Eboni Booth is an actor whose Off Broadway credits include being a member of the terrific award-winning ensemble of that memorable Dance Nation at Playwrights Horizons. Booth also currently happens to be a playwriting fellow at The Juilliard School.
One of the plays that Booth developed there, Paris, premiered on Tuesday at Atlantic Theater Company’s 98-seat Stage 2 space.
No, not that kind of Paris. Booth’s story happens in Paris, Vermont, which is revealed to be a predominantly white working class community in the boondocks.
More specifically, Paris unfolds in the break room and warehouse areas of Berry’s, a big box store, where Emmie just started as a $5 per hour worker. (It’s 1995: Thus the low wage, lack of awareness among its hardscrabble characters, and absence of cell phones in this story.)
Emmie (Jules Latimer) is 22, black, single, and broke. And she recently slipped on the ice in a parking lot of a tavern and busted her face. During the opening scene, when a sorely bruised Emmie is interviewed for a job at Berry’s by Gar (Eddie K. Robinson), a temperamental young supervisor, she explains the accident and other biographical bits.
The next day, as Emmie puts price stickers on sweatshirts in the stockroom, she gingerly interacts with several co-workers, who are white folks of various types.
Wendy (Ann McDonough) is an anxious, older, sweetie-pie married to Dev (James Murtaugh), a semi-retired traffic cop who sells get-rich-quick paperbacks. Logan (Christopher Dylan White) is the continually-stoned wannabe rapper. Maxine (Danielle Skraastad) is an angry, foul-mouthed single mom of four kids. Then there is Carlisle (Bruce McKenzie), a sardonic gent doing some mysterious business with Gar.
Absorbed with their own money and personal troubles, everybody’s behavior towards Emmie is reasonably amiable over the next week or so. Then gradually a sense of otherness becomes evident. At different times, these locals ask Emmie where she comes from. When Emmie replies that Paris is her hometown, their response invariably is that they never saw her there before.
More of a realistic character study regarding invisibility in a quietly racist society than a plot-driven drama, the 80-minute play provides sufficient insights on the paycheck-to-paycheck mindset to compensate for its relative absence of storyline. A slim but intriguing thread involving Emmie and Gar, who also is black, snaps as the play simply ends rather than concludes.
Booth writes highly natural everyday conversation and colors in her characters nicely but not so deeply. Emmie, the central figure, reveals not much of an internal life.
Atlantic Theater Company gives Paris a supportive premiere staged with very capable actors and solid visuals by director Knud Adams. Although Adams occasionally hangs too long onto pauses in the dialogue that he stages, he otherwise obtains especially fine performances.
A newcomer with a noble face, Jules Latimer invests the watchful Emmie with a melancholy quality that suggests she fears her future is going nowhere fast. Eddie K. Robinson properly lends Gar an offbeat nature. One of the best character actors in the biz, Ann McDonough is a cozy, crotchety presence as the flask-toting Wendy. Christopher Dylan White’s scruffy Logan looks like he lives on a skateboard. All fiery eyes, Danielle Skraastad enlivens every scene her truculent Maxine enters.
Adams’ production features such essentials as a grubby two-level workplace setting designed by David Zinn, perfectly crummy winter clothes by Arnulfo Maldonado, and some handsome guitar and piano music composed by Trey Anastasio.
Although the play may be somewhat wanting in dramatic heft, the subtle social observations and the good talk that the author provides—plus the excellent production that serves everything so well—makes this little trip to Paris mostly a pleasure.
Paris opened January 21, 2020, at Atlantic Stage 2 and runs through February 16. Tickets and information: atlantictheater.org
