Theatre in Review: Bootycandy (Playwrights Horizons)

	Phillip James Brannon, Jesse Pennington, Lance Coadie Williams. Photo: Joan Marcus

A story, running on Playbill Online, about the new show at Playwrights Horizons is titled "Splicing the DNA of Richard Pryor, Jackie Mason, and RuPaul to Create Bootycandy." They might have added Norman Lear, In Living Color, George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum, and Mad Magazine, for Robert O'Hara's scorched-earth satire on race in America contains trace elements of all these influences. If only it had one-tenth the discipline and focus of any of them. One thing is certain: Bootycandy bids fair to be the big love-it-or-hate-it item of the fall season. At the performance I attended certain sections of the audience rocked with laughter; elsewhere, the silence of the grave prevailed. To see which category you might fall into, take this simple test: If the idea of a ghetto mother naming her baby Genitalia makes you scream with laughter, this is the play for you.

I laughed out loud about half a dozen times at Bootycandy, but more often was simply bewildered. Some will claim that this deliberately offensive mashup of scenes and plot lines, laced with some of the most low-down gags ever to emanate from the Playwrights Horizons stage, is the work of a daring agent provocateur. To these eyes, however, it is more notable for its deliberately shambolic construction, flagrantly cartooned acting style, and willingness to flog each joke to death. There are some very funny ideas here, but they are allowed to run amok until they implode from sheer exhaustion.

Bootycandy takes aim at cultural representations of blacks while simultaneously taking down the insularity and homophobia of the black community. This is a tall order, and it results in a structural train wreck, a chaotic collection of scenes that break down into two categories. The main narrative follows the progress of Sutter, a young gay black man who grows up in a titanically dysfunctional and homophobic household, maturing into an adult who makes a fine art out of bad decisions. Interspersed among these scenes is a range of revue-style sketches: A pastor, infuriated by anonymous letters accusing his male choir singers of being gay, comes out to his congregation -- in a gold lame dress, fire-engine red heels, and platinum blonde wig. A quartet of urban matrons gossip furiously about the aforementioned Genitalia. Later, we see Genitalia as a middle-aged woman taking part in a beachside "non-commitment" ceremony with her soon-to-be ex-lover, a woman named Intifada. ("You may now bitch-slap each other," says the officiant.)

The scenes focusing on Sutter are similarly all over the place. The opener, which plays like an especially raunchy episode of '70s-era sitcoms like Good Times or What's Happening, features Sutter wondering why his mother refers to his penis as his "bootycandy." This bizarre euphemism is part of an overall child-raising strategy designed to avoid answering any awkward questions, and, of course, it backfires. "Can I lick it?" Sutter asks. There's quite a discussion about bootycandy hygiene, culminating in Mother's warning that if it is not attended to, it will fall off. Sutter also inquires about periods and blow jobs; she sends him to the dictionary in what proves to be a fruitless search for knowledge. (In an early sign of desperation, the mother sprays both sides of her face with perfume, then lifts her skirt for an additional spritz.)

We also see Sutter as an adolescent, dressed as Michael Jackson, trying to warn his parents that he is being followed after school by an adult man. Their response: Sutter is taken out of the school musical (The Wiz, with Sutter as the Scarecrow) and is made to take up sports. Also, his stepfather says, "You need to start bending your knees when you pick stuff up." -- a line that, remarkably, got one of the biggest laughs of the evening. It must land well at every performance, because the author repeats it.

Later, the grown-up Sutter appears locked in a tormented sexual relationship with his white brother-in-law and, still later, taking part in an abusive threesome, in which he and his friend Larry, a black drag queen, sexually assault and humiliate a white heterosexual alcoholic, who later leaps to his death. (The guy asks for it, but still.) During this sequence, the cast appears to rebel, refusing to go on until the author agrees to skip ahead to the play's final scene; they could have put their collective foot down much earlier, as far as I'm concerned.

This scene is not the only example of Pirandellian fooling around. Late in the first act, O'Hara convenes a playwriting seminar -- at Playwrights Horizons, no less -- where a quartet of black writers must endure a series of stunningly boneheaded questions from a white moderator. Actually, this leads to some pretty funny moments. "By the way," he remarks to one of them, named Terry O'Malley, "Seems odd for a black playwright to have the last name O'Malley. How did that come about?" "Slavery," she replies. The moderator also refers to another guest as an "emerging" talent. "I've been writing for 20 years," he replies, with no small amount of indignation.

But like everything Bootycandy, this sequence is allowed to go on for far too long, with writers agreeing that their work should make audiences "choke," which leads to everyone getting up and chanting "Choke, muthafucka, choke!" over and over again. And so it goes: The sketch with the crossdressing minister is painfully extended, as is the "non-commitment" ceremony, in which the characters hurl increasingly vulgar and ugly insults at each other. (Intifada, who wears a skin-tight dress, reaches between her legs to pull out the list of grievances she has compiled against Genitalia.) And as scene after scene unfolds with little or no clear destination, the running time seems to stretch into infinity.

Since he also staged Bootycandy, O'Hara has no one to blame for this but himself. Would another director have gotten him to edit and shape this material? Or insisted on a less-frantic performing style? We'll never know. In any case, O'Hara has found a quintet of actors who are more than willing to inhabit his gallery of grotesques. Jessica Frances Dukes is suitably horrifying as the young version of Sutter's oblivious mother and as the trash-talking Intifada. Benja Kay Thomas works similarly as the middle-aged edition of the mother and the put-upon Genitalia. Lance Coadie Williams runs the gamut as the gay preacher, Sutter's abusive stepfather, the flamboyant Larry, and Sutter's elderly granny, who fakes having Alzheimer's until a visitor bribes her with a $20 bill. Jesse Pennington is convincing as that awful moderator and a couple of bi-curious guys; he also deftly handles a long monologue as a young man confronting a possible mugger. The role of Sutter is singularly unrewarding -- he's a passive victim as a young man and disconcertingly vicious later on -- and the accomplished Phillip James Brannon can do little to make him interesting.

O'Hara has also engaged the services of a fine design team. Clint Ramos' set design places the action on a narrowly focused revolving stage, which is surrounded by an enormous masking proscenium that serves as a surface for Aaron Rhyne's projections of New York street scenes and other locations. It's an elegant solution for a play loaded with scenes and locations. Ramos' costumes range amusingly over a variety of styles -- from the young Sutter's patch-style bell bottoms, to the ghetto ladies' stretch pants ensembles, to the argyle sweater vests worn at the writers' conference. Japhy Weideman's lighting and Lindsay Jones' sound design are both totally solid.

Bootycandy ends in a scene, between Sutter and his institutionalized grandmother, which is apparently supposed to represent some kind of resolution, if only because there is a poster on the wall dominated by the word "Acceptance." It also has the advantage of being moderately amusing and, blessedly, relatively quiet. But Sutter has long since worn out his welcome, as has the man who created him. Bootycandy is less a play than a two-hour-plus rant, delivered to nails-on-the-blackboard effect. That line about wanting audiences to choke? He wasn't kidding.--David Barbour