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    Review: In ‘This Land Was Made,’ Huey Newton Walks Into a Bar

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    Tori Sampson’s look at the Black Panther movement is a warm sitcom that becomes a jarring inquest into a real murder.In Oakland, Calif., in 1968, Huey P. Newton, the Black Panther leader, was convicted of killing a white police officer. In 1971, after two more trials and nearly two years in prison, he was cleared of all charges. So who pulled the trigger?That’s the question at the heart of “This Land Was Made,” the gutsy but murky new play by Tori Sampson at the Vineyard Theater. Part murder mystery and part counterfactual yarn, with generous helpings of sitcom and social drama thrown in, it doesn’t hold together in the largely naturalistic framework provided by Taylor Reynolds’s production. But several elements remain compelling on their own, especially when they acknowledge and repurpose familiar forms.Most successful is the sitcom element, which could be titled “Trish’s,” an Oakland bar where everybody knows your name. Miss Trish (Libya V. Pugh) is a New Orleans transplant with a sharp if loving tongue, serving beer and soul food to regulars who come for the schmooze as much as the fare. In one corner, her daughter, Sassy (Antoinette Crowe-Legacy), trims the Afros of old-timers and revolutionaries alike.For about 25 minutes, Sampson serves up something warm and piquant at Trish’s: an interplay of zingers, flirtations, spats and politics. Sassy is being romanced by Troy (Matthew Griffin). Her flashy friend Gail (Yasha Jackson) spars with the out-of-work Drew (Leland Fowler). Mr. Far (Ezra Knight), an avuncular mechanic, smooths everything over, with one affectionate eye on Trish and one on her fried chicken.Opinion on the Black Power movement is neatly divided among them. Troy, studying government in college and planning to be a judge, has no time for performative radicalism; Drew, who styles himself a “King Black Man” and is enamored of the Panthers, calls Troy a sellout. Mr. Far doesn’t like seeing “youngins stomping round with big chests” instead of working, but is sympathetic. And Trish, who lost a son in Vietnam, is fatalistic.“They gotta give up power for you to get some,” she says of white people. “Newsflash, that ain’t finna happen.”Antoinette Crowe-Legacy as the narrator, Sassy, and Matthew Griffin, left, as her boyfriend, Troy, in the play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat Newton himself then walks into the bar seems like the setup for a joke — and, indeed, at first, he is handled cheerfully. With his swagger and charisma, and despite the bandolier of bullets draped sash-like over his leather coat, he is, in Julian Elijah Martinez’s electrifying performance, way more exciting than scary. Later, Martinez will fill in the more troubling aspects of the character, but at this point even Troy finds him impressive and approachable enough, despite their antipodal politics, to accept his invitation to a rally.Whether this meet cute of radicalism and conservatism is historically plausible, it is compelling as part of the playwright’s mission. Sampson, who grew up in a Black Power household, recently told my colleague Naveen Kumar that in writing “This Land Was Made” she “wanted to talk about the lowercase-p Panthers, as people.” When she intermittently achieves that sort of conversation — and in the process dramatizes the ways some Black Americans responded to the uppercase-p Panthers — the play hits a sweet spot at the intersection of fact and fiction.Then it swerves. The officer is killed and Sassy, in her secondary role as present-day narrator, sets out to reveal, as history has not, whodunit. “This Land Was Made” offers three variations on the fatal confrontation. Unfortunately, the staging, with interstitial rewinds as seen in “Hamilton,” is so unclear you may have trouble following any of the outcomes, which all involve one of the regulars at Trish’s.A bigger problem is the meaning of the invention. Is it designed to counteract an un-nuanced and possibly racist judgment on the movement as extremist and anti-American? The play’s title — taken from the song “This Land Is Your Land,” Woody Guthrie’s bitter retort to “God Bless America,” suggests as much. But it’s one thing to probe the past and extrapolate some answers; it’s another to claim, as Sassy does, that the play depicts “the exact events” that the world has never known “until today.”Perhaps that magical yet iffy omniscience — Sassy calls herself a griot, or traditional keeper of stories — would have felt less jarring in a more abstract production. (Wilson Chin’s set, though handsome, is compulsively detailed, right down to the B.B. King showcards.) In 2019, the fable-like “If Pretty Hurts,” Sampson’s first professionally