“A Playwright’s Fictions Stay Close to Real Life - New York Times” |
| A Playwright’s Fictions Stay Close to Real Life - New York Times Posted: CHICAGO — Midway through the second of the three "Trinity River Plays" at the Goodman Theater here, a small moment takes place that is hauntingly familiar to anyone with an elderly parent. Rose, played by Penny Johnson Jerald, who is weakened by ovarian cancer, has gone to the kitchen to boil water for oatmeal. But she is too frail to handle the kettle, which slips from her grasp. Her 34-year-old daughter, Iris, played by Karen Aldridge, rushes in, telling her mother to sit down and let her make the cereal. "I'm the mama, I'm the mama," Rose insists, asserting her matriarchal status. The words ring true for the playwright Regina Taylor, perhaps better known as the Emmy-nominated actress in the 1990s television series "I'll Fly Away," and, more recently, for her role in "The Unit." Ms. Taylor wrote "The Trinity River Plays," named for the river that winds through her hometown, Dallas, after the death of her mother five years ago from the same disease. Though she calls it a work of fiction, "In my own journey, in becoming who I want to be, you do have to embrace the good and the bad," said Ms. Taylor, who turned 50 last year. "You have to go back and wrestle with the past, and embrace it." A three-hour, three-act story, "The Trinity River Plays," directed by Ethan McSweeny, opened at the Goodman on Jan. 23 as a co-production with the Dallas Theater Center, which mounted it last fall. The play, which runs here until Sunday, is divided into "Jar Fly," which depicts Iris at 17; "Rain," the longest section, focusing largely on Rose and Iris; and "Ghoststory," in which Iris confronts her past and her relationship with her estranged husband. Reviews have praised the work's intensity and richly drawn characters, while taking issue with its length. "In tone, dialogue, characterization and clarity, this trio of interlocking plays mark a real breakthrough" for Ms. Taylor as a playwright, the critic Hedy Weiss wrote in The Chicago Sun-Times. But Chris Jones, the chief theater critic for The Chicago Tribune, found the production "a long, meandering opus in desperate need of a vigorous, clear-eyed edit." Yet, Mr. Jones added, "it's the kind of emotional, revealing play many of us feel like writing after suffering through the life-upending death of a loved one." The current version has evolved considerably from what Ms. Taylor showed Robert Falls, the artistic director of the Goodman, three years ago. "Rain," the first section she completed, was a "very spare, small play — four characters and sort of minimalism of language," said Mr. Falls, who has known Ms. Taylor for nearly two decades. "It was only the bones of the play, but the bones were so solid that you could add veins and blood and muscle and tissue, and it would ultimately become something full and whole." A spokeswoman for the Goodman said that producers from other regional theaters had been coming to see the trilogy and that she expected that it would be performed elsewhere in future seasons. The piece marks Ms. Taylor's 11th production as an actress, director or playwright with the Goodman, where she has been an artistic associate for the last 17 seasons. Until last summer, when she moved permanently to Chicago, she had divided her time throughout her career among Los Angeles for television roles, New York and Chicago for theater productions, and Dallas, where she cared for her mother before her death. Ms. Taylor's acting, writing and directing lives have intertwined since the 1980s. In New York she was the first African-American to play Juliet on Broadway — in a 1986 "Romeo and Juliet" produced by Joseph Papp — and she has appeared in a variety of movies for the large and small screens, among them Spike Lee's 1995 "Clockers" and the 1999 Showtime television film "Strange Justice," in which she portrayed Anita Hill. Her plays, an eclectic list, include the 2000 "Oo-Bla-Dee," about four black female musicians in 1946 who dream of becoming bebop stars; the musical "Crowns," which she adapted and directed, about the tradition and symbolism of elaborate Sunday church hats that some black women wear; and "Drowning Crow," her adaptation of Chekhov's "Seagull," set in 2004 in the Sea Islands of South Carolina and presented on Broadway in 2004 by the Manhattan Theater Club. Her most recent Goodman production, "Magnolia," an update of "The Cherry Orchard," set in 1960s Atlanta, had its premiere in 2009. Ms. Weiss, like a number of critics, has had mixed reactions to Ms. Taylor's playwriting, as she stated in her review of "The Trinity River Plays": "Instead of the often opaque or chokingly politically correct work of seasons past (from 'Drowning Crow' to 'Magnolia'), this three-hour trilogy, which is clearly more than a little autobiographical, gives us a revealing, deeply intimate, 'hang out the dirty laundry' look at crucial aspects of Taylor's past. In the process, she seems to have liberated herself as a writer and discovered a far more direct, accessible, overtly emotional way into her audience's heart." In an interview last month at the Goodman, Ms. Taylor explained why she preferred to work in more than one discipline. "I like exploring different ways of expression," she said, "the acting, the writing, the directing, even cooking a meal." Food plays a role in "The Trinity River Plays," as do gardening and writing, which Ms. Taylor said she had done since she was 6. "Jar Fly," the trilogy's first section, explores the yearnings of a 17-year-old in the 1970s, when possibilities were opening up for young African-Americans that their parents might have found unimaginable. The title is a colloquial name for the cicada — some species of which take wing every 17 years, an interval that resonates in the trilogy — which Iris is writing about in her application to Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where Ms. Taylor also studied. Iris's free-spirited cousin Jasmine, meanwhile, who has dropped out of high school, wants to become a "Soul Train" dancer on television. Jasmine, Iris's Aunt Daisy and Daisy's husband, Ray Earl, are living with Iris at her mother's home for the summer while Rose is away, training for a job. The neat atomic ranch-style home, with its vivid garden, is where Iris reveals her crush on Jack, a classmate and athlete whom she has been tutoring. But her cousin dons a flaming-red outfit and patent-leather boots and steals Jack's attention. Iris's innocence also is stolen, and the effects of that summer are still felt in the second play, "Rain," when Iris, who has become a successful New York writer, returns 17 years later to discover that her mother has fallen ill. In the final play, "Ghoststory," Iris confronts the effects of her mother's death and of Iris's 17th summer on her own life. "Here is the first chance to see this writer, who is gifted, elusive and congenitally inclined to retreat into florid metaphor when things get too intense, begin to open up and confront her own demons," wrote Mr. Jones of The Tribune. But Ms. Taylor, soft-spoken and exquisitely polite, would not declare the production a turning point. An admirer of the jazz great Miles Davis, she noted that for decades he kept progressing beyond his landmark albums, "Kind of Blue" and "Sketches of Spain." "He did not stop at one sound," Ms. Taylor said. In the same way, she added, her plays are "markers along the way." This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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