SF Playhouse’s Barbecue sizzles

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The cast of Robert O’Hara’s Barbecue at San Francisco Playhouse includes (from left) Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe as Adlean, Adrian Roberts as James T, Kehinde Koyejo as Marie and Halili Knox as Lillie Anne. Below: The clever, twisty play also includes cast members (from left) Teri Whipple as Marie, Clive Worsley as James T, Anne Darragh as Lillie Anne and Jennie Brick as Adlean. Photos by Ken Levin

Robert O’Hara is one of those playwright/directors who, when his name is attached to a project in any way, you pay attention. He’s smart, funny and has a keen eye for theatrical disruption. His Insurrection: Holding History may have played at American Conservatory Theater almost 20 years ago, but it remains one of the wildest, most wonderful things I’ve seen from that company.

O’Hara – the playwright – is back in town with Barbecue, the first show in San Francisco Playhouse’s 15th season, and here’s what’s on the grill: American families, race in America and recovery porn. This is comedy with deadly serious aim or drama with some really big laughs. Whatever it is, it’s almost indescribable, and that’s a good thing.

The one thing I will tell you, even though it would be better if you went into the play knowing nothing other than it was impeccably directed by Margo Hall and might elicit strong reactions from you on a number of fronts, is that O’Hara turns theater into a wacky mirror, almost literally. The subject is the O’Mallery family’s five (of seven) surviving siblings in a Midwestern city. They are a family plagued with addiction issues (alcohol, painkillers, marijuana, crack, control) and bad attitiudes. They don’t like each other much, but they love each other, and when sister Barbara needs an intervention to get her into rehab, the family rallies. Just like they’ve seen on TV reality shows, they stage a “barbecue party” in a local park in an attempt to lure her in.

But here’s the first of several twists you will encounter over the course of the play’s two hours: we see the O’Mallery’s as a white family in one scene and then as a black family in the next. Same characters, same situation, two sets of actors. When are we afforded the chance to challenge ourselves and our notions of how family and race and class are related? What does it say about me that I found the white family whiny and annoying while the black family was more interesting and likable and much funnier and more vivacious? (Perhaps the white family hit too close to home.)

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If the whole play had only been ricocheting between the alternate families, that would have been fine by me, but O’Hara has more in mind here. These families are alternating reflections, but what exactly are they reflecting? That’s the real question, and O’Hara does provide answers. And twists. And a lot more fun and some quite serious thoughts on rehab and recovery and the language and culture we have built around that process.

There are some wild tonal shifts here, but director Hall has everything firmly in hand, with an excellent design team including Bill English (the superb outdoor park setting complete with restrooms that you know are on the verge of disgusting), Wen-Ling Lao (perfect lighting alteration to accommodate the play’s twists) and Brooke Jennings (pitch-perfect costumes on the cusp of reality/comedy). Usually when Hall is in the director’s chair, the only downside is that it means she won’t be on stage. But that’s not a problem with Barbecue. She is part of the excellent cast and all but ignites the second half alongside the also excellent Susi Damilano. The black/white scene flips, in addition to being culturally, comically and dramatically fascinating, offer a wonderful opportunity to see talented actors tackling the same roles at the same time.

The entire cast is tremendous, but it’s especially instructive to see the dramatic work of Anne Darragh and Halili Knox as Lillie Anne, the controlling sister who is attempting to pull off this intervention and get her difficult (and addled) siblings on board with her. They approach the character differently and offer different levels of empathy, and it’s extraordinary. On a more comic level, Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe and Jennie Brick as Adlean are both hilarious and, again, so different in the way they get laughs. One is more obnoxious and one is more lovable. The same is true of Clive Worsley and Adrian Roberts as brother James T and Teri Whipple and Kehinde Koyejo as Jack Daniels-swilling sister Marie.

If all of O’Hara’s twists don’t have the same potency, this cast pulls off this whole audacious enterprise beautifully and keeps the flames of Barbecue high and hot.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Robert O’Hara’s Barbecue continues through Nov. 11 at San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post St., San Francisco. Tickets are $20-$125. Call 415-677-9596 or visit www.sfplayhouse.org.

Wonderful women in Word for Word’s Aunt Hagar

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The cast of Word for Word’s All Aunt Hagar’s Children by Edward P. Jones includes (from left) Kehinde Koyejo, Jia Taylor, Khary L. Moye, Sheila Balter and Margo Hall. Below: The Young Man’s (Khary L. Moye) elders (Margo Hall, left, Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe, seated, and Velina Brown) ask an urgent favor. Photos by Julie Schuchard

What you remember from Word for Word’s production of All Aunt Hagar’s Children, a full theatrical adaptation of the short story by Edward P. Jones, are the women. Such women. They make an impression on the audience the way they make an impression the story’s narrator, a nameless young man who returned to his native Washington, D.C., nine months ago after serving in the Korean War.

