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    Review: In ‘La Race,’ a Fight Back From the Margins

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    Bleu Beckford-Burrell’s play about a City Council campaign aims to catalog a gamut of social ills and how Black women rise to meet them.What does it take to speak up for your community? In “La Race,” which opened at the McGinn/Cazale Theater on Monday night, the question is both practical and personal. For a reluctant candidate running a grassroots campaign in the Far Rockaway neighborhood of Queens, the race is more of an impetus for self-reflection than a quest for power. In order to speak for anyone, the play suggests, you first have to find your voice.It’s 2017, liberal resistance is in the air and residents of the coastal district have been pushed so far to the margins that they are practically falling off the map. Beloved by beachgoing New Yorkers and encroached upon by developers, Far Rockaway is also home to low- and middle-income people feeling the creep of gentrification — represented here by the arrival of Le Sea Bean, a comically bougie cafe where a latte costs $13. That’s where Maxine (Naomi Lorrain) goes to do some enemy reconnaissance after she loses a personal assistant gig, leaving her searching for renewed purpose.Her devoted friend and roommate A.J. (Shaunette Renée Wilson), a staunch warrior against all manner of oppression, is urging Max to run for City Council and be an advocate for the area’s underserved constituents. Max’s knee-jerk hesitance gives way as A.J. rounds up a campaign team, including A.J.’s admirer Trey (Christopher B. Portley); Uriel (Auberth Bercy), a silly-sweet barista who works multiple jobs; and Dejani (Stacey Sargeant), who’s looking to earn goodwill points in a custody battle for her children. Each character’s investment in rallying around Max, and its relation to their personal back story, comes to light over the course of the play with varying degrees of clarity.Like Max, who articulates her platform in a broad-ranging spoken-word poem addressing everything from police violence and consumer capitalism to big pharma, the playwright Bleu Beckford-Burrell swings big, aiming to catalog a gamut of social ills by illustrating how they affect — and meet defiance from — Black women. Max’s visits to a psychologist (also played by Sargeant, in a skillful double turn) demonstrate the mental and emotional burdens she carries, as well as her tendency to bear responsibility for them, before a breakthrough helps her recognize the extent to which they are shared and systemic.Taking up untold stories can be unwieldy, and “La Race” would benefit from more streamlined character development and a sharper focus. At just over two and a half hours, the halting progress of community organizing starts to drag, while Max’s romantic involvement with a white man (Vince Nappo) feels like an easy contrivance to generate conflict neatly reflecting social tensions. Even Max herself can seem like a totem, despite disclosing her feelings in periodic therapy sessions, another on-the-nose device.The production, from Page 73 and Working Theater, is a feat of versatile and often witty design by Arnulfo Maldonado, whose set goes from a living room to an open-mic night to a day at the beach with clever ease, and with remarkable work from lighting designers Stacey Derosier and Bailey Costa. The director Taylor Reynolds, and the wholly appealing cast, create an engaging sense of place and affinity, such that “La Race” is perhaps, above all, a love letter to the very idea of a neighborhood. Take a step back, and it’s also an argument for coexistence and democracy, even at the edge of the world.La RaceThrough Dec. 23 at the McGinn/Cazale Theater, Manhattan; page73.org. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More

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      ‘Patience’ Review: At the Top of His Game, and Lonely

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      Johnny G. Lloyd’s new play about a solitaire champion examines talent, ambition and the rising stakes of success when you’re Black.The most powerful line in “Patience,” Johnny G. Lloyd’s new play about Black excellence, comes not from the world-champion solitaire player at its center but rather from a teenage opponent quietly eyeing the champ’s crown, skilled and ferocious and determined to dethrone him.“I’m not going to apologize for wanting to dominate,” she says. “I’m not going to apologize for making myself lethal.” And then comes the vital bit, landing like a punch: “I’m not going to apologize for losing, because one day I will be winning and winning and winning.”That’s the thing about the path to success, isn’t it — that talented people need to be allowed to stumble sometimes, then continue their quest. “Patience” itself is a case in point. Part of the Second Stage Theater Uptown series dedicated to emerging playwrights and early-career artists, the show isn’t a win for Lloyd and his director, Zhailon Levingston, but it’s hardly a wipeout either.Daniel Bryant (Justiin Davis), the play’s 25-year-old Black superstar, hasn’t stumbled in a very long time. Two decades ago, he exhibited a talent for solitaire, and his mother (Mary E. Hodges), who is also his manager, has been nurturing it ever since. Undefeated for four years running, he is focused, famous and alone at the top.Solitaire is an obscure choice of game to graft onto those glittery circumstances, but Lloyd is thinking figuratively — about a competition in which one’s true opponent is oneself, and about the pressure and isolation of being an only.Daniel is so adept at flying solo in his cosseted life that his adorable fiancé, Jordan (the immensely likable and funny Jonathan Burke), has a very specific, not-unreasonable-sounding fear: that one day the phone will ring and on the other end will be someone who works for Daniel, calling to dump him on Daniel’s behalf. Though he and Jordan have just bought a fancy new house, their relationship feels less than solid, and anyway, Daniel is a living-in-the-moment kind of guy.“The future is terrifying,” he says.On the fence about what should come next, he is tempted to retire — until the 18-year-old up-and-comer Ella (Zainab Barry) appears on the scene, threatening his dominance with her own Black excellence. Daniel’s mother, understandably frightened that her career will collapse if he stops playing, encourages a match between them without mentioning a crucial fact: She has taken on Ella as a client, too.Does that seem like an implausible conflict of interest and egregious betrayal of trust? Yes. Are we meant to give Daniel’s mother (the character’s name is simply Mother) a pass? Apparently. It’s a distracting complication that seems manufactured, and not for any clear reason — not even after the play’s Venus-and-Serena theme becomes overt.You will be primed for that motif early on, when Daniel tells a class of high schoolers that he has “been called the Venus Williams of solitaire,” and you think: Venus, really? Not Serena? Then Daniel’s friend, Nikita (Nemuna Ceesay), mentions that same fact about him, unnecessarily.When Ella happens to have the same surname as Daniel, though they’re not related, it seems tailored to the Williams sisters metaphor, in which of course she is Serena. On the plus side, the coincidence of their both being Bryants does allow Ella to make a pointed observation.“Very popular name,” she says. “Could go into why, if we really wanted to. Probably something depressing. Or — colonial.”Competition approaches: Zainab Barry as Ella in the background, and Davis with Mary E. Hodges, who plays his mother-manager. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt the McGinn/Cazale Theater on the Upper West Side, “Patience” has an across-the-board appealing cast, and the show is beautifully designed, except for an unpersuasive late scene involving the illusion of two Daniels. (Set by Lawrence E. Moten III, costumes by Avery Reed, lights by Adam Honoré, sound by Christopher Darbassie.)Ultimately, though, the play’s balance is off, as if it can’t decide whether Daniel anchors it, or if Daniel and Ella do, or if maybe the show wants to be an ensemble piece.Its heart, though, is invested in a future in which Black megatalents like Daniel and Ella — or Venus and Serena — don’t have to occupy the pinnacle of their field one at a time.“I will not be intimidated by the competition,” Ella vows. “I will welcome it, I will not try to crush it, I will encourage it, I will make room. I will make room and I will still win. Because I know there can be more than one.”PatienceThrough Aug. 28 at the McGinn/Cazale Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      ‘53% Of’ Review: Zinging Pro-Trump Women, and Everyone Else

