Harvey Gardner Moore (Damon) and DeWanda Wise (Nina).