Coincidental Flashback

After waxing rhapsodic about Kia Corthron's new novel last week, I thought it was a cool coincidence that six years ago today, I saw one of her plays!  Here is a reprint of that review, just for a little flashback fun.  With all the news about Nestle, the water situation in Flint, and other tragedies, her play seems prescient now.  And some of the things I quibble about in this review with regards to the play, I embraced thoroughly in Kia's novel, which you should have bought last week after I talked about it...

3/18/10:  I lucked into a free ticket for a preview of Kia Corthron’s new play, A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick, at Playwrights Horizons last night.  I've read some of Kia's plays before, but I've never seen one.  This is a play jam-packed with ideas and plots and sub-plots—my head was spinning by the end.  I enjoyed myself, but I think maybe it’s a little too jam-packed for one play.  I actually ran into Kia in the ladies room before the show started and she said they put a lot of changes in last night. After seeing the performance, I think I want to go back and see those changes after they've settled in more.

We first meet our lead gent, a smiling young man named Abebe, wandering into a bathroom and continually flushing a toilet.  It’s an odd beginning, but I was completely charmed by his joy and rapture at the sound of running water.  Once the other characters began yelling at him for wasting water, the central debate was underway.

The main plot of the play deals with this young African student who has come to America to learn about water conservation so he can return to his village in Nairobi and save it from drought.  He is also very interested in becoming a preacher, so he frequently gives sermons to the ladies he is living with in America.  Right off the bat, we’re given several storylines to follow:  the young African gentleman struggling with his desire to be a preacher vs. his (imagined) responsibility of saving his village, a young girl struggling to be understood by her mother, and a mother struggling to deal with her grief over a loss that is revealed throughout the course of the first act.  We also have a sub-plot about a young white boy who recently lost his entire family in a horrific event and has since become mute, and is befriended by Abebe.  Whew!  That’s in the first fifteen minutes or so! Several other stories make their way into the evening, and for me, it started to become a tad overwhelming.

photo credit: Sara Krulwich

I greatly enjoyed most of the performances--I thought the young man playing Abebe (William Jackson Harper) did a fine job with a very difficult role.  His smiling, optimistic exterior hides a guilt-ridden, unhappy man.  Once those two forces start to collide, it’s quite interesting to watch him struggle.  The dream sequence he has with his adopted brother was very moving.  I also liked Myra Lucretia Taylor, who played Pickle, the woman who takes Abebe into her home, treating him like a son, while he lives in America.  I think she’s saddled with some very difficult business, especially at the end of the first act, but she pulls it off very well.  She was also quite charming in the second act with a character trait that was hinted at in the first act coming to the fore.  I wasn’t as enamored of the girl playing the daughter or the boy playing her boyfriend, but I think it’s because they were more devices than characters.  The boyfriend, especially, only seemed to be there to make a very specific political point late in the play.  Since I couldn’t really make an emotional investment in him, I didn’t find him as interesting.  But you know me, I can always find things to quibble about, especially in plays that intrigue me.

Chay Yew is the director and he’s done some really interesting visual things with the production—the end of each act become these amazing flights of fancy that come from nowhere but just kinda knock you back with their power.  The playwright has written about very interesting and necessary topics—water conservation and how water has become a commodity instead of a right.  There are some compelling ideas in it and stuff that I had no idea about beforehand.  I enjoyed the intellectual debates and am actually really interested in learning more.  I also basically liked the characters and how they were constructed; their dialogue felt authentic to me.  But the sheer number of storylines made it hard for me to really latch on, ultimately.  I think I understand what she was trying to do—make these characters real people by giving them all something to overcome, then we’ll become invested in them and then invested in the major issue at hand, but there were SO many things to overcome and dissect that it became a little unwieldy by the end.  I guess I feel if she just cut out at least one of the subplots, things would move a little more easily.  But then that would make it my play instead of hers, I guess.  There’s a lot of speechifying going on (the characters have a habit of speaking in monologue-form rather than in dialogue), underlining the political points, that I could do without, though, to be honest, they do make the fantastical bits at the end of each act stand out even more. So maybe I should just shut up.

Of course, now this review is rather like the play.  Maybe a little too much.  Oop.  But I do give the play a thumbs up.  It’s about ideas and you know how I like a play about ideas. I’ll just give the caveat that there is maybe such a thing as ‘too many ideas.’   But I'll be first in line to see what Kia brings us next...