Marco Ramirez’s outstanding play, The Royale, opened at Lincoln Center Theater in 2016 when the Black Lives Matter movement was not the inescapable motivating societal force it is today. In 2021, however, the five-character, 85-minute one-act is even more outstanding. That’s as taped then and streamed from Lincoln Center Theater.
Today, the national psyche has become sensitized to the effects of systemic United States racism as it never has been and certainly not as it was in 2016. Progress has been made but not as much as remains needed. That unfortunate reality is pointed out daily. Concerned citizens have only to look, for one confirming instance, at the prospective and restrictive voting rights bills floating across a conflicted nation.
It is this state of problematic affairs that Ramirez, the playwriting son of Cuban immigrants, addresses, not exactly head on but through bold allegory. For his oblique illustration, he has gone to the great turn-of-the century boxer Jack Johnson, here called Jay “The Sport” Jackson (Khris Davis). It was Johnson who in 1908 became the first Black fighter to become the world champion, defeating Tommy Burns.
As Ramirez frames it—taking liberties with the Johnson facts—Jackson insists on challenging the while champion, here the never-seen Bernard “The Champ” Bixby. Jackson gets the match and prevails.
He gets it but not without challenges aimed at him, not so much from cautious manager Wynton (Clarke Peters) as from sister Nina (Montego Glover). She fears the white-community repercussions following a Jackson victory. But considering his inflexible insistence Blacks are equal to whites at any given task, Jackson doesn’t give in to Nina’s entreaties. Were he to do so, there would be no play—or at least a very different one.
Ramirez uses stylization to tell his forceful tale, the theatricalization he requires worked to the max by the skilled actors and by director Rachel Chavkin, for whom theatricalization is a calling card. (Remember her accomplishments with the three Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 versions, starting at the small Ars Nova, transferring to the larger Tribeca tent, and then to Broadway’s cavernous Imperial Theatre.)
The action is played on a boxing-ring-sized platform, which, indeed, represents a boxing ring at certain moments and at others stands as a metaphor for the boxing ring we all face throughout our daily lives. (Nick Vaughan is the set designer.)
In the opening section of The Royale, Jackson tangles with Black challenger, Fish (McKinley Belcher III), who does well though he loses. Chavkin stages, indeed all but choreographs, this sequence with only one three-poled railing. It’s repeatedly raised, moved, and lowered, often with loud thuds as well as bells and clapping hands. The bells and claps are then used throughout, giving the play a ringing (pun intended) presence. (Matt Hobbs is the sound designer, the lighting is by Austin R. Smith.) Also lending volume to the reverberating proceedings is full-throated announcer Max (John Lavelle).
Perhaps most significantly, when Jackson meets this Bixby, it’s not Bixby who enters what is now the facsimile of a true boxing-ring. The point Ramirez makes—and makes with strong stage conviction—is that Jackson is not fighting a foe with a menacing left hook. He’s confronting the history of what we now hear regularly termed “systemic racism.” (Ramirez’s metaphorical approach, by the way, is not that of Howard Sacker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1967 play, The Great White Hope, which also deals with Jack Johnson pursuing the championship.)
Not incidentally, Ramirez fortifies the metaphor by having brother Jay remind sister Nina that throughout their childhood she admired posters hanging in their local pharmacy that featured white women advertising colognes and the like. It has wounded him that his sister longed so openly to be in the place of women whom she doesn’t look like.
(Keep in mind the number of times currently when the words “who don’t look like me” are spoken by commentators on the airwaves when discussing whites taking for granted the ability to leave their homes without worry, whereas Blacks, perhaps especially Black men, still don’t have the advantage.)
As to the title: The Royale, according to dialog, was a fight among several blindfolded men that continued until there was only one left standing. The importance of such a contest is made clear in the script—and doesn’t sound like a sweet science of any sort.
That plays regularly take on shifting and enhanced meanings is a standard occurrence according to the times when they’re revived—or brought back as are many productions during the pandemic. This is unquestionably true of The Royale, more cogent now than it previously was—and therefore even more of a must-see.
The Royale was streamed starting April 22, 2021 and will remain online through May 16. Information and free streaming: lct.org