produced play, got an impressionistic staging at Playwrights Horizons that enhanced her rich language instead of fighting it. Another Sampson play that year, “Cadillac Crew,” about women workers in the Civil Rights movement, did not, and fell flat.A more ambitious work than either, “This Land Was Made” does not yet seem certain of what it wants to be. Its sitcom setup (Sampson credits Norman Lear as an inspiration) clashes with the deadly seriousness that comes later, reducing the effectiveness of both. With a killing still unsolved at its center, it can’t, as Sassy instructs, “tell it like you know it.” It can only hazard a few unsatisfying guesses.This Land Was MadeThrough June 25 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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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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      ‘Man Cave’ Review: Things That Go Bump in the American Night

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      John J. Caswell Jr.’s play is a political drama wrapped in the spooky pleasures of the horror genre.Late on a thundery monsoon evening in a well-appointed basement in Sedona, Ariz., the ghosts are restless. Or something is — thumping and scratching inside the walls of a congressman’s gated home, where Imaculada, the housekeeper, has been holding down the fort alone.When her friends Rosemary and Lupita show up unannounced, fleeing domestic danger, the noises don’t take long to creep them out.“You’re supposed to disclose your home’s paranormal status to guests upon arrival,” Rosemary chides, dryly.But this is just what she needs: a place rife with spirits that might be enlisted for vengeance on her live-in boyfriend, a police officer who has beaten her bloody yet again. On the internet she found “a little witchcraft” that she’s been wanting to try.“It’s called death walking,” she says. “Energy harnessing, engaging spirits in highly active spaces to do your bidding in exchange for eternal release from their own purgatory.”“Man Cave,” John J. Caswell Jr.’s new play at the Connelly Theater, is a political drama wrapped in the spooky pleasures of the horror genre, and it works on both levels. Its characters are Mexican American women on the economic fringes, and its concerns are theirs: work, love, heritage, survival; how to be safe, and feel at home, in their own country.Unfolding in the congressman’s man cave (designed by Adam Rigg), with its cowboy-movie posters and mounted elk head, the play is also a contemplation of what the United States was built on, what’s buried underneath — and which insistent, haunted voices it’s determined not to hear. (Lucrecia Briceno’s lighting is vital to the chilling of our spines.)Directed by Taylor Reynolds for the theater company Page 73, the show cultivates a scary mood even before it starts, thanks to Michael Costagliola’s supremely clever sound design, which thrums ominously as the audience settles in but cuts to an unnerving quiet in the opening scene. We are primed to be startled by the slightest noise, and so we are. And because the audience is expecting, even hoping, to be frightened, its attention has a tautness that’s sustained throughout the play.That’s helpful with a show that takes its time, as “Man Cave” does — sometimes to the point of bagginess — letting the friends bicker and snipe over the course of a fraught weekend. Why, Rosemary (Jacqueline Guillén) wants to know, is Imaculada “cleaning house for an overtly racist politician”? Is Imaculada (Annie Henk) right that something is trying to kill her? And where is her missing 20-something son?Why is Lupita (Claudia Acosta), Rosemary’s sober girlfriend — her tender romantic refuge from the abusive cop — suddenly drinking again? How gross is it, exactly, that Rosemary has brought a bag of the cop’s fingernail clippings for the spell she means to cast? What has drawn her to the spirit world, when that used to be her mother’s thing?Her mother, Consuelo (Socorro Santiago), an undocumented immigrant, raised Rosemary to assimilate. But when Consuelo arrives at the congressman’s house, she doesn’t need anyone to tell her its paranormal status. She has a supernatural sensitivity to the dead.“I can hear them screaming in my head,” she says.A program note explains that Caswell wrote “Man Cave” over the past five years — a time of immense social and political turmoil in the United States. If the play sometimes feels bloated, it may be from absorbing so much anger and anxiety from the air. But its shape also feels like an act of resistance to the constraints of theatrical convention.On a wall of the man cave, near the elk head, hangs a rack of vintage rifles, emblems of American cowboy culture. This isn’t Chekhov, though, and those guns never go off. They just stay in plain sight, silently menacing.Man CaveThrough April 2 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan; page73.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Tambo & Bones,’ a Minstrel’s Guide to Making Money