The young man is in a transitional phase, working a file clerk-type job until he can join a war buddy in Alaska and strike gold, but mostly he’s giving himself license to celebrate (i.e. drink) and dream of a life beyond what he already knows. As he puts it: “And I, a veteran hearing Alaska singing, didn’t want to ask any big questions and didn’t want anybody asking me any big questions. I was twenty-four and just starting to dance away on the easy side—a little soft-shoe here, a little soft-shoe there.”

Living a quiet, alcohol-soaked life isn’t quite panning out for the young man. Drama finds him in the form of a strange incident involving a Jewish woman who practically dies in his arms on the street, muttering an enigmatic Yiddish phrase with her final breath. And in the form of a murder that he reluctantly agrees to help and solve.

With that latter, Jones’ story falls into some familiar, noir-ish rhythms, although the young man, who worked as a military policeman in Korea, is not at all a detective. What his investigation does is let him cross paths with some extraordinarily interesting women, and that’s where the heart of the story lies.

As in all Word for Word productions, the company has not changed a word of Jones’ story, which originally appeared in the New Yorker in 2003 and then served as the title story in a collection of his short stories in 2006. A Pulitzer Prize-winner for his novel The Known World, Jones delivers an unusually told story that is both intimate and epic, a short story that feels crammed with incident and history and interpersonal connections. It’s one man’s story that is continually taken over by the women he encounters, some of whom are close family members, others he barely knows and still others who are strangers on the street.

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Director Stephanie Hunt (working with co-director Margo Hall, who is also a standout in the uniformly strong cast) has the disadvantage of working on the cavernous main stage at Z Space rather than the more intimate Z Below in the basement. Set designer Sean Riley creates a striking image of brick buildings in a northwest Washington neighborhood, but most of the action is confined to a much smaller platform plagued with door frames whose logic is not always observed by the actors. There’s a lot of time spent bringing furniture on and off this platform, which tends to slow the action.

And if there’s one thing plaguing this 100-minute one-act production it’s pacing and a tendency to be too literal in the interpretation of Jones’ prose. The writing is evocative enough without having to see every little thing (especially at the end with a striking image that is probably best left to the imagination rather than being rather clumsily realized).

Khary L. Moye makes for an arresting narrator who is at once charming in his assessment of his life and surroundings and confounded by the same. Except for Joel Mullennix in a series of smaller roles (a nefarious bad guy from the past, the young man’s lawyer boss), the other six members of the cast play all the wonderful women our narrator encounters in his quest to solve a mystery and discover the meaning behind the words uttered to him by the dead white woman he tried to help.

Velina Brown is piercingly funny and moving as the young man’s mother, a stern, sharp-tongued woman with a deep love for her children and her two best friends from childhood (Hall as Aunt Penny and Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe as Miss Agatha), with whom she suffered some significant trauma as little girls in Alabama. The ghost of that trauma haunts the present (1950s) narrative in a most intriguing way.

Sheila Balter plays both of the Jewish women who factor into the young man’s intrigue: the woman who dies on the street and the woman who connects him to the dead woman’s final words. Just as the connection with his mother’s past weighs on the young man, so does his post-World War II interactions with these two very different Jewish women. Nothing is overly explicit in Jones’ writing here – it all adds to the emotional, cultural and even historical complexity of the young man’s experience.

Many of the other woman are those who assist in the murder investigation in some way. Hall is hilarious as Minnie, a neighbor of the murder victim who’s skill at flirtation is almost as pronounced as her talking bird’s ability to surprise with bizarre exhortations (“I’m only flesh and blood” or “There’s more to come, somebitch!). Kehinde Koyejo memorably plays the bird.

Jia Taylor plays the romantic interest from whom the young man is uncomfortably trying extricate himself as well as one half of a duo (Koyejo plays the other) who help the budding detective the trajectory of his investigation (he hasn’t quite figured out that he should visit the scene of the crime even though it happened some two years ago).

Storytelling is important to characters in All Aunt Hagar’s Children, just as their stories themselves are powerful in the telling. One character says of her father, “He used to tell me stories when the world got too much. Comforting, you know. Keeping the world away.” Jones’ has that effect while also bringing the world in closer for a better, more intriguing view.

[bonus story]
You can read Edward P. Jones’ All Aunt Hagar’s Children on the New Yorker website here.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Edward P. Jones’ All Aunt Hagar’s Children continues through Dec. 11 in a Word for Word production at Z Space, 450 Florida St., San Francisco. Tickets are $33-$58. Call 866-811-4111 or visit www.zspace.org.