A singular, shape-shifting drama that transports audiences to places it never expects to go, Fairview premiered at Soho Rep’s 65-seat space a year ago. Since then awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for drama, Jackie Sibbles Drury’s play now reopens with its original company under the aegis of Theatre for a New Audience at its 260-seat Polonsky Shakespeare Center in downtown Brooklyn.
Although the designers have magnified somewhat the sights and sounds of the production to accommodate a larger theater, it does not appear that the playwright has significantly altered the text. Nor have the actors modified their sterling performances. So newcomers to Fairview will discover what the rest of us first experienced last year.
Hang on tight: It’s a wild ride.
[Read Jesse Oxfeld’s ★★★★★ review here.]
Deceptively mild-mannered during its cozy opening phase, Fairview occurs within the creamy-white living room of a contemporary, upscale, African-American family. A handsome middle-aged couple, Beverly (Heather Alicia Simms) and her good-natured husband Dayton (Charles Browning), cheerfully bustle about the premises readying a celebratory birthday dinner.
Soon they are joined by Beverly’s slyly passive-aggressive sister Jasmine (Roslyn Ruff) and their smart teenaged daughter Keisha (MaYaa Boateng). There ensues some lightly amusing business involving cheese plates and dance moves and the sisters working each other’s nerves.
What initially registers as a modest satire of black bourgeois comedies suddenly stops and the actors depart. The backstage crew resets the room. The play starts again from the beginning.
Only now the actors are silently mouthing their dialogue as they physically go through the motions of what we’ve seen previously.
Several unseen voices begin a conversation, initiated by somebody saying, “If you could choose to be a different race, what race would you be?”
The ensuing chitchat suggests that these invisible people—who sound terribly white in their casual assumptions regarding racial identity—are idly watching the proceedings as if they were unfolding as a TV sitcom or a DVD movie.
This commentary, which initially resonates as humorous in its many stereotypical perceptions of various ethnicities, gradually becomes heated and strident. Meanwhile, when the action goes beyond the point where it had earlier broken off, these doings increasingly turn surreal even as the unseen chat deteriorates into a screaming, foul-mouthed tirade.
Eventually the characters that we have watched and the characters whom we have heard are merged onstage in a bizarre and chaotic conflation. And then—well, the fourth wall gets broken, but let’s not reveal those circumstances.
This final convulsion of the play does not entirely succeed due, in part, to technical issues. Yet Fairview remains a striking, even startling, consideration of white perceptions regarding racial identity and how such judgmental attitudes affect American society today. If Drury’s extreme reach as a playwright exceeds her ultimate grasp in landing the play’s conclusion, her message about the need for white people to undertake a fair view of others unlike themselves is clear enough.
Sarah Benson, the director, for the most part capably manages the play’s transmogrifications in style and mood. Breezing through the sitcom passages with zest, the actors silently replicate their action with admirable precision. Lending distinctive voices to the glib unseen commentary, Hannah Cabell, Natalia Payne, Jed Resnick, and Luke Robertson gamely enter into the play’s subsequent chaos.
Designer Mimi Lien’s handsome, glossy setting neatly handles the play’s unexpected demands. Amith Chandrashaker’s lighting indicates transitions in mood. Presumably the layered sound level eventually is cranked up to assaultive volume by the director, but it would be helpful had MaYaa Boating’s voice been amplified for her key speech during the conclusion.
Then again, perhaps excluding some of the audience from hearing much of what this character has to say is meant deliberately to underscore the drama’s point about racial disconnection. If so, this decision proves a case of cutting one’s tongue to spite their message.
Regardless, Fairview is a bold and memorable play certain to stimulate everyone who sees it.
