Face Off Theatre’s recent production of “Sunset Baby” was staged this past weekend in the Nelda Balch Theatre at Kalamazoo College’s Festival Playhouse. WMUK’s Gordon Bolar has this review.
Sunset Baby is the story of former Black Panther and released prisoner, Kenyatta, who, in later life attempts reconciliation with grown daughter, Nina, shortly after the loss of her drug-addicted mother.
In telling this tale, playwright Dominique Morisseau’s script examines downstream generational consequences for a long-subsided revolutionary struggle by Nina’s black activist father and her late mother, an author who chronicled the couple’s heady fight for freedom back in the seventies.
Most of the action is centered around a gritty three-way struggle between Kenyatta, (Ron Ware), his daughter Nina, played by Mikaela Johnson, and her partner in nightly crime, Damon, portrayed by Delanti Hall. Strong and riveting performances by Ware, Johnson and Hall hold the audience’s attention, and underscore what’s at stake for each as they plot to dupe one another.
The result of this complex interaction is a rewarding but sometimes challenging evening in the theatre that provides revelatory insights into the life altering choices made by three characters.
The focus of each member of this trio is an undelivered packet of letters written to Kenyatta, by Nina’s mother. The letters, in Nina’s control throughout the play, have allegedly significant monetary worth from would-be publishers. More importantly, the letters represent Nina’s emotional and spiritual legacy from her mother, a ticket out of the ghetto for Damon, and the potential catalyst for Kenyatta’s redemption and self-forgiveness.
The long over-due meeting between father and daughter begins with Nina’s grudging admittance of Kenyatta into her cramped urban apartment. The dialogue in their electrically charged initial encounter is succinct, abrupt, and filled with invectives from Nina against Kenyatta. Johnson, as Nina, is an actor who can stick a cold insult or turn a frigid shoulder to a fellow player on stage with the authority of the iceberg that sunk the Titanic.
As Nina, Johnson is believable as a stick-up artist and as one skilled in lying straight-faced to men in dark alleys or to both Kenyatta and Damon. Frequent musical interludes from namesake, Nina Simone, reinforce the sullen moods and strident rants of her prickly character.
Delanti Hall, as Damon, is a gifted actor. He is in firm control of several frank monologues, that help delineate his fully rounded character and role in the neighborhood he inhabits. As he negotiates with Kenyatta for exchange of the letters, he compares his style of armed activism and plans for wealth redistribution, with Kenyatta’s efforts for social advancement back in the day.
Later Hall shows us the vulnerable side of his character, as he exposes his Achilles heel: an awareness of his failure to be a reliable father for his eight-year-old son. As this poignant admission is overheard by Nina, we join her in connecting the dots within the silent comparison she is making between her lover, Damon, unable to express direct affection for his son, and her own lifelong absent father. Part of Morisseau’s skill as a playwright is to leave her audience to make these connections in the words unsaid, or in silences and gaps between her characters’ lines.
That is difficult and challenging work to effect onstage. Here Director Marissa Harrington’s production succeeds.
Although at times Ron Ware’s vocal level prevents him from filling the Kalamazoo College Festival Playhouse, he is effective in his portrayal of a character who has difficulty speaking his inner thoughts and feelings to others. At times Ware’s Kenyatta can only put up his hands in defense or cover his face to stifle angry words when pushed to the wall by his daughter.
When confronted with Nina’s pointed pistol as she demands a profession of love that Kenyatta could not say to her mother, Ware’s character shakes his head in silence.
Following that failure of emotional expression, Nina asks the play’s most haunting question: “Why are we all so dead inside?” Kenyatta can only reply in a whisper: “I don’t know.”
The full weight of the play’s impact comes to its audience slowly and near its very end. The subject of “Sunset Baby” is the intimacy that is missing among familial relationships. These are the intimate feelings that no character can express directly or face to face- from lover to lover, father to daughter, or father to son. These are the feelings that can only be expressed in fugitive traces and from afar, in the grainy pixels of an apologetic video clip, or hidden between the lines of a coveted letter, long withheld, as if by spite.
“Sunset Baby” isn’t really about the seeds of failed revolution. It’s about the seeds of failed love. Love that may itself, stand in need of revolution.