| Certainly FAIRVIEW is bold and surprising. And while this counts for a lot--so little theatre is really startling--I was hoping for something more coherent and, in a way, more incendiary. The play has three stages and each of them incite very different feeling responses. It moves from vaguely unsettling at first to tedious to outrageous--and very funny--to its daring but blurry conclusion. Its arguments are most compelling when they're seditiously enacted. But the race mayhem is leavened with a heavy dose of academically inflected posturing and this impedes the play's momentum. While FAIRVIEW does finally take off, it lands somewhere between a plea and an indictment and, to my mind, neither is forceful enough. Still, it's a rigorous, intentional work that holds its own in a growing catalogue of plays that depict aspects of America's unreconstructed, so to speak, race problem. |