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      Dave Harris’s hip-hop triptych exploring racism and capitalism is meant to be a biting satire, but it has little force behind it.The minstrel show — that racist brand of theater that perpetuated stereotypes about Black people — was all the rage in the 1800s and hung around until the rise of the civil rights movement put the genre in its grave. And yet, I bet that even today, most Black Americans have witnessed or participated in a minstrel show of some sort — a performance of Blackness that simplifies and debases it.If that performance makes a profit — well, that’s capitalism for you, right? Even a young playwright with a new Off Broadway production may fall into that trap — and he knows it.This scourge of capitalism — as the engine of slavery, as a shaper of Black art and identity — is what the two characters in “Tambo & Bones” must grapple with. The play, which opened at Playwrights Horizons on Monday in a coproduction with the Center Theater Group, aims to be a sharp satire about the intersection of race and performance, especially when money is in the picture — as it always is in our country of wealth and opportunity.Written by the poet and playwright Dave Harris, “Tambo & Bones” begins by introducing us to two minstrel characters, Tambo (W. Tré Davis) and Bones (Tyler Fauntleroy). Dressed in tattered period attire, they mill around in an artificial pastoral scene, alongside fake trees and grass designed like paper cutouts from a children’s storybook. Tambo just wants to nap under his cardboard tree, and Bones is doing all he can to hustle up some quarters. (After all, their pipeline to success is “quarters to dollars to dreams.”)The setup of two friends waiting around for something to happen, discussing what they most crave and value, recalls the story of two old goats who famously waited for some guy named Godot — or, more recently, the play “Pass Over.” Though here it lacks the lyrical dexterity and layered meanings of either.In the lengthy second part of the show, which is described as a “hip-hop triptych,” we hear the promised music in the form of a concert, though songs are limited to this middle section. Tambo and Bones, dripping in diamonds and gold chains, come out on a platform surrounded by the hard lights and scaffolding of a stadium; they’re now contemporary rappers who trade lyrics, Tambo more Nas or Chance the Rapper to Bones’s 50 Cent. Their different rap styles, however, aren’t the only ways the two are at odds: Bones wants to game the system to achieve the same amount of wealth as his white peers, while Tambo thinks the system is broken and must be brought down completely.I won’t spoil the third part, but it jumps to the future, in a changed society where the story of Tambo and Bones has become a vital part of history.In the play’s second part, Fauntleroy, left, and Davis assume the roles of rappers. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHarris’s concept is promising. It brings to mind plays like “Underground Railroad Game,” “3/Fifths” and “Black History Museum,” which used music, games and immersive art installations to deliver biting satire on subjects like minstrelsy and the effects of institutional racism. But “Tambo & Bones” drops its two characters — actually, more like archetypes (the Black activist, the Black businessman) — into the supposedly satirical world of the play and shuffles them around with little development of the central themes and progression of the main ideas.The director, Taylor Reynolds, doesn’t help clarify or illuminate Harris’s shallow script, defaulting to only one mode: loud and emphatic. And the transitions between sections do little to connect the parts in service of a grand thesis. A satire and a concert and an off-road turn into speculative fiction: “Tambo & Bones” is a lot of things, but nuanced is not one of them.Harris tries to have it both ways when it comes to his play’s stance, critiquing how some creators, producers and audiences capitalize on Black trauma, while self-consciously acknowledging that he, too, is part of that practice. (In an essay in the program, Harris writes about how performances of trauma are often rewarded in the world of poetry slams.) In one scene in particular, he has his characters explicitly call him out: As if by addressing the issue head on, he can absolve himself of it.At the very least, the costumes (by Dominique Fawn Hill) and lighting (by Amith Chandrashaker and Mextly Couzin) have a clear execution and purpose, as the show shifts from the affected sunniness of the minstrel setting to the aggressive reds and