Aaron (Teagle F. Bougere) and Samuel (Patrick Breen) are the only mixed-race gay couple in a small suburban town. Therefore they’re the only local mixed-race couple raising a daughter, Eisa (Kara Young)—a very smart daughter at that. These three somewhat outsiders are the focus of The New Englanders, Jeff Augustin’s drama-with-comic-undertones.
Initially, things look copacetic for the family, where Samuel is on the road a good deal and has a standing dad-daughter date with Eisa when he returns (a Chuck E. Cheese outlet has been a fave destination) and where Aaron is a stay-at-home dad. Also at first, Eisa is a college-bound student who happens to harbor a great admiration for 1990s rapper Lauryn Hill, once of The Fugees.
Looks, however, are deceiving. The Aaron-Samuel bonds are fraying—sexual activity has ceased for a while. The friction is exacerbated when Raul (Javier Muñoz), a drifter and a formerly abandoned Aaron lover, reappears with reawakened goo-goo eyes and an ancillary $5000 loan request. Worse than those home-contentment wrinkles, Eisa, in thrall to rap star Hill’s “Everything is Everything” philosophy, decides to live as she believes her idol would. She engages in a confrontation with teacher Laura Charpie (Crystal Finn) over an F grade for an end-of-term assignment. The revenge she takes when the adamant Charpie refuses to raise the grade—an Ambien dose and feces are involved—could result in her losing her college acceptance and her parents’ esteem.
As the disappointed Aaron, the perplexed Samuel and the warring Eisa carry awkwardly and troublingly on, conditions become increasingly bleak before possibly improving. High school drug dealer Atlas (Adam Langdon), whose parents love cartography, occasionally features in the disturbed doings.
There’s no denying that playwright Augustin has presented a charged multi-conflict situation. On the other hand, he hasn’t given himself room in the intermissionless 90-minute play to probe more deeply into the cracks in the Aaron-Samuel relationship than is necessary. Neither does he sufficiently explain how a young woman as savvy as Eisa goes so excruciatingly off the deep end. And these are lapses that can’t be patched by director Saheem Ali or his cast, although to a man and woman they do their emotional utmost.
From time to time Augustin does get off amusing cracks at differences between the tastes of white and black communities. He asks for resistance from that wholly favorable opinion, though, when Thornton Wilder’s Our Town comes up for brief discussion. Samuel asserts that the 1938 Pulitzer Prize winner isn’t a very good play. Not the best remark to make in a script with its own noticeable deficiencies.
Incidentally, readers who saw Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play, when it appeared at New York Theater Workshop last season—it opens on Broadway this Sunday—will recall that one of the three couples trying to improve a currently sexless marriage is mixed-race. They join two mixed-race heterosexual couples for a treatment that seems to work and is called Antebellum Sex Performance Therapy. So anyone attending The New Englanders who’s already seen Slave Play can be excused for thinking that Aaron and Samuel might consider ASPT for themselves.
New Englanders set designer Arnulfo Maldonado uses approximately two-thirds of the stage to erect the porch and lawn of an appealing Northeast home. At times—there’s a drawback—Maldonado adds a few pieces on the lawn so that in both the bar and the later motel scenes, the supposed change of locale is awkward. (Ali might have allowed his designer the latitude to come up with a better solution for the play’s demands.) On the porch wall behind two comfortable-looking white wicker chairs, Maldonado has affixed a star. This has the surprise effect of hinting at a self-proclaimed one-star rating for the piece. Nevertheless, as it zooms in on one aspect of contemporary racial issues, The New Englanders deserves more. But not, unfortunately, that many more.
The New Englanders opened October, 2, 2019, at City Center Stage II and runs through October 20. Tickets and information: newenglandersplay.com
