A playwright whose reputation is shaded by misanthropic comedies regarding the sexes, Neil LaBute may be unfashionable in these #MeToo times. Nevertheless, LaBute remains a wickedly sharp dramatist, as evidenced by his Appomattox, a fresh one-act that premiered on Sunday.
Popping up last among three new works in the Series B program in the annual Summer Shorts festival of brief American plays at 59E59 Theaters, Appomattox makes the patchy bill worth seeing.
First let’s consider the lesser works that appear prior to LaBute’s little jaunt along today’s racial divide in Appomattox.
Providence, written by Nancy Bleemer, is a minor domestic sketch involving Renee and Michael, a young married couple spending the night in his boyhood home on the eve of a sister’s wedding. Uncomfortably sharing a narrow bed in Michael’s old room, they are visited by Pauly, the groom-to-be.
A wired guy anxious over his nuptials, Pauly quizzes them about married life with queries such as “What do you talk about?” His look-in causes the couple to reaffirm their relationship.
A ho-hum piece that—making adjustments for period manners and local color—could blandly apply to white middle class American marriage anytime over the last century, Providence at least is pleasantly acted under Ivey Lowe’s direction.
Regarding a considerably more troubled relationship, Lucky is composed by Sharr White, the up-and-coming author of The Other Place and The True. Set in a motel room in a small town in 1949, the story concerns Phil, who finally returns to his empathetic wife several years after surviving combat service during World War II. Unable to articulate a reasonable explanation for his long absence, Phil observes, “I feel like some sort of ghost.”
A subdued and realistic study in post-traumatic stress disorder, Lucky is so poorly directed and consequently performed that there is little point in trying to assess its dramatic merits.
A sardonic sage of our divisive age, LaBute reflects upon the current issue of African-American reparations in Appomattox.
Bros in early middle age, Joe is white and the aptly-named Frank is black and they’re hanging out after lunch in a neighborhood park. Joe brings up a recent story about Georgetown University students voting to pay an extra $27 a semester in reparations to relatives of 272 enslaved African people sold by the school back in 1838.
Frank is reluctant to discuss the issue, but Joe presses him. Frank mildly remarks that such reparations are mere symbolic gestures. “It oughta sting a bit,” he believes. Joe then wonders what Frank would consider sufficient payment for the horrors his ancestors experienced.
Soon Frank and Joe are sliding down a satirical Br’er Rabbit hole: Should it be a lump sum of how much? Something else? Maybe a car? Would that be a Ford Focus or a new Lexus? Or perhaps Joe could provide some kind of service? What about reparations for the former miseries of indigenous natives? And Asian-Americans?
Joe, who suffers not so much from “white gaze” as a glaze regarding the dark side of American history, keeps begging the question. Frank insists that our “so unspeakable, so un-make-up-able” past is too toxic for people to revisit in any way today. “You just agree that’s the case,” says Frank. “They’re no man’s land and that’s that.”
This seriocomic argument escalates until a friendship explodes.
A terribly thoughtful comedy, Appomattox is framed within a stock situation of two guys in a park, but the conversational football they toss is mighty serious. The playwright stacks his points neatly even as his oh-so-natural dialogue spills out like gasoline to fuel the conflict. Tactfully, LaBute ends the story before it gets too ugly.
Respectively well cast and guided by director Duane Boutté as Frank and Joe, Ro Boddie and Jack Mikesell exchange their characters’ black and white thoughts with easy believability. The simple set by Rebecca Lord-Surratt and clean lighting by Greg MacPherson are sufficient and appropriate (as their designs prove to be for the other two plays).
I did not get the opportunity to catch the Series A program in this festival produced for a thirteenth season by Throughline Artists. Although Providence and Lucky fall somewhat short in the Summer Shorts Series B bill, Appomattox is a significantly smart comedy sure to spark talk afterwards.