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      A new comedy by Steph Del Rosso starts as a satire of conservatives, then takes aim at progressives. Too bad the jokes barely cut either side.In America, to vote in a federal election is to commit a secret act. One votes in private, in a curtained booth, on intimate terms with an oversize ballot. But little in American public life stays private for long.Exit polls soon provide precise demographic breakdowns, illuminating just who voted for whom. Perhaps you remember this statistic from back in 2016: Despite the “locker-room talk,” to say nothing of the accusations of groping, forced kissing and assault, 53 percent of white women voted for Donald J. Trump. The fitful new comedy “53% Of,” by Steph Del Rosso at Second Stage’s uptown space, takes that data point as inspiration. (Corrected metrics later showed it was more like 47 percent, but whatever.)The play begins in a middle-class living room, embellished with “Home Sweet Home” throw pillows and an outsize American flag. The setting is a small city in Pennsylvania. The time is wine o’clock. Four white women, members of a local conservative club called the Women for Freedom and Family Group, have met to toast Trump’s win and to make plans for his visit to their city. They’re joined by a fifth white woman, PJ (Eden Malyn), who arrives in a sweatshirt bearing the Confederate flag. That sweatshirt upsets the other women because it says the quiet part — the racism that undergirds their politics — loud and proud. It helps explain why these women have voted against their own gendered interests.After internal squabbles, the meeting devolves — a gelatin salad is thrown — and the actresses return, with slight changes of clothing (jackets instead of skirts), this time playing the women’s boorish husbands. It is a month or so later, and the men, also white, have gathered to watch the Trump inauguration.Grace Rex, Wake, Marianna McClellan and Crivelli, now as a progressive coalition in New York.Joan MarcusAfter a second change, the same actresses return again, this time as an urban collective of the pussy hat-knitting variety. The set, barely altered, has become a cramped New York apartment in some outer borough. The flag has gone, replaced by feminist ephemera. These women are white, too. Apparently the group had one Black member at one point. She hasn’t returned. There’s racism here, too, of course, which manifests as enthusiasm and tokenism.Del Rosso’s play is a kind of target practice, and in every act those targets are big. But the effect is hit or miss. The conservative women crave status and recognition. The conservative men crave women who aren’t their wives. The liberal women mask ego as sanctimony. None of this surprises. (I saw “53% Of” the day after the decision overturning Roe v. Wade, when in progressive corners of social media, ostensible allies had already begun to turn on one another.) The jokes are very shallow when they could go deep. Flesh wounds only. Take for example a moment in which the women contemplate going to a march against police brutality, only to ditch it for a bridal shower, a documentary screening, a date.A note in the script advises that “no one is a caricature in this play. Embrace their full complexities.” But Del Rosso and the director, Tiffany Nichole Greene, judge these characters energetically, which sours the play and leaves the actresses little space to expand beyond parody, though Anna Crivelli and Marianna McClellan find a few more grounded moments.The best scene of the play is also the last, in which Crivelli’s Sasha, who is white, goes for a drink with her college friend KJ (Ayana Workman), who is Black. (She is the one who bailed on the collective.) This dialogue also tackles white privilege, but from a place of greater realism rather than scattershot satire. Crivelli makes us feel Sasha’s good, misguided intentions; Workman delineates KJ’s frustrations with not being seen as fully, fallibly human. It’s a sad scene. And a good one. Here, finally, the aim is true.53% OfThrough July 10 at McGinn/Cazale Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More