Collective Consciousness Takes The Sharpest View

There’s a moment rather early in Fairview when a family is dancing together, performing steps and singing a song that they all remember. It’s an expression of joy, the strengthening of a familial bond. It’s silly and easy to like. But then Keisha, the youngest family member, steps away from her family and into a spotlight. She’s not having fun. She’s troubled. ​“My future just looks so big and bright, I can’t wait for it to hurry up and Get Here. I want to know all there is to know and be all there is to be,” she says. ​“But. But I feel like something is keeping me from all that. Something.… Yes, something is keeping me from what I could be. And that something. It thinks that it has made me who I am. It’s.… It’s just so confusing.”

Something’s off. Something’s wrong. And we’re just getting started.

Fairview — a 2018 play by Jackie Sibblies Drury that won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, among a few other awards, and is now running at Collective Consciousness Theatre through Nov. 19 — begins by setting in motion the story of a well-to-do Black family getting together to celebrate the birthday of their matriarch, who is, for the moment, confined to her bedroom. We meet Beverly (Jamie Guite), a classic eldest sibling, bustling about the house, trying to finish preparing dinner while also making sure all the details are just right. Her husband Dayton (Joshua Eaddy) helps her the best he can, doing some of the work while also making sure that Beverly stays on an even keel. Younger sister Jasmine (Marie R. Altenor) is less interested in helping than she is in possibly getting to the bottom of the bottle of wine she has bought. Maybe Beverly sees Jasmine as a bit of a screw-up. But even Beverly has to see that Jasmine has a deep connection, and an easy rapport, with Keisha (Kendall Driffin), Beverly’s daughter. Keisha is nearing the end of high school and looking to go to college. She’s also dating another girl, Erica, and is worried about how her grandmother will take it.

In short, the setup for Fairview has all the angles of a straightforward family drama. From the setup, we might think that this will be a play about differences in intergenerational values, and in intergenerational understandings about what it is to be Black in America. Then, while bringing a bowl of carrots back into the kitchen, Beverly drops the bowl and faints. The scene cuts to black. And resets. 

We are back at the beginning of the play, and the characters are going through the motions we’ve just seen, mouthing their lines, except that instead we hear other voices — White voices, Jimbo (Griffin Kulp), Mack (Nick Fetherston), Suze (Lisa DeAngelis), and Bets (April Lichtman) — starting a pointed conversation about race: specifically, as Jimbo says, ​“if you could choose to be a different race, what race would you be? Do you know what I mean?”

The Black family goes through its motions, voiceless. The conversation among the White voices continues. What is going on? Beverly faints again, as we have been waiting for, as we know she must. And here is where respect for what Drury has accomplished as a playwright, and what Collective Consciousness Theatre has brought to the stage, prevents me from saying anything else about what happens next.

Suffice it to say that it’s very easy to understand why Fairview won as many awards as it did, and this Collective Consciousness Theatre production, fiercely directed by Jenny Nelson, has done the play proud. The uniformly excellent cast commits fully to their roles. In the first half of the play, Guite, Eaddy, Altenor, and Driffin serve the comedy and the drama of their family situation in equal measure, and Driffin excels at the subtle breaking of the fourth wall that a few of her scenes require. When the drama resets, the actors nail the eeriness of having to see it again, accelerated, hurtling toward something, while Kulp, Fetherston, DeAngelis, and Lichtman lean into the casually aggressive and increasingly awkward conversation they have about race, a kind of reverse wish fulfillment in which a few of the characters say things with the nonchalance of people who know there will be no consequences to them for voicing their opinions. As usual, lighting designer Jamie Burnett and scenic designer David Sepulveda transform the theater’s space in Erector Square into a posh dining room that looks perhaps a little too tidy to be true. Costume designer Carol Koumbaros ably signals the way the play goes increasingly haywire.

After Beverly faints a second time, the play shifts, and shifts, and shifts, demanding increasingly more of its actors — especially Driffin, who shines in her earnestness, anger, and vulnerability. Without saying anything more specific, the play is challenging in the best possible sense. By the end, it has raised pointed, searing questions not only about race, class, and gender politics (which were in play from the first scene), but about the plot and character conventions that usually hold a play together, and the theater conventions that keep audiences in their seats. How do they work, and for whose benefit, and why?

Fairview is one of the most exciting pieces of theater this theatergoer has seen in several years, and with this production, coming off the heels of last season’s Barbecue, Collective Consciousness Theatre has cemented its place as a company that consistently punches way above its weight in its fearless choices and ability to deliver. Go see it.

Fairview runs at Collective Consciousness Theatre, Erector Square, 319 Peck St., through Nov. 19. Visit the theater’s website for tickets.