Ideology smashed to 'Crumbs' in Repertory play

COURTESY YALE REPERTORY THEATER Clay exerts influence on Hinds and McClendon

In Crumbs from the Table of Joy, the new show at the Yale Rep directed by Seret Scott, playwright Lynn Nottage, DRA '89, has created a rare hybrid--a sweet, whimsical drama of warring ideologies and personal disintegration. It's an enjoyable night, but there are traces of another play that is darker, troubling, and more human beneath the surface.

Crumbs, which takes its title from a Langston Hughes poem, is narrated by Ernestine Crump (Afi McClendon). An African-American girl in Brooklyn in 1950, Crump lives in the midst of rabid hormones, the Cold War, and all the usual furniture of American coming-of-age dramas. It's a gamble to filter a memory play through the limited perception of an adolescent girl, but McClendon has enough charisma to pull it off without straining either patience or credibility.

She lives with her sister, Ermina (Natasha Hinds) and father, Godfrey (Jonathan Earl Peck), who, after reading the label off a bottle of miracle tonic from Peace Ministry founder Father Divine, moved up North to be closer to spiritual greatness. For most of the play, an illuminated portrait of Divine, a real figure and a great dramatic find, dominates the Crumps' basement apartment.

Then, in walks Godfrey's sister-in-law, Lily (Caroline Stefanie Clay, who seems to be channeling comedienne Jackee of 227 fame), a vocal communist and frequent lush working for the "Negro Revolution" and the emancipation of her nieces from Godfrey's puritanical ethos. The Auntie Mame of the Harlem Renaissance, she gives them liquor, encourages their burgeoning sexuality, and introduces them to be-bop, the "true African music." She also has sexual designs on Godfrey, and one day, after tempting him into an embrace, he runs off and returns days later--married to a white woman! Gerte (Dee Pelletier) is not just white, but German, inspiring thoughts of Nazism in Ernestine.

Nottage is a master of her craft. She writes fluid, laugh-out-loud dialogue. When Godfrey brings Gerte home for the first time, he tells his outraged children to calm themselves and sit down. "Why?" Ermina responds, "if we sit down is she not gonna be white?" Nottage also works in surreal and effective visual metaphors for the romanticized--and Caucasian--world Ernestine would like to live in. At one point, a film projector drops from the rafters, bathing the action in flickering white light.

Far too many ideas, however, are abandoned before they reach fruition. The play is brimming with speeches about communism versus Christian patriotism, freedom versus servility, black rights in the face of a racist white hierarchy, and in the second act, these long debates encumber the play's previously streamlined pacing.

Crumbs truly shines when it leaves its grandstanding behind and focuses on the realities of a world that promises romance only to make it unattainable. The point isn't as much the pontificating as the longing for order and hope. Having lost his wife Sandra, Godfrey grasps for meaning in religion and marriage. Drunken, searching Lily dreams of revolution, a cultural history, and her own sexual desirability.

When ideology meets real life and desire, its grandiose promises come crashing down. In its quiet moments, such as when Godfrey is denied his meeting with Father Divine and starts to doubt his faith, Crumbs has a chance to find its heart.

Unfortunately, the production, is often too broad to allow for this kind of subtlety. Hinds' Ermina and Clay's Lily ham it up too much with exagerrated gestures and movements that approach phoniness. The precocious direction of the Crumb children also makes them seem much younger than their purported ages. Peck's Godfrey, more than anyone else, combines dignity and humor, never sacrificing real emotion for easy comedy.

Nottage's script contributes to this lack of balance, particularly when it takes liberties with the memory play form. The playwright undermines the logic of this form several times by creating scenes with Ernestine offstage. How can a character remember something if she wasn't there to witness it in the first place?

Crumbs invites inevitable comparison to the grandfather of all memory plays, The Glass Menagerie, which the Rep will perform later in the season. Tennessee Williams' workhorse has more convincing and consistent lyricism than Crumbs, but it also has more courage. For instance, one scene that ought to lead to something bold, perhaps tragic, ends instead in a mock-fight between Gerte and Godfrey, who fall down laughing over it. Nottage won't go far enough, so the repressed anger and frustration become descriptive, not existential. Throughout Crumbs, one keeps longing for that moment of naked emotional nihilism that characterizes the best Williams and the best drama in general.

Professional as ever, this Rep production certainly deserves kudos for Neil Patel's impressive, dreamlike sets--clouds within tenements, as if Magritte had painted Brooklyn. Like so many moments and fine performances in the play, they're well worth seeing, and they suggest the beautiful table from which these Crumbs of insight must have fallen.

Back to A&E...