What a joy it is to see an early work from a playwright you’ve long admired and discover something so terrific that you wish you could go back and see the play in its first incarnation.
Until someone invents that theatrical time machine, thank goodness we have productions such as Keen Company’s Crumbs From the Table of Joy, a beautifully fashioned revival of Lynn Nottage’s play, the 1995 piece that marked the now–two-time Pulitzer Prize winner’s off-Broadway debut.
You’d never guess that this is Nottage’s first play; nothing about it screams “young”—except, perhaps, the age of the narrator/central character, 17-year-old Ernestine (Shanel Bailey). Set in 1950, Crumbs centers on Ernestine’s coming of age; how she and her 15-year-old sister, Ermina (Malika Samuel), grieve and recover after their mother’s death; and how her father, Godfrey (Jason Bowen), grieves and retreats after his wife’s death. After a sudden move from Pensacola, Fla., to Brooklyn, N.Y., they get a new roommate and self-appointed mother figure: Aunt Lily (Sharina Martin), an outspoken communist and proud unmarried woman. “And why take just one man, when you can have a lifetime full of so many,” she reasons.
[Read Sandy MacDonald’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
The women must also contend with Godfrey’s worship of the unseen but ever-present Father Divine, a self-proclaimed deity and founder of the International Peace Mission Movement, and his eventual remarriage to Gerte (Natalia Payne), a German woman. In a rare cruel moment, Ernie likens her to Marlene Dietrich, “a cold bitter whore laughing in our doorway. She might as well be wearing a satin tuxedo and blowing smoke in our faces.” Later, when Godfrey is attacked while the couple is out together, Gerte naively asks: “What did we do?”
Bailey—a powerful presence as Ernie (or Darling Angel, if you’re using the name bestowed on her by Father Divine)—is blessed with Nottage’s most vibrant, evocative prose, lines that give this memory play its shape. As she feels the weight of her mother’s passing: “Death made us nauseous with regret. It clipped daddy’s tongue and put his temper to rest.” Recalling evenings with her father, a night-shift bakery worker with pockets full of sweets: “Love is candied peanuts and sugar babies, day old cinnamon buns and peach cobbler.” Learning about communism from Lily: “Smothered in gossamer smoke and dizzying assertions, I wondered had her revolution already begun?” Of their new home in Brooklyn: “A basement apartment, kind of romantic, like a Parisian artist’s flat.” (“If Parisian mean ugly,” Ermina interjects.)
If you’re familiar with Nottage’s works, you’re sure to notice a few details in Crumbs that surface in other plays. Starting over in Brooklyn—that’s something the title character does in Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine. We see Ernie working on her graduation dress, pinning and nipping and tucking on a sewing mannequin; Esther in Intimate Apparel is a seamstress by trade. Ernie is passionate about movies; Nottage later wrote a comedy, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, skewering the film industry.
But Crumbs has a voice all its own. It also has one of the most jaw-dropping Act 1 endings you’ll ever see.
Crumbs From the Table of Joy opened March 7, 2023, at Theatre Row and runs through April 1. Tickets and information: keencompany.org
