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    ‘… What the End Will Be’ Review: Learning to Let Go

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    The intergenerational comedy is a poignant reflection on sexuality, mortality and Black masculinity by the playwright Mansa Ra.Kinship with our elders is a privilege not often afforded to queer people. How many sons have come out to gay fathers and grandfathers? Imagining the possibility of these generational bonds feels like a reparative gesture in “…What the End Will Be,” an astute and poignant reflection on sexuality, mortality and Black masculinity by the playwright Mansa Ra, which opened on Thursday night at the Laura Pels Theater.Did I mention it’s also a comedy?The play is set in a stylish living room in a posh Atlanta suburb, where Maxwell (Emerson Brooks) has taken in his ailing father Bartholomew (Keith Randolph Smith). Because Bartholomew has Stage 4 bone cancer, there’s only one way this can go, and he is already browsing for caskets online. But Maxwell, a careerist whose ambitions are a fortress against reality, is in deep denial. (“No dying,” he says to his father, laying the ground rules for their new living arrangement.)While Bartholomew is readying his goodbyes, Maxwell’s teenage son, Tony (Gerald Caesar), is figuring out who he wants to be. When Antoine, a femme and fabulous boy from school (Ryan Jamaal Swain), is caught sneaking out of Tony’s room, Tony reveals that he’s more than just a friend. “That’s your type?” Maxwell asks derisively, betraying a reflexive narrow-mindedness. (Tony had already confided in Charles, Maxwell’s more understanding husband, played by Randy Harrison.) But Bartholomew is pleased. “Bring it in, Champ!” he says, with a predictable aphorism about apples falling from trees.Then he grows wistful. “I wish I would’ve had somebody hug me when I came out of the closet,” he continues.Now, Chloe (Tiffany Villarin), a gracious in-home nurse, is Bartholomew’s most intimate source of comfort. The ghost of his dead partner (also played by Swain) haunts him like the pain he refuses to rate honestly on a scale from one to 10.Learning to let go — of personal hang-ups, social expectations and ultimately of life itself — is at the heart of “… What the End Will Be,” which is not shy on sentimentality. Directed by Margot Bordelon, the 90-minute production would not feel out of place on prime-time television, where straightforward setups deliver clear emotional payoffs with a side of laughs. But there’s gratifying nourishment in Ra’s recipe, a restorative fantasy as much as it is an unabashed tear-jerker.What if instead of being presumed absent, Black fathers were depicted as fallibly present? And rather than having his life taken away, a Black man were pictured in control over how he leaves the world? That all of the men in Ra’s play are gay fuels his confrontation with the assumptions and limitations heaped on them because they are Black.Assured and affecting performances from the cast succeed in tugging at heartstrings, especially Smith’s, whose frail ox ready for pasture is rueful but grounded, in a role that might easily turn maudlin. Swain is a total delight as the most self-actualized queen in the room, unwilling to dim his light for anyone still living in the dark. (“I’ve been offending people since I twirled out of the womb,” he says.)Bordelon’s staging for Roundabout Theater Company balances the play’s humor with its sobering central conceit. The slickly appointed interior, designed by Reid Thompson and covered with art that Bartholomew describes as Afrocentric, demonstrates Maxwell’s faith in the protective powers of material wealth. But money is no defense from human frailty.“… What the End Will Be” is less wide-ranging and conceptual than Ra’s previous work Off Broadway, “In the Southern Breeze,” and more playful and light-footed than “Too Heavy for Your Pocket,” also staged by Roundabout when he was known as Jiréh Breon Holder.In “… What the End Will be,” facing death really means reckoning with life — what makes it worth living despite its impermanence — and learning how to seize some measure of joy for yourself. It’s everything that is meant when we say that Black lives matter.… What the End Will BeThrough July 10 at the Laura Pels Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘In the Southern Breeze’ Review: A Dark Night of the Soul

