Out, written by FELISPEAKS
Pound Cake, written by Brittany Fisher
Security Watch, written by TyLie Shider
Immanentize the Eschaton, written by Garrett Turner
Just One Good Day, written by Jeanette W. Hill
…But Not Forgotten, written by D.L. Patrick
Directed by Kimille Howard
195 E. 3rd St., Manhattan, NYC
January 23-February 2, 2025
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Anita Welch-Smith and LaDonna Burns in Out. Photo by Dante Crichlow
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The time has arrived once again for one of our most anticipated annual theatrical events, The Fire This Time Festival Ten-Minute Play Program. In its 16th season, the Obie Award-winning Fire This Time Festival, which provides a platform for playwrights of African and African-American descent, has adopted the theme of "Taking Space" and has put the Ten-Minute part of things into quotation marks, loosening the time restriction to allow each of the program's six individual plays to take the space that it needs. In its second year at wild project, The Fire This Time Festival also expands the role of musical performance in the program: where the previous year's show opened with a pair of songs from a musical guest, this year's interaction features musical interludes in the transitions between (and thematically relevant to) each play and into the intermission, each sung by a member of the cast and all arranged and accompanied by Dwight Howard. These interludes, from Stevie Wonder's “Isn’t She Lovely,” performed by LaDonna Burns, to Langston Huhghes's “I, too, Sing America,” set to music by Margaret Bonds and performed by Rebecca L. Hargrove, enrich a captivating slate of plays that foregrounds women characters in emotionally honest examinations of the burdens and joys of memory and of struggles to define–and achieve–a good life.
Out, from Nigerian-Irish artist FELISPEAKS, opens the program with a pair of Nigerian women waiting for a bus on a rainy day in Dublin City. The women are Arike (LaDonna Burns) and her daughter Angel (Anita Welch-Smith), and the sight of a man in sparkles and animal print prompts a discussion between them about queerness. Angel, who is a lesbian, helps Arike to understand the components of "LGBTQIA+," and Arike helps Angel to understand why she never reacted to Angel's coming out with the rejection that Angel still fears must be coming. The comedy and camaraderie, however, are upended when the topic of Angel's deceased father is raised, a sore subject for the pair, and particularly for Angel, whose fury over his reaction to her coming out, very different from her mother's, still burns hotly. This turn into conflict, movingly realized by Burns and Welch-Smith, will require Angel to revise how she has remembered and understood her past, and, consequently, how she and Arike live their present.
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Anita Welch-Smith and LaDonna Burns in Out. Photo by Dante Crichlow |
Memories and their power, for good and ill, are the explicit focus of the next play, Virginia-based Brittany Fisher's Pound Cake, which introduces a touch of speculative fiction into its 1930s setting. A man named Angel (William Watkins) sits in a chair in what the signs projected behind him identify as the "Colored Waiting Room" for "Brain Evaluations" and is shortly joined by a young woman (and historical personage) named Billie (Anita Welch-Smith, who gives a formidable performance of "Strange Fruit" in the subsequent interlude). Both hope to undergo one of the experimental surgeries being performed at the location, but while Billie wants her memories erased–the trauma of, as she puts it, walking through a white world as a target–Angel, who has plenty of his own past trauma, wants something like the opposite, having only unpredictable and fragmentary access to his memories since surviving a violent incident. Billie asserts that all she needs in life is to be able to sing, but Angel makes the case both that her singing could take on a greater purpose and, using a clever metaphor drawn from his deceased wife's pound cake recipe–the only thing he can still consistently recall–that a life that retains only the good parts is not much of a life at all. Watkins expertly balances Angel's charming optimism and deep sadness as he tries to win Billie, the excavation of whose own pain Welch-Smith imbues with powerful presence, to his way of thinking.
