Let’s have a great, big, abundant bundle of grateful words for Ted Shen, who left a successful business career some time ago with two goals in mind. He not only wanted to help develop musicals but also to create musicals himself.
He’s done both. Having founded, with his wife, Mary Jo, the Shen Family Foundation/Musical Theater Composers Initiative, he’s aggressively followed up on the former goal. Right now it may be enough to report that through the Ted & Mary Jo Shen Charitable Gift Fund he is contributing to support three tuners running in Manhattan: Scotland, PA, Soft Power, and Einstein’s Dreams. And that’s only a dip in the Shens formidable list over the years.
Even more significant at the moment is that Shen, as composer and lyricist, is opening Broadbend, Arkansas, the Transport Group/Public Theater co-production, which is worth its estimable weight in cheers. To be precise, Shen has written the music and added lyrics to two related monologues. The first is “Just One Q,” which boasts the too-little-recognized Ellen Fitzhugh as lyricist and librettist. The second is “Ruby,” which has the equally accomplished Harrison David Rivers as lyricist and librettist.
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★ review here.]
It needs be said that in both monologues the dialogue and the sung sections blend seamlessly. The result is as moving as it is because to a high degree it approaches operatic levels. That’s presumably why Fitzhugh and Rivers are credited as librettists rather than bookwriters.
What distinguishes Broadbend, Arkansas—and make no mistake, it’s distinguished, all right—is its trenchant handling of one of today’s most pressing and most visible headline grabbers: racism. What further distinguishes it is its appropriately restless direction by Transport Company co-founder and director Jack Cummings III, who makes it a point of pride never to repeat himself.
In “Just One Q,” it’s 1961 and Benny (Justin Cunningham) is an orderly at a nursing home run by a white woman called Julynne. Regularly tolerant of demanding resident Bertha, Benny handles his assignments efficiently. At the same time, he worries about his twin daughters Samantha and Ruby growing up without their institutionalized mother.
Feeling an obligation to himself, Benny talks Julynne into allowing his driving Bertha home to Memphis. It’s his excuse for observing the Freedom Riders as they pass through in their bus. Observing, however, isn’t enough for him. He gets caught up in their mission, and though he never boards the bus, he declares himself one of them. His action leads to arrest and worse.
“Just One Q” ends with Benny’s eventually being released and feeling himself a reborn man returning to his first obligation, his daughters. (Incidentally, the “Q” in the title has to do with a Scrabble set Julynne owns and a particular game she’s played with Bertha.)
“Ruby” takes place in 1988 at a cemetery, where Benny’s daughter Ruby (Danyel Fulton) has fled from a hospital where her son Ben is recovering from a beating suffered at the hands of a white police officer. She’s here to visit the graves of (spoiler alert) her father and Julynne who are buried next to each other.
In her frustration and sorrow, she explains how both Benny and Julynne came to be there and why she’s remained in Broadbend, whereas sister Sam left some time before. Whatever dreams Ruby had as a girl evaporated when at 15, she became pregnant. Her graveside argument is, of course, with herself, not with Benny and Julynne, who adopted the twins after Benny died. Ruby’s best option now is resolving to move forward.
Broadbend, Arkansas is stunning—“stunning” used in the sense of an unexpected punch to the solar plexus—because both Benny and Ruby are up against societal conditions that haven’t changed over a significant passage of time. They are conditions that give very few signs of changing. So Benny and Ruby after him are consigned to give themselves the hope that moving forward will ease their plights. That’s even as they must feel within themselves that hope itself continues to be compromised.
The starkness of the production underlines this. Broadbend, Arkansas is sung by Cunningham and Fulton with breathtaking conviction and commitment to the unrelenting pathos. Michael Starobin is the invaluable arranger. From the piano Deborah Abramson conducts a mini-orchestra in which three stringed instruments and two reeds immeasurably enhance the score.
Benny and Ruby do their soul-searching on a long, rectangular black floor that only features three doctor’s-waiting-room chairs during the first monologue. They’re removed for the second. Dane Laffrey is the set consultant, whose contribution is sensitively abetted by lighting designer Jen Schriever and sound designer Walter Trarbach. Peiyi Wong dresses Cunningham and Fulton simply and effectively.
The Shen-McHugh-Rivers piece is notable for reflecting perhaps the most recalcitrant current situation in a country where division is worsening, where tribalism is becoming entrenched. With the short, in some ways quite modest works—each monologue is about 45 minutes long—the creators have boldly faced a contemporary reality. They reflect an era when facing reality is sidestepped on a daily basis, most noticeably by the prominent one-time star of a so-called television reality show. The unflinching Shen-McHugh-Rivers determination to condemn the disturbed times is extremely laudatory.
Broadbend, Arkansas opened November 10, 2019, at the Duke on 42nd Street and runs through November 23. Tickets and information: transportgroup.org