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      In Mansa Ra’s heart-bruised new play, racism is a lethal force that menaces generations of Black American men.The script for Mansa Ra’s heart-bruised new play, “In the Southern Breeze,” at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, has two epigraphs — one from the Amiri Baraka poem “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note,” the other from Martin Luther King Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”Those opposing impulses — despair and perseverance — duel over the course of this dramatic dark night of the soul, which opens with a nameless contemporary American (Allan K. Washington), named simply Man, arriving home and stripping off the smile he wears, of necessity, in the hostile world outside.It’s the expression he calculates, as a Black man, to signal that he’s both nonthreatening and educated enough not to be messed with. “The Obama Deluxe,” he calls it.That little slam gets a big laugh. Only a few minutes in, humor is already a tension release in a show that will talk of suicide, slavery and the lethal force of racism in Black men’s lives throughout United States history. And Ra, like this show’s excellent cast of five, proves adept at lightning-quick switches between the crushing and the comical.Tormented by anxiety, depression and panic attacks, the isolated Man is struggling to carry on. Submission to the unseen, ever-present noose that hangs over him — “Every Black man’s boogeyman,” he calls it — has begun to seem like a comfort.“Sometimes it beckons me,” he says toward the end of that first scene, which, hearkening back to Baraka’s poem, Ra titles Volume 19. Volume 20 is this play’s other bookend. The longest of the three scenes — the surreal and moving center, in which Man does not appear — is Volume 1.In a handsome production by Christopher D. Betts, all of it takes place on a grassy expanse stretching into the distance, with a spiritual, “Fare Ye Well,” as a solacing aural motif. (The set is by Emmie Finckel, the lighting by Emma Deane, the costumes by Jahise LeBouef and the sound by Kathy Ruvuna.)As the play shifts into Volume 1, the wary, eager Madison (Charles Browning) enters, looking for the caravan that will take him north to meet his wife. It is 1780, as far as he knows, and he is running from slavery, barefoot.But the first person he encounters is Lazarus (Victor Williams), a Tennessee sharecropper from 1892. Then a 1970s Black Panther named Hue (Biko Eisen-Martin) stumbles in, followed shortly after by Tony (Travis Raeburn), a young AIDS activist from the early 1990s. It takes most of them a while to figure out why they’re all gathered there, under that unseen noose, and how many eras have collided.“Hold the phone,” an incredulous Hue says to Madison. “You really a slave?”“Hold the what?” a baffled Madison replies.“In the Southern Breeze” pays tender tribute to previous generations of Black Americans and bears unblinking witness to the white violence that has marred and menaced them. Hearkening back to that quote by Dr. King, it also acknowledges the progress toward justice through the ages.This play is a more formally ambitious, far-reaching work than “Too Heavy for Your Pocket,” with which Ra made his New York debut in 2017, when he was known as Jiréh Breon Holder.What stumps him here, in Volume 20, is how to let his unnamed 21st-century Man reject existential exhaustion in a way that doesn’t seem pat. Like Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s “Pass Over,” rewritten for its recent Broadway run to allow more space for joy, this play wants to illuminate an uplifting path out of pain. But its final section turns muddled and didactic, its poeticism forced.Finding hope, it turns out, is the tricky part.In the Southern BreezeThrough Dec. 12, in person and streaming, at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Manhattan; rattlestick.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      Rattlestick Theater Focuses on Social Change in New Season

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      The theater will produce three plays in an ambitious 2021-22 season, but it has also committed to a five-day workweek and reforms that prioritize artists.When Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, the West Village testing ground for new playwrights, reopens Aug. 14, it will be the same 99-seat, proscenium-arch venue where Heidi Schreck (“What the Constitution Means to Me”) and Jesse Eisenberg (“The Spoils”) have premiered plays. But some things are changing behind the scenes. Despite a heavier load this season, which will feature three, not just two, main-stage shows (to honor commitments to productions planned before the pandemic), rehearsals will take place exclusively during the five-day workweek, and no rehearsal or tech call will last longer than eight hours.“It feels essential to have a healthy dynamic for everyone to do their best work and also take care of themselves,” said Daniella Topol, the theater’s artistic director. (Previously, some team members would spend as many as 18 hours at the theater.) She added that rehearsal periods would be extended by an additional week to allow for ample time to prepare for the shows.“It’s not an inexpensive change,” she said. “But it’s an essential one we’re all so grateful for.”When the season kicks off, with Arturo Luís Soria’s solo show “Ni Mi Madre,” social change will be at the heart of the new season. Soria’s show, which will be the actor’s first venture as a playwright, is one of two this season that will be presented both in person and livestreamed.“I hope this is our new normal,” Topol said of the in-person and virtual options. “It’s been great to give people who don’t just live in our borough or our neighborhood the opportunity to experience the work, as well as to open it up to people who have physical restrictions and can’t access the work live.”The one-man play, which features the music of Gloria Estefan, Cher and Maria Bethânia, explores the intersection of queerness and Latino identity in the tumultuous relationship between a larger-than-life Brazilian mother and her son. “It’s deeply personal, alive and funny,” Topol said of the show that lays bare the secrets, memories, fears and celebrations of being an immigrant and first-generation American. Rattlestick’s directing fellow, Danilo Gambini, will oversee the world premiere, which will be his first professional production in the United States after having previously worked as an opera and musical theater director in his home country, Brazil.“It will make anyone and everyone think about their relationship with their mother,” Topol said.The show will be followed in November by the Atlanta-based playwright Mansa Ra’s “In the Southern Breeze,” an absurdist drama that centers the Black male experience across centuries of American history as it follows five Black men who meet in the afterlife following their murders. Christopher Betts will direct.Topol, who first got a glimpse of the play when Rattlestick produced a reading of it in 2018, said, “I couldn’t get it out of my head, particularly when everything was happening with George Floyd and the protests. It really speaks to this moment.”In the season’s final show, and the only one to be presented exclusively online, audience members will be invited to chart their own theatrical experience in the interactive virtual game “Addressless,” which asks viewers to work together in small groups on Zoom to make choices that illustrate the challenges of homelessness. The work, written by the Hungarian artist Martin Boross and adapted by Jonathan Payne, whose day job is working in social services, will be presented virtually in January and February.“The irony is that every choice you make as the character either costs money or years of your life,” Topol said, noting that they include whether a character will sleep on the street or in a hostel, if they will ask people for money or try to find work. “Hopefully people can move toward greater empathy and change after seeing this piece.”Topol said the theater has also hired a venue and production manager to oversee Covid-19 health and safety protocols during the 2021-22 season, which include installing MERV-13 air filters. In line with the demands articulated by the advocacy group “We See You, White American Theater” last fall, Rattlestick has brought on a mental health professional to support artists in rehearsals for projects that involve trauma.“These are personal pieces that dig deep into the roots and deal with inherited and generational trauma,” Topol said, “and we want to do all we can to help artists investigate that with courage, passion, care and empathy.” More