Everybody’s entitled to a little privacy. Character development in drama is similar to a growing friendship—a process of gradual divulgence. The puzzle of someone’s bearing and outward presentation gives way to the collection of secrets and fears and family history that make up—and, over time, help to explain—that person. Still, the most interesting people, onstage and in our lives, hold on to a whiff of mystery. There’s something alien and ineffable about them that can’t be reduced to mere facts, or be rationalized by psychology. Call it soul.
Lynn Nottage’s new play, “Clyde’s,” directed by Kate Whoriskey (at the Helen Hayes), about the staff of a run-down sandwich joint at a truck stop, takes a stark either-or stance regarding the lives of its characters. They spill their guts without much prompting, and, in the spilling, court intimacy—or, in the frustrating case of the title character, give nothing at all. Both approaches render surfaces rather than spirit.
Clyde (Uzo Aduba) is the badass, shit-talking, intermittently horny, sometimes violent proprietor of the roadside shop. She wears formfitting clothes that highlight her curves and pedestal her décolletage. Sex has something to do with her power—the passes she makes at her employees register as vague threats. She always wants the sandwiches to come out faster, and she has no patience for the culinary ambition that’s growing in the kitchen under her nose. She wants the basics, nothing more. Sometimes she shows up with odd gifts that might or might not be ill-gotten, the kind of stuff that euphemistically “falls off the back of a truck”—some olive oil from Central Europe, an inexplicable mess of wilted chard, a plastic bag full of sea bass in greenish liquid.
“The fish smells rank,” somebody says, to which Clyde replies, “You know my policy. If it ain’t brown or gray, it can be fried.” Fire up the skillet. A free beer for anybody who gets sick. That’s the kind of place this is.
Clyde is an ex-convict, and so are the people who work for her, a fact that she hangs over their heads like rain in a cloud at every opportunity—nobody else is going to hire them, so they’d better submit to her whims, however brutal. Tish (Kara Young, who spins great performances out of straw in every show I see her in) is a single mom saddled by a trifling, untrustworthy co-parent. Rafael (Reza Salazar) fumblingly pines for her. Jason (Edmund Donovan) is the new guy, initially quiet and sullen, marked up with white-supremacist tattoos. They’re all under the thrall of the sagelike Montrellous (Ron Cephas Jones), a kind of sandwich guru, who wants to jazz up the place with new recipes and more tender attention to ingredients. He leads the group in sessions of visualization and conjecture—what kind of sandwich can your mind conjure up?
Often, the sessions lead to bouts of confession—all the employees give up the goods on why they did time, even, eventually, Jason. This is supposed to deepen the bonds among them, and, perhaps, to offer a well of complexity not often granted to working-class people chewed up by the system and given a harsh set of choices: eat shit, starve, or go back in. But the life stories come between slapstick riffs on sandwich-making and kitchen etiquette—a bunch of well-performed gags—and as a result the play has trouble finding its tone. It’s hard to figure out how seriously to take the putatively tough moments in “Clyde’s,” or what to do with the biographies we’re offered. (Clyde’s own answer to anybody else’s suffering is to dismiss it. “I don’t do pity,” she says.) The lighting, by Christopher Akerlind, tries to indicate emotion—when Montrellous is rhapsodizing, he gets a fuchsia glow—but nothing that any character says steers the play in a new direction. Sad tales are divots for us to navigate between laughs.
Much of the problem lies with Clyde herself. In an early private moment, Clyde and Montrellous—who have a history that remains shrouded throughout the play—are arguing about the future of the shop. Montrellous lets slip that Clyde has fallen into “gambling debt,” and that the shop is somehow mixed up in the trouble. That’s the only thing we ever really learn—or, at least, think we learn—about Clyde. She rings a bell when new orders come in, appearing at the window to the kitchen all of a sudden, like a poltergeist at the climax of a horror flick. She rages through the kitchen, spewing just enough bile to get the objects of her tyranny complaining again, but she’s never subjected to the kind of scrutiny that makes watching a character worthwhile.
Uzo Aduba is one of my favorite televisual performers of recent years—as Suzanne (Crazy Eyes) Warren in Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black,” and as the therapist Brooke Taylor in the new season of HBO’s “In Treatment”—largely because she holds within her characters, and gradually reveals, many layers of tenderness and brokenness, irrationality and explosive pain. At her best, her eyes, deep with feeling, are like bowls left out in the rain, steadily filling up with the liquid stuff of personality. Here, those skills are tossed aside. Clyde toys with angry fear when her troubles come up, but she never revisits it. She’s like an ungenerous sketch-comedy depiction of a woman we want to meet, whom Aduba could, I think, play well: wrathful and dangerous, yes, but welling up and bubbling over with a past—and some drastic action—to justify it.
Speaking of justification, “Trouble in Mind”—the 1955 play by Alice Childress, now making its much belated début on Broadway (directed by Charles Randolph-Wright for Roundabout Theatre Company, at the American Airlines Theatre)—slowly unravels an aging actress named Wiletta (LaChanze), who is reluctantly exposed to an acting approach that asks her to find emotions to support the actions of her character. Her director, Al Manners (Michael Zegen), fancies himself a social and artistic progressive. The play they’re rehearsing, slated for Broadway, is about small-town Black folks who, because they want the right to vote, get threatened—and worse—by a gathering lynch mob.
Manners, who is white, thinks the play is on the cutting edge of race relations—at least, as close to that edge as the theatre’s commercial imperatives will allow. He pokes and prods Wiletta, expressing dissatisfaction with her performance as a mother whose son is in big trouble, asking her to “justify” her character’s decisions, not merely to act them out with rote professionalism. He’s trying to make high art out of a play he doesn’t know is offensive trash. The problem is that Wiletta’s got a real artist inside her—“I want to be an actress!” she says in the middle of a reverie—and she learns the new method a bit too well. She begins asking questions that the script, and her director, just can’t answer.
Wiletta starts out as a jaded veteran, advising a younger actor to laugh at the director’s jokes and tell little lies to pad his résumé. She’s not the only cynical one: her castmate Millie (the very funny Jessica Frances Dukes) is in a wry fury about how poorly she’s served by the roles she’s made to play. “Last show I was in, I wouldn’t even tell my relatives,” Millie says. “All I did was shout ‘Lord, have mercy!’ for almost two hours every night.” It’s a representational lament that sounds stale until you realize that the play was written more than sixty-five years ago.
“Trouble in Mind” is pessimistic about the structures that underpin the entertainment industry, but it is bullish about the possibilities of earnest artistic pursuit. Even a schmuck like Manners can read some Stanislavsky, bring it clumsily into rehearsals, and, unwittingly, spark the beginnings of a revolution. ♦
