Joan Marcus Photo
War. Huh! What is it good for? Well, War—the new play by the hotshot young playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, getting its world premiere at the Yale Rep through Dec. 13 — is good for starting arguments.
The dysfunctional multicultural family drama offers sharp opinions on African-American heritage, World War II Germany, cultural assimilation, Barack Obama, work, the meaning of life, and a dizzying range of marital or family relationships. If that’s not enough for you, some of the most sympathetic voices in War belong to monkeys.
“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life explaining myself to white people” are just some of the fighting words uttered by Tate, War’s irrepressible and perpetually pissed-off main character. He’s just arrived at the hospital where his mother, Roberta, is unconscious and recovering from a stroke. Tate can’t sit still long enough to get basic information about his mother’s condition before he’s berating his sister Joanne, insulting the charming nurse, and fending off a couple mysterious visitors who claim to be Roberta’s blood relations — though no one else in the family has ever heard of them.
As the play unwinds, Tate never does. He’s leaving his political campaigning job, an important relationship in his life has ended, he’s pulling up stakes and moving, and his mother is dying. While it’s obvious to others, he can’t seem to put the total spectrum of loss and change into perspective for himself — and he’s impatient and obnoxious when Joanne and Malcolm, Joanne’s well-meaning husband, bring it up.
It’s exhilarating to hear such intense arguments between people who have such trouble understanding each other. Jacobs-Jenkins creates distinct voices for his characters, and seems to exult in their exasperation. In one scene, Tate unspools an argument about racial identity that Malcolm caps with this: “So Obama is not African-American…. but that is no reason to quit your job.”
“Obama is not why I’m quitting my job,” Tate replies. “My mother is sick.”
“I’m being provocative,” Malcolm says.
“Being annoying is not being provocative,” Tate says.
The biggest declaration of War, however, has nothing to do with how the characters communicate and everything to do with how they don’t. Joanne and Malcolm are happily married and sharing a happy secret about their future. They parry and fend off Tate’s harshest verbal blows, and survive them mostly because they exist on a whole separate plane from him.
But that distancing is nothing compared to what Roberta, the mother everyone has gathered around, experiences. She can’t wake or speak on the mortal plane. Yet she delivers stirring monologues from a spiritual realm, where she communes with apes — a change in consciousness nailed by Mariana Sanchez Hernandez’s ingenious set design, which literally folds and crumples the stark white walls and floors of the hospital room into a new netherworld-friendly space. Roberta also walks up to her children and tell them how she feels about them, but they can’t hear or respond.
Then there are the apes themselves, with their crude sign language and curious natures. There are also the German interlopers Elfriede and her son Tobias, who don’t speak much English and are too agitated to speak calmly and clearly even if they did.
In the way its natural human drama is augmented by almost supernatural subplots, War resembles the work of David Lindsay-Abaire, whose Fuddy Meers has a lead female character whose mental state causes her to enter a different realm. But Jacobs-Jenkins is also working in the grand tradition of Eugene O’Neill and the Greek playwrights who inspired him. War alternates between blistering familial confrontations and more tranquil monologues, in which time stops to let the characters fully express themselves without interruption.
Director Lileana Blain-Cruz, who graduated from the Yale School of Drama in 2011 and has known Jacobs-Jenkins for a decade, was acclaimed during her Yale years for her exceptional skill with ensembles, from Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew to Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights to Wilde’s Salome. Blain-Cruz’s proven talents for deftly shifting a play’s moods and textures, and finding and enhancing each actor’s strengths, are much needed here — and fall short. Some scenes are played naturalistically and conversationally when they might have much greater effect as stand-alone outbursts directed at the audience. Bolder presentational choices could have been made. In some cases, the actors don’t seem up to the changes in pacing, volume, and emotion.
Donte Bonner curiously underplays the hotheaded Tate, and doesn’t find the throughline that makes his character believable. He conveys Tate’s intelligence, but doesn’t curse and scream convincingly. Tonya Pinkins, the much-lauded New York theater and soap opera star, is the one performer whose monologues aren’t being constantly interrupted by other people. But her transitions from the blistering hospital rages of her offspring to the comparatively tranquil astral monkey house she finds herself in require a certain amount of initial, scene-establishing oomph that Pinkins does not deliver. The German contingent — Trezana Beverley as frail, confused Elfriede and Philippe Bowgen as Tobias, who equals Tate in the take-no-guff department — make great entrances but often overstay their welcomes. Beverley’s Elfriede wanders about in quiet disarray while Bowgen’s Tobias erupts in manic alcoholic overload. But when they have to hold a sustained conversation and impart important information, the words bog down. Tyrone Mitchell Henderson as both nurse and head ape, Rachael Holmes as Joanne, and Greg Keller as Malcolm offer stalwart support and get plenty of pithy words in edgewise, though their main roles are to provide convenient targets for the verbal abuse of others.
You don’t expect a show like this, with its suspenseful death-and-mystery plot, its major pronouncements about the state of the world today, and its attempt to connect its characters’ troubles with centuries of mistreatment of Africans by Europeans and Americans, to be fluid. You do want it to be less disjointed, though. War talks the talk, but its strategy lacks focus, and it loses some of its key battles for clarity.
War plays through Dec. 13 at the Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel St. Performances are Tuesday through Saturday at 8 p.m., with 2 p.m. matinees on Dec. 3, 6, & 13. (203) 432‑1234.