roving spotlights of the concert. The scenic design, by Stephanie Osin Cohen, however, feels more functional than finessed; the bucolic setting of the first part is quickly swapped for the Madison Square Garden-style arena, and unsightly orange panels are rolled out and lined up in a row to form a makeshift wall for the final part.And even though the 90-minute show may not always be entertaining for the audience, at least the actors have fun. Davis keeps up with the sudden turns of the production but is stuck with an unremarkable character. Fauntleroy, as the more interesting Bones, brings an infectious sense of play to the production; his blithe performance in fact feels unmatched by the material, which even Fauntleroy’s enthusiasm can’t elevate.“Tambo & Bones” ends abruptly, with no bows. It’s an attempted mic drop but with no force behind it, an ineffectual grab not for the quarters or dollars that Bones seeks but for the greatest currency of any stage, minstrel or otherwise: an audience’s attention.Tambo & BonesThrough Feb. 27 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Review: Martha Washington, Hilariously Haunted by Her Slaves

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      James Ijames’s amusingly cynical and eclectic new play, “The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington,” is at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival through July 30.On an evening train back from the Hudson Valley last weekend, I overheard two drunken friends — one white, one Indian American — having a loud, expletive-ridden debate two rows behind me.History was irrelevant, the white friend was saying. Between Cold Spring and Yonkers, they argued about police brutality, institutional racism and citizenship, but they kept circling back to the topic of reparations. “If my grandfather was a serial killer, why do I have to pay for his crimes?” he asked. He said history was being used against him. The past is the past — so why should he suffer?That this experience followed a performance of James Ijames’s stunning new play, “The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington,” directed by Taylor Reynolds at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, was an event of stage-worthy irony. The theater gods certainly have a sense of humor.And so does Ijames (“Fat Ham,” “TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever”), though his is laced with a brutal sense of cynicism. I say that as a compliment: What else could be more appropriate to the obscene joke that is this country’s treatment of its Black residents? In “Miz Martha Washington,” George Washington is dead and his wife, Martha (played by Nance Williamson), seems about ready to follow him to the grave. Ann Dandridge (a sharp Britney Simpson) — her slave and also her half sister, who is unfortunately tangled up in Martha’s line of ancestry — tends to the former first lady while raising her own son, William (a perfectly jejune Tyler Fauntleroy).Martha is weak and feverish, talking nonsense and having hallucinations while Ann and the rest of her slaves — the Washingtons held hundreds, historically — continue to cook her food, clean her floors, chop her wood and polish her silverware, as they’ve done her whole life. But now they’re antsy and less accommodating: In his will, Washington offered the slaves freedom upon his wife’s death.In a series of hallucinations, her slaves appear as lawyers, prosecutors and historical figures who try to show her how accountable she is in a system of oppression. Her fever dreams include chats with Abigail Adams, Betsy Ross and Thomas Jefferson, all of them Black; a game show hosted by a Black King George and Queen Charlotte; and a “People’s Court”-style trial. She should just do the right thing and free her slaves while she’s still alive, but it’s hard to be ethical when you’re accustomed to a certain lifestyle.“Miz Martha Washington” bears the signature of Ijames’s clever wit: He writes the slaves as more than docile stereotypes; these slaves have personality to spare, and they joke and sing with a threatening jocularity. You know how baring one’s teeth can be a sign of joy or hostility? Ijames does.Two female slaves, Doll (Cyndii Johnson) and Priscilla (Claudia Logan), act as twin jesters in the play, clowning and gossiping at Martha’s expense — as when Priscilla acts out what she hopes will be Martha’s “death rattle,” a hilariously odd sound that falls somewhere between a groan and a screech. They don’t talk purely in the expected dialect of stage slaves, but in an anachronistic mix of that with modern Black American vernacular.All of the elements of the production have a bit of this playful mash-up approach (which recalls the style of other great Black playwrights like George C. Wolfe, Adrienne Kennedy and Suzan-Lori Parks). In terms