Marys Seacole is the latest—and dizzyingly adventurous—drama from Jackie Sibblies Drury, the up-and-coming playwright whose Fairview, a cunning meta-theatrical study in race, stirred up so much excitement among downtown audiences last summer.
Opening on Monday in a fine production by Lincoln Center Theater’s LCT3 unit at the Claire Tow Theater, Drury’s new play will not be as controversial a show as Fairview, but it’s likely to addle some viewers as much as it will engage others.
Beginning in a deceptively forthright manner, Marys Seacole initially purports to relate the 19th century biography of a Jamaican medical practitioner and entrepreneur who established a hospital in the midst of the Crimean War of the 1850s.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★ review here.]
Elegantly dressed in a black-and-white crinoline gown, Mary speaks gravely and directly to the audience. Mary briefly outlines her proud Creole-Scots heritage, her ambition to be a “doctress,” and her times battling cholera at home and nursing British soldiers abroad.
Yet the setting designed by Mariana Sanchez appears at odds with this real life Victorian-era saga. Done up in gleaming pink tiles, the space suggests a modern-day combination of an emergency room and the reception area of a hospital, with an institutional bed situated to one side.
Soon Mary steps out of her gown and into a modern nurse’s togs and is joined by an associate, also of Jamaican descent, as they care today for an elderly white woman in the bed whose bickering daughter and granddaughter are no help. As they tend to their incontinent patient, Mary and the other nurse talk about their children. They also refer to their own upbringing in Jamaica, where they were farmed out to work for older white ladies, from whom they learned much.
But then Mary gradually reverts to her Seacole persona as the time and place shifts to 1850s Jamaica. By now it’s clear that the plural Marys of the play’s title signifies that this story regards caregivers of color of different epochs. In a later scene, Mary is glimpsed as a nanny gossiping with another West Indies nanny as they watch their little white charges romp on a city playground of today.
And so this 100-minute play incessantly moves back and forth in chronology and in its scenes from a hospital today where an active shooter emergency drill is being practiced with mock victims to a bloody battlefield in the Crimea where Mary and other women minister to wounded soldiers. Certain moments are outrageously funny, while others are appalling or poignant.
It is never wise to try to describe Drury’s stratified plays as regarding simply one thing. Still: Marys Seacole generally appears to study women of color who provide care for others, often at a personal cost of neglecting their own children or elderly parents. The story, which involves mother-daughter relationships, also speaks to an abiding maternal instinct that can override other exigencies.
With its nonlinear structure, mashing up of situations, strong Jamaican accents, and several themes, the play is challenging to follow as it becomes increasingly expressionistic in style. The conclusion, during which the six-member company repeats previous snatches of dialogue in a babble of voices, is scarcely coherent and demands clarification. No doubt the playwright, the director, and the actors know what their characters are saying here, but audiences really need to comprehend it as well. Although the play mostly holds one’s attention, its ending befuddles.
A compelling performance by Quincy Tyler Bernstine in distinctive characterizations as the several Marys–—all of them confident, warm, humorous, wise individuals—securely anchors the drama.
Clad in voluminous black as Mary Seacole’s forbidding mama, Karen Kandel is a mostly mute yet impressive figure. Marceline Hugot, Gabby Beans, Lucy Taylor (especially amusing as a prim Florence Nightingale), and Ismenia Mendes effectively portray various people of yesteryear and today. Designer Kaye Voyce’s costumes aid the actors and viewers in bridging the time warps.
Lileana Blain-Cruz, a top-notch director of demanding works such as this one, admirably and neatly accomplishes the drama’s numerous switches in time and location; for instance, a load of dirt suddenly dumped from above signals the start of a battlefield sequence. Jiyoun Chang’s ever-modulating lighting and Palmer Hefferan’s intricately-layered sound design assist the director considerably in creating a range of moods.
Although the playwright does not fully control and articulate the themes of her ambitious, sprawling play, Marys Seacole remains a thoughtful consideration of the women who serve others more than themselves.
Marys Seacole opened February 25, 2019, at the Claire Tow Theater and runs through April 7. Tickets and information: lct.org
