Arts, Entertainment, Living OnStage God and tragedy in three strong plays in Pitt...
RSS: 
I was on KDKA-TV this morning for my usual Thursday gig, when I try to cover the highpoints of current theater in four or five minutes – impossible, of course. So I gabbled lickety-split about “Jesus Hopped the A Train” at barebones (take note: ends this weekend!), “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” at Kuntu (ends Feb. 4) and “Through the Night” at City (ends Feb. 5).
(You can watch me on KD -- click this link. Ignore the headline that comes up and the short commercial, and there it is.)
Although I didn’t say it, because maybe it sounds like a downer, it occurred to me that all three are . . . tragedies. (You thought I was going to say African American, right? More about that later.)
Well, “Through the Night” isn’t quite a tragedy, but it’s poised right on the edge of tragedy, with a 50-50 chance of . . . no, I don’t want to give that away. But you know how “Ma Rainey” ends, right? With Levee and Toledo posed like the Pieta at mid-stage? (Or they would be if Slow Drag didn’t obscure the ending with an unnecessary cross right by them, blurring that essential final image.) And the ending of “A Train,” which has by then whipsawed us through several unforeseeable turns of event/character/fate, certainly registers as tragic to me, though I might get an argument from someone religiously bent.
And then there’s God, in all three. He/she features very much in “Ma Rainey” (in absentia, says Levee), and one of the characters in “Through the Night” is a preacher, much concerned with the deity. But God is right at the center of “A Train,” where the two central characters debate his/her nature and existence.
So the three plays speak to each other in different ways. Good plays always do, but this trio could almost have been chosen with each other in mind.
And yes, two of the plays are black, while “A Train” features one black character and two Hispanic. In the old days you might have chalked this up the imminence of February, aka Black History Month, as it used to be called (or is it still?), an invention of political correctness that also had a whiff of ghettoizing about it.
Now, I think it’s just a coincidence: three strong plays at the same time.
Subscribe to this comment's feed
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|