of plot, the play recalls, of all things, “A Christmas Carol,” as Martha is haunted by her wrongs. But “Miz Martha Washington” is never as procedural as that; scenes set in the real world are broken up by dance interludes with disco lights and by surreal fantasies like a reverse auction in which the slaves, posed as owners, examine and bid on Martha.Even the costumes, by Hahnji Jang, are sportively eclectic, with clashing patterns and colors — along with additional anachronistic details, like hoop earrings and sneakers. Under Reynolds’s puckish direction, the tone, too, whips from exaggerated sitcom-style humor (hammy facial reactions, quick comedic beats) to poetic surrealism (a young slave boy’s prophetic monologue) to tragedy (accounts of abuse, sexual assault).Cyndii Johnson, foreground center, plays a slave who also serves as a kind of jester, joking and gossiping at Martha’s expense.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhen the slaves sing and dance and drum around poor, sick Martha’s bed, it looks like a dark sacrificial ritual or an exorcism of America’s evils. And when one slave laughs, and the sound is joined by an offstage chorus of laughter from other slaves, the thunder is spirited at first but then quickly becomes unnerving. As Ijames notes in his script, “Laughter is a weapon.”And yet Martha isn’t a meek, quivering pupil to the slaves’ lessons on the debts America owes to its Black people; Williamson pivots from pleas to commands, fear to rage, declaring herself America’s mother, a woman who “did right” by her slaves, and refusing to be spooked into more righteous behavior.Behind the simple staging of Martha’s bed on a sandy patch of ground, an opening in the tent on the beautiful lawn of the Boscobel House and Gardens, in Garrison, N.Y., revealed a backdrop of mountains and a hazy blue sky. This view, which dimmed over time into the buzzing, uninterrupted darkness of the evening, for me recalled the ways our American mythos is tied to grand landscapes — “amber waves” and “purple mountain majesties” for white explorers and white landowners. All fitting for a show confronting questions about freedom, inheritance and birthright. (“Miz Martha Washington” is part of the festival’s 34th and final season before it moves to a new location.)I couldn’t help but imagine how much greater the show would be on a big Broadway stage with all the fixings, so to speak. After all, Ijames’s revisionism works, in many ways, as the inverse to “Hamilton.” “Hamilton” uses its Black and brown actors to reclaim history as a story of hope for immigrants, minorities, the disenfranchised. It’s a rebranding of the American dream. “Miz Martha Washington” uses its Black actors to expose the blights of the American dream and the hypocrisies of our historical narratives.And so the hilarious Brandon St. Clair is the obliging slave Davy as well as a very Black — and priceless — George Washington, resurrected from the dead. And another slave, Sucky Boy (Ralph Adriel Johnson), appears as a humorously tactless Black Thomas Jefferson.Does the play have a happy, inspirational ending? Well, let me just say that despite Ijames’s antic fabrications, he is ultimately tethered to the tragedy that is America. And we all know how that story goes.On the train after the show, the conversation between the two friends seemed to stretch on forever. When the white friend got off, after saying he had enjoyed the “discourse,” a fresh silence took over. Infuriated by the ignorant, racist statements I had been hearing, I walked over and spoke to the Indian American man, a lawyer named Ash.“You’re totally right on everything,” I said. “I’m not sure you should bother.” He gave me a fist bump and said that he still wanted to try.About halfway through the play, Priscilla says to Doll, “Hard work openin’ folks’ eyes,” to which Doll responds, “Huh … you can say that again.”But are we all accountable for our fellow citizens who are, if not explicitly racist, at least complicit in the systems and institutions that degrade and oppress? Does Ijames consider his work educational, a corrective? I would wager not. History has taught us that even our most high-minded foundational ideals — “all men are created equal” — can be interpreted to a single group’s advantage or be a basis of manipulation. You can’t teach a person humanity if it’s a lesson they don’t want to learn.In the fairy tale version of our country’s racial politics, we all learn about justice and skip happily toward the future. I, for one, am done with fairy tales as history — and patient explanations. Give me the harder truth of Ijames’s fantastical version any day.The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha WashingtonThrough July 30 at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Garrison, N.Y.; 845-265-9575, hvshakespeare.org. More