Bruce Norris sets his bitter comedy of post-colonial race and economic relations in the villa of Nancy (newly blond company favorite Naomi Jacobson) and Don (Charles H. Hyman), somewhere in West Africa. It’s a comfortable, attractive place, but we can just see—at extreme stage right—the strands of razor wire that surround the compound.
Don is an industrialist with a mutualistic relationship to “Aunty” Mimi (the versatile Dawn Ursula), representative of the current government and member of the native aristocracy. When Don opens his house to Dave (Tim Getman) and Jane (Marni Penning), missionaries in matching sunburst tee-shirts, after their school and dwelling burn down under mysterious circumstances, the principals square off in a hard-edged geometry of vexed entitlement. Each character clings to the right to expropriate or civilize, as he or she sees fit, the grindingly-poor people of this equatorial backwater.
There’s more than a whiff of Tennessee Williams in Norris’s play, what with the Big Daddy-like Don nursing a secret heart ailment; the tropical setting; and the comic foil of The Doctor (the very enjoyable John Livingston Rolle), a local who has escaped into smoking pot but who is wise enough to know when to prescribe only a placebo.
It’s the passive-aggressive churchman Dave who provides the tautness to the story in the first act. Dave, when asked whether he objects to another’s smoking, says only “It’s not a problem for me,” with a lightly-veiled supercilious smirk. And yet it’s Dave who seems to have the most realistic grasp of the situation, and who cautions against do-gooders who want only “easy Jesus.” So when Dave goes missing at the end of the first act, the narrative comes unglued, as the remainder bicker over the severity of the response needed to ensure his return.
The play is framed by the fourth wall-breaking monlogues of Etienne (Kofi Owusu), a punk who may be involved in the arson. He tells us that the play is no good, that we’d be better off watching something entertaining on television. Though we can’t agree with him completely, he’s a good reminder that we haven’t fixed any problems by sitting in a theater box for two hours.
- The Unmentionables, by Bruce Norris, directed by Pam MacKinnon, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington