KILL FLOOR is well written and performed, but it doesn't develop. It's a commendable first play but the obvious dedication to naturalism becomes distracting when it's unaccompanied by any real dramatic incident or motion. I was focused more on the talented actors, Marin Ireland especially, and their impressive, sober precision than any purpose the playwright had in mind. The play drifts along, a trail of character observations, and then it ends. It's all speech and no content.
CLOUD NINE, on the other hand, brims with both. If there's a better play on the correspondences between colonial oppression and varieties of sexual oppression, I don't know it. Every character here is bound to or by some cultural imperative pertaining to class, sex, or gender, and then, in Act II, the binds loosen and all sorts of possibilities for freedom, for prerogative, emerge. At every moment, and in every direction, Churchill's speech is entirely purposeful; it's action itself. And the actors here are splendid throughout. Unfortunately, the play has been put in the round for no compelling reason that I could discern. Consequently, the audience must "bear," as a program note puts it, a seating arrangement that is so uncomfortable it's compromising. In any case, CLOUD NINE remains a sly and savvy provocation that seems almost entirely of our present cultural moment even as it was written 37 years ago.
BARBECUE is another roguish affront, but it's less cohesive. Act I is a raucous race--and class--comedy that subverts expectations even as it trades in them. At its surprising finish the play seems ready to burst into something really startling, a real situation comedy, but instead it dwindles. What has been daring about the play, what's been specific about it, becomes a familiar warning about the cults of money and celebrity and the deceptions enacted to join them, a caution that's less interesting than, and has little to do with, what came before. Robert O'Hara writes vernacular speech that is nasty funny, but he hasn't yet found a thematic idea that he can elaborate and sustain. BOOTYCANDY, delirious as it was, had a similar problem. Both plays are wholly worthwhile, but I expect O'Hara is just warming up.
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