It isn’t easy to review Fairview. That’s not because it’s a play that so deeply challenges its audience, although it is. And it’s not because it’s a play that takes twists and turns, that veers from heightened realism into surrealism and then into the absurd, although it’s that, too. It’s because those twists and turns contain so many surprises, so many unexpected and occasionally jaw-dropping moments, that to describe them would be to ruin half the fun.
So let’s say this: Fairview is extraordinary. It is funny, it is insightful, and it is shocking. It makes you uncomfortable, in all the best ways. It leaves you thinking about it for days afterward, and then it leaves you rethinking what you’ve thought.
And also this: Fairview won the Pulitzer Prize for drama earlier this year, after its debut at the Soho Rep. If you care about theater, you should get yourself to the Theater For a New Audience in Brooklyn for its encore performance.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★★ review here.]
Fairview was written by Jackie Sibblies Drury, whose Marys Seacole played at LCT3 last season and won her an Obie Award. That play was grounded in the real-life story of a pioneering British-Jamaican nurse and world traveler, who upended notions of what people of her gender, and her complexion, were expected to do. Fairview is entirely fictional, but it similarly explores notions of identity and of race, and it similarly blows up many of the ideas you have coming into it.
Directed by Sarah Benson, who leads us confidently through its many turns, the play follows one night at the home of the Frasiers, seemingly a happily bougie upper-middle-class African-American family. Beverly (Heather Alicia Simms) is preparing for Mama’s birthday — that’s her mother, the family matriarch — and, at first, everything seems to be going fine. She’s happily peeling carrots and singing along to Sly and the Family Stone. The first sign that something’s not quite right is that Sly’s “It’s a Family Affair,” for no good reason, changes into Iggy Pop’s version. Bev fiddles with the stereo, the song reverts, and she goes back about her business.
Her loving husband, Dayton (Charles Browning), shows up, offering to help but not being especially helpful. Her sister, Jasmine (Rosyln Ruff), arrives, bearing rosé — from France, she’s sure to point out — and bitching and gossiping. And then daughter Keisha (Mayaa Boateng) gets home from basketball practice. The family talks about usual family things, but you also, slowly, start to get the feeling that this isn’t quite real life. The house is pretty but bland — innocuous art, big beige couches — and the interactions and personas are mostly clichés: harried mom, goofy husband, snide sister, exuberant daughter. It’s a sitcom version of a family, acting out life on a proscenium soundstage and mugging for the laugh track. It is, you start to realize, an imagined, idolized version of an African-American family, modern (and less currently problematic) Huxtables.
Then everything shifts. And this is where description gets tough. We keep watching the Frasiers, but now there’s an unexpected, offstage conversation overlaid. It’s a first date, maybe, friends talking, first a man and a woman and then others joining in. And the dominant voice in the conversation is almost LaBute-ian (even, perhaps, Trumpian), an alpha male who is both domineering and perpetually aggrieved. His main conversational gambit: If you could be any race, what race would you be? At first their chatter, with its inappropriate questions and uncomfortable responses, seems unrelated to what’s going on among the Frasiers, but then the two threads seem to overlap and interact—perhaps we’re listening to people watching the Frasiers in a TV show, if in fact it’s a TV show.
And then, just as you start to get your mind around that, everything changes again—becomes stranger, wilder, more challenging and more unsettling. (Scenic designer Mimi Lien, costume designer Montana Levi Blanco, lighting designer Amith Chandrashaker, and sound designer Mikaal keep us off balance, as does choreographer Raja Feather Kelly.)
The basic point, I think: This country’s racial politics and racial history are so complicated, troubled, and insidious that they weigh on everything for a black family. That white people, and white expectations, dominate even inside black Americans’ interior monologues, invade their psyches. And that the only way to change that, to fix that, is for the two races to somehow switch places. Or at least, that the only way for power and privilege to be redistributed, to be more equitably shared, is for those who have it to give some of it up.
At Lincoln Center a year and a half ago, Joshua Harmon’s Admissions raised a similar point, but more politely (and in an all-white production). “If there are going to be new voices at the table, someone has to stand up and offer someone else his seat,” said Charlie, a white, liberal kid (this was Lincoln Center, after all), as he decided to give up on trying to get into a good college.
That truth—or, perhaps, a recognition of it—is what brought us the staggeringly reactionary movement we call Trumpism. And as Trumpism has come into full flower, Fairview is an eloquent, defiant response.
Fairview opened June 16, 2019, at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center and runs through August 11. Tickets and information: tfana.org
