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“A small town in a small country in the middle of nowhere,” where abortionists are tolerated but forced to wear clothes that reveal the scarlet A seared to their flesh, where there are more people in prison than aren’t, where sex workers can sell exclusive rights to their persons to the highest or most powerful bidder, where hunters run down anyone accused of anything and submit them to vicious forms of torture, for money and amusement. Is this fiction or simply a slight exaggeration of current tendencies?
In Pulitzer-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’ Fucking A — playing through Oct. 27 at the Yale University Theater as the first show of the three-show student season at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale — the setting is dystopian, the comedy rather dark, and the sense of theatrics fascinating. Directed by Bobbin Ramsey, a fourth-year MFA candidate in directing, the show aims high in an attempt to live up to Ramsey’s call for “visceral theatricality, the creation of communal experiences, and complex stories to create a more just, connected, and compassionate world through art.”
Those words are from the show’s playbill. In an email exchange, Ramsey shared her remarks from the production’s meet and greet that expand on the attraction of Parks’ harrowing and comic fantasia: “I often gravitate to plays that show the world, and humanity, at its worst. In reflecting, I’ve come to realize that these types of plays test — and exhibit — the resilience of the human spirit,” Ramsey said, “’Freedom ain’t free’ is the motto of this place. Every person in this play is affected by this oppression, which gives us a rich set of complex and contradictory characters. There are no heroes in this story, but there are people who are doing what it takes to survive, in body and spirit.”
It’s a good point — because those who need heroes to be somehow superlative if flawed will find that Parks’ play is more attuned to stories of the down-and-out, people who, as one song says, are “at the bottom of the barrel.” Survival, with some shred of humor and dignity, is the best most of these characters can hope for. The key figure, seared with that telltale A, is Hester Smith (Giovanna Drummond) a put-upon abortionist who lives for one great hope: that she will one day free her son — Boy Smith (Tré Scott) — from prison. So she pays into a “freedom fund” and, in the meantime, hopes to afford a picnic with him. That brief furlough would let her lay eyes on a son she hasn’t seen for 30 years. He was locked up as a child, we learn, when another child — the daughter of Hester’s employers at the time — snitched on him for stealing some food from their kitchen. Since then, in his letters, Boy tells how he is always being blamed for some new infraction in prison that adds more and more time to his sentence. Hester, with a Mother Courage-like resilience, believes in his unimpeachable goodness.
And that’s good because to most of the town’s inhabitants, Boy is known as Monster, and he’s accused of almost any horrendous act you might care to imagine. Part of the play’s contradictory complexity that Ramsey spoke of comes from the fact that, while characters have names that suggest archetypal status, the characters themselves break through the simple assignment of epithets with their own sense of purpose or resistance. Names such as Hester, borrowed from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel The Scarlet Letter, or Boy, or Monster, or Canary Mary (Augustine Lorrie) for her trademark canary-yellow dress — or Butcher (Ariyan Kassam) or Scribe (Michael Allyn Crawford) or The First Lady (Anna Roman) can all be inflected by actions and songs. As Ramsey said, “an ‘archetype’ is a set of societal expectations that a character is expected to fulfill. The beauty of these characters … is that they insist on existing beyond the bounds of these descriptors (e.g. of a ‘Noble Mother’ or her ‘Wayward Son’).”
Caroline Tyson, a second-year MFA candidate for costume design, addressed the challenge of creating costumes “that lend some humanity to characters with intentionally dehumanizing names,” and spoke of wanting “to avoid ‘poverty porn’” by “focus[ing] on portraying hard-working people who do what they can with what they have and maintain a sense of dignity, rather than creating a Dickensian caricature of abject suffering.” The show’s visual aesthetic is richly served by such concerns. Patti Panyakaew, a second-year MFA candidate in scenic design, has built what Ramsey called “a structural behemoth of a set” that is stylized but functional, where slabs of meat hang to indicate Butcher’s shop, where a bed and a balcony conjure the upscale lives of the Mayor (Michael Allyn Crawford) and First Lady, and where clothes — such as the special framed A Hester wears — are, for Tyson, “pre-made” to enforce the roles these characters are made to assume in their society.
Then there are the musical instruments, some at the back of the stage, some set up in rooms on the set, some brought on when performance is required. And music — shaped by the music direction, orchestration and additional music of Liam Bellman-Sharpe, an alum of the Yale program — is a key element of Parks’s theater here. The songs, very Brechtian in flavor, are wonderfully charged occasions to let the characters say how they feel about their assigned roles. Hester’s “Working Woman Song” lays it all out there at the start of the show, and Giovanna Drummond is perfectly cast to give us the toughness and vulnerability of this somewhat naïve but driven woman; likewise “My Vengeance,” the song that closes the first act, gives us a feeling of foreboding even as it suggests the kind of agency that Ramsey’s production underscores.
Other standout numbers include Canary Mary’s song — Augustine Lorrie’s singing voice is a great asset throughout — and the haunting song Boy/Monster sings late in the play: “You’d think it’d be hard / To make something horrid / It’s easy,” an aside on how, as Tyson put it, “people we are quick to call monsters are merely an inevitable byproduct of an environment that we ourselves have created.” As the song’s lyrics say: “A small bit of hate / In your heart will inflate / And that’s so much more than enough / To make you a monster.” Tyson mentioned Greek tragedy as an element of the play and that’s the sense that came through to me in the end; the way, for instance, Euripides gives us stories that show human passions and flaws not to lead us to some great moral but to show that human action is full of ironic twists, of blindness and insight, and that even those in power generally fail to achieve their desire.
Another telling element is language. Parks, certainly one of the most consistently excellent playwrights of her generation, has created for the lower-class women a unique pidgin that is called simply “talk.” It’s a somewhat playful way for women to speak of their sexuality, body parts, and unflattering perceptions. So we don’t miss their meaning, subtitles are projected in easy-to-read spaces (Doaa Ouf, co-artistic director of Yale Cabaret Season 56 and a second-year MFA candidate, is projection designer). This means the various levels of speech used for female experience — from slang to textbook terms — get scrawled on the stage, viscerally.
And, finally, there’s a wonderful aria delivered by Ariyan Kassam as Butcher, speaking of his wayward daughter, that shows Parks’s sense of humor, which is both puckish and punk. Reminiscent of Lucky’s long speech in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (which Ramsey once staged on a pier in Seattle), Butcher’s litany isn’t a rant, but rather a careful listing of every infraction he can call to mind, providing both comic relief and an escalating sense of how almost any individual behavior, any slight originality or deviance, can be a thought crime or a flaunting of a freedom that, in the world Parks and this resourceful team at Yale create, must be paid for, somehow. Fucking A.
Fucking A runs at the University Theater, 222 York St., through Oct. 27. Visit the school of drama’s website for tickets and more information.