FLYIN' WEST by Pearl Cleage. Orange Tree Theatre

London

FLYIN’ WEST
by Pearl Cleage

Orange Tree, Richmond To 29 September 2001
Runs 2hr 30min One interval

TICKETS 020 8940 3633
Review Vera Lustig 17 September

Triumphs, struggles and dilemmas of African American women in 1890s Kansas evoked with wit and compassion.
The opening is inauspicious: too loud for the Orange Tree’s intimacy. But once the narrative takes hold, self-conscious stageyness falls away and the production becomes atmospheric and engrossing.

With the Orange Tree’s characteristically cunning use of its space (designer: Judy Stedham) and delicate music by the ‘Chopin of the Creoles’ Louis Moreau Gottschalk, ‘Black Mahler’ Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and the slave Blind Tom Bethune, this is a superbly unsentimental evocation of life in rural Kansas at a time of African-American self-determination and female emancipation.

Pearl Cleage is an Atlanta-based writer and Flyin’ West is part of her theatrical exploration of the African-American experience. Avoiding didacticism, the play offers a fascinating insight into a neglected chapter of black ‘herstory’. In Auriol Smith’s production the actors, notably Jax Williams and Karen Bryson, inhabit the play’s world and, with their self-awareness and humanity, draw us into it.

The play looks back without rancour to slavery, using the reminiscences of the oldest character, the stooped, canny Miss Leah (Miquel Brown, bordering on stereotype), a former slave. Her expectations contrast sharply with those of her younger neighbours, Sophie and Fannie (Williams and Bryson), fiercely proud new landowners.

Fannie’s younger sister, Minnie, returns from London with her suave husband Frank, a Negro-hating mulatto whose assimilated lifestyle among London’s white literati is jeopardised by looming insolvency. Minnie’s elegant hat conceals a bruise and, in Tracey Saunders’ fine performance, her brittle chirpiness masks a deep conflict of loyalties.

In this deceptively placid backwater, arguments rage about ethnicity, land ownership, and the role of violence while Frank’s desperation and loathing spiral out of control.

It’s an evening at once life-affirming and unsettling. Still, in a world torn by conflicting absolutes, such moral ambiguity may be, like apple pie, A Good Thing

Sophie: Jax Williams
Miss Leah: Miquel Brown
Fannie: Karen Bryson
Will: Rex Obano
Minnie: Tracey Saunders
Frank: Howard Saddler

Director: Auriol Smith
Designer: Judy Stedham
Lighting: John Harris

2001-09-24 01:14:42