Security Watch, from Minnesota's TyLie Shider, the inaugural playwright in residence at ArtYard, takes us back to the present and to a bedroom in an apartment overlooking a city. The white world here, specifically that of academia, may not be physically violent, as it is for Angel and Billie, but, at least according to Hagar (Rebecca L. Hargrove), the pregnant wife of almost-tenured professor Abram (Danté Jeanfelix), continues to target Black people. This standout play sees the couple preparing for a party at which Abram plans to politick, in his view, to seal the deal regarding his overdue tenure. For Hagar, who works in theater, politicking is less accurate a description than is "tap dancing" for something he had already more than earned. Despite this disagreement, the couple displays their obvious warmth and love. Again, it is the remembrance of past grief that causes the real problem when Hagar offers Abram a gift that is also a challenge to move on from his past and to focus on their present and future together. Abram proves surprisingly resistant, even to the idea that there is a "more" in their lives to want, much less aim for, and Hargrove and Jeanfelix, superb throughout, create a palpable feeling of the free-floating tensions and simmering resentment of a good evening poisoned by an unexpected fight, and Security Watch gives us something more, and more authentic, than an easy reconciliation before its end.
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Anita Welch-Smith and William Watkins in Pound Cake. Photo by Dante Crichlow |
The question of people's, and particularly Black people's, expectations for their lives also animates Alabama native Garrett Turner's
Immanentize the Eschaton, set in the breakroom of a catalytic converter factory in Huntsville. In the play's (very funny) opening, working class laborer Thomas (William Watkins) waxes eloquent to his coworkers Teyana (Rebecca L. Hargrove) and Justin (Danté Jeanfelix) on his belief that one must act like the rich to become rich and on what his life as a rich man will be like, asserting that Black people are owed a luxurious life in return for centuries of being stolen from. The new girl, Constance (Anita Welch-Smith), however, brings Thomas's fantasizing up short with a crash course on the appropriation of surplus labor and their alienation as workers from the means of production, from one another, and even from the very land upon which they work (in, she points out, prison-like disciplinary conditions) and live. In short, she maintains, they are all still being stolen from, every time they report to work. Teyana is clearly frightened by Constance's ideas, her resistance to wanting more reminiscent in some ways of Abram's as she counters that they need to keep their heads down and not make waves because the world is just the way it is. But will any of the others be convinced? Revolutionary change can only, after all, be wrought together, as the play's emblematic closing visual image of solidarity reinforces.
Jeanette W. Hill's poignant
Just One Good Day centers a different kind of labor. Sonya (LaDonna Burns) has been taking care of her husband Greg (William Watkins), who has dementia and Parkinson's, for several years, and as the play begins, a doctor tells her via phone that the latest results indicate that Greg's condition will continue to deteriorate (institutional authorities here, as in the final play of the program, are not much help). Making Sonya's care more difficult are Greg's outbursts of anger and paranoia, part of an exceptional performance by Watkins and familiar to anyone who has cared for someone afflicted by dementia. Another challenge is Greg's assertion that they would both be better off were he to die, but ranged against his pessimism is Sonya's steadfast love and her and Greg's surviving shared memories, as displayed in one touching sequence between the two. In the end, Sonya's view of life is not too different from Angel's in
Pound Cake.
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William Watkins and Anita Welch-Smith in Pound Cake. Photo by Dante Crichlow |
The final play of the program, native Detroiter D.L. Patrick's
…But Not Forgotten, might be described as a kind of decade-spanning ghost story. Inspired by the real-life case of Black teen Sandra Young, the play alternates between the points of view of sisters Sandra (Rebecca L. Hargrove) and Sophie (Anita Welch Smith), each of whom asks early in the play where her sister is. The play quickly hints through some of Sandra's comments that something bad happened to her when she went missing from an Oregon beach in 1970. Even when unidentified remains are found on the island from which Sandra vanished, the police do not give Sophie any closure, and Sophie grows older, enough to eventually be played by a second actor (LaDonna Burns, whose climactic outpouring of Sophie's long-held grief is a piercing moment in the production), and Sandra endures a kind of absolute loneliness. The older Sophie notes that her sister was not the right kind of person for police and media attention, something as true now as in 1970. Remembering, though, including across generations, possesses the potential to be more powerful than even the disregard of white-dominated institutions.
…But Not Forgotten supplies a haunting and beautiful ending to another fantastic group of short plays at The Fire This Time Festival. Vividly embodied by an excellent cast, the characters in these selections may often feel borne down by the weight of the past, but they also often display the strength and resilience to imagine ways forward and to bring others with them. As an image for our times, it could hardly be more apt.
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
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