Theatre in Review: minor*ity (Colt Coeur/WP Theater)

	Nimene Sierra Wureh. Photo: Joan Marcus

In minor*ity, playwright Francisca da silveira throws together a trio of Black artists at an international symposium, catching them in all sorts of personal and ethical entanglements. Key virtues of the debut work are sharp characterizations, a breezy cynicism, and a knack for complicated questions, none of which come with easy answers. Nobody is let off the hook, resulting in many crackling confrontations.

The setting is one of those corporate-sponsored confabs where artists opine on panels for wealthy people with vague good intentions. (The sessions come with jargon-encrusted titles like Respect and Repair(Ations): Intentional Art Teaching Through the Black Gaze.) Cheikh, a Senegalese storyteller and musician, fled the conference scene five years earlier, but is back, hoping to raise money for a school in Dakar. He also wants to see Ceza, his ex-lover, a fierce Cape Verdean painter whose portraits of volcanoes are so vivid that, at one exhibition, she says, "We had to install a thermometer in the room where this series is displayed to prove that the room was really at twenty-one degrees because people were complaining." She adds, "I was against it, of course. Let them burn."

The badly blocked Ceza is nevertheless a skilled competitor in the sponsorship stakes, wielding her formidable persona on academic panels and lunches with foundation managers to fund her work. (She is also available for teaching gigs, private gigs, and seasons as a judge on The Great European Bake-Off.) She is totally prepared, however, to shun anything that drags her back into Cheikh's orbit. "I haven't finished anything since you left me," she says, accusingly. "I'm not the man who robbed you of your creativity," he replies. She responds by spitting red wine on an empty canvas.

Barging, like a clueless Henry James character, into this tense and alien atmosphere is the American Sami, "a director slash playwright slash dramaturg slash intimacy coordinator," whose garrulous, boundary-free approach to socialization has a way of bringing conversations to a halt. In a typical moment of oversharing, she tells Ceza, "If they wanted a theatre person shouldn't they be asking Lynn or Whitney or Dominique or Robert or Michael or Suzan-Lori or fricken Jeremy or something?" It never occurs to her that this procession of American theatrical first names might mean little to a painter based in Portugal. Bucking herself up, she adds, "But then I had to look at myself in the mirror and be like: You are the main character." That's telling yourself.

As Ceza and Cheikh circle each other, rehashing the past and angling for pride of place with a wealthy patron, Sami jousts with them both. When she announces the title of her session, Postcolonial Staging: Subverting the Western Dramaturgical Frame Through Radical Technique, Cheikh responds, "None of what you just said means anything," cueing an angry exchange of ideas. Ceza grills Sami about her acclaimed production of Ruined, using the Socratic method to determine that, like the playwright Lynn Nottage, Sami never went anywhere near the Congo, where the play's atrocities unfold in an atmosphere of civil war. Sami defends herself as an avid researcher, leading Ceza to ask, "And this second-hand process qualified you to direct it?" Furious at everyone's condescension, Sami asks, "And you're supposed to be my role models?" Cheikh gently points out he never signed up for that job. Ceza seconds that.

As it happens, Sami has the sharpest elbows of them all, breaking confidences to ignite a major blow-up between the ex-lovers and outplaying them at the authenticity game. Yet, for all the sharp claws on display, da silveira truly likes her characters and understands their dilemmas. (A scene in which Ceza and Sami trade accounts of dealing with rude white journalists is a case in point.) And the playwright grants at least two of her creations a measure of peace at the finale, while sending the third on her merry way.

Shariffa Ali's production is an elegant round of three-corner catch played by a trio of fine talents. The effortlessly charismatic Ato Essandoh makes a perfect emcee, presenting the story to his students in Senegal as a good example of how not to behave on the international circuit. He is the most casual of counterpunchers, especially when calling out Sami for unconscious racism, then offering her the destabilizing opinion that "Africans are the most racist people in the world." He also shares a combustible chemistry with Nedra Marie Taylor's chic, composed, and faintly terrifying Ceza. To be sure, she knows how to give people what they want: Stunning Sami with a savage tale, from her family's past, about an infant left in a volcano, she concludes, "I have got it to exactly 250 words. There is also a 100-word version, but eh, not as compelling, I don't think." Underneath her well-dressed exterior, furies rage, however, especially when, in a calculated act of misbehavior, she gets roaring drunk before having to go onstage. Sami is, at times, a borderline caricature in her American innocence, wondering where all the Black people are in the conference's audience and insisting that it is a logical contradiction to be Black and racist, but Nimene Sierra Wureh plays her for all she is worth, making clear that she is not to be dismissed.

The production is solidly designed: Brittany Vasta's scenic concept employs an array of curtains to create the conference's green room; they can also be used to suggest an auditorium in Senegal for the play's framing device. Celeste Jennings' costumes are amusingly observant about the characters' self-presentations: Cheikh's African outfits, designed to please the patrons; Ceza's striking, highly individual ensembles; and Sami's casual jeans-and-tops looks, with added African touches as the action unfolds. Daisy Long's lighting and Tosin Olufolabi's sound are both solid; the latter earns laughs when the PA system punctuates onstage arguments with official thanks for the corporate sponsors, a rogue's gallery that includes Coca-Cola, Nestle, Starbucks, The Gap, and Google.

It's always great news when a fresh new comic voice appears, especially one prepared to use humor to pursue provocative ideas. The people in minor*ity are eminently corruptible, but they're also profoundly human, doing their best in an economic system that routinely forces them into selling bits of themselves to fund their creative work. But they are delightful company, and what they have to say is very much worth hearing. Cheers to WP Theater and Colt Coeur for this discovery. --David Barbour