brownsville song (b‑side for tray) is a love poem of sorts to a certain way of life in a specific part of Brooklyn. There’s gang violence and drug dealing and less overt adversities, like getting through the school day or not losing your temper with your family. Kimber Lee’s script is earnest and hopeful.
But ultimately brownsville song seems simplistic, unfinished, and underwritten. It can’t hold a candle to similar Long Wharf projects, such as Michael Brown’s The Day the Bronx Died — which had both a workshop and a full production at the Long Wharf in the early ‘90s, directed by Gordon Edelstein — and the adaptation of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in 2007. For a vivid reflection of life on the streets, this fully staged drama, with its detailed multi-platformed set and extravagant lighting effects, doesn’t even match the poetic one-woman sparse-stage musings of Dael Orlandersmith’s Forever, which ran on the Long Wharf’s Stage II earlier this season.
One clear issue is that brownsville song has trouble commanding Long Wharf’s mainstage, where it’ll be through April 19. It is an intimate, dialogue-driven piece that can only be enlivened so much by staging. The most active scenes are of a little girl portraying a tree in her school pageant, the writing of a college admissions essay, and a guy buying a cup of coffee at Starbucks. There’s some half-hearted dancing, but the whole show is lacking in human energy.
So is the script. Lee structures brownsville song non-linearly, dancing around a single tragic event (which is not shown, only talked about) by skipping in time from its aftermath to the days before it happened. The out-of-order sequencing would not be a bad idea if Lee hadn’t decided to underplay the event at the center of everything. As it is, the play begins with a speech by a grieving mother that has to be both an introduction and a summation. Elements of revelation and resurgence go nowhere.
There’s a disturbing randomness to the production. Livelier scenes aren’t evenly placed around the quieter ones. Moments that propel what plot there is can be lost in the shuffle. The play is fairly well divided among its four main players — high school student Tray, his adorable yet troubled little sister Devine, their mother Merrell, and their grandmother Lena — but the actors playing them don’t really gel, certainly not as a family. They work in different styles and at different volumes. As Lena, Catrina Ganey gets the grandest, matriarchal “you tell ‘em, lady” pronouncements. Sung Yun Cho as recovering addict Merrell is so understated and flat-toned that she sounds like she’s reading her lines off a page. Kaatje Welsh as the grade-schooler Devine must bear the burden of providing most of the lightness and joy in the drama, her cuteness placed center-stage at regular intervals when she’s not hiding in a corner beset by fears no child should have to experience. As the title character Tray, Curtiss Cook Jr. has the impossible balancing act of being both hero and everyman, virtuous and vulnerable, doomed while embracing the future. The various acting styles and agendas don’t mesh, and even if they did, the time-jumping narrative structure would likely undo any deep connections. A fifth actor — Anthony Martinez-Briggs, who plays both a friend of Tray’s confusingly addressed as both “Junior” and “Anthony” and a stereotypical college student — is used unevenly.
The disorienting randomness of this show, however, isn’t its main problem. The situations seem cliched and forced. The cultural references — Starbuck’s, generic hip-hop beats, Tray’s overuse of the phrases yo and a’ight — seem outdated. Many of the character relationships — the grandmother who can’t cook, the child who wants to see her family in the audience at the school play, the young man who has to begin using his mind after his dreams are dashed by a sports injury — seem melodramatic.
A few of brownsville song’s numerous short scenes have the gravity or drama they’re clearly meant to have. They are fine moments of writing. Lena’s opening monologue has a Greek-chorus aspect to it that promises much more than the play delivers, and some of the gentle chatter between Tray and Merrell as they try to get reacquainted and move forward as family is touching. But the lack of momentum is hard to overcome.
It’s easy to imagine brownsville song (b‑side for tray) playing better on the more intimate Stage II, while the emphatically shouty and physical Bad Jews, which played Stage II last month, could have easily taken over the mainstage. Both shows had a single multi-part apartment setting, no intermission, and a tight cast. A calmer, tighter setting might have given director Eric Ting — who directed the aforementioned Bluest Eye and who is usually masterful with multi-layered, purposefully disjointed mood-swinging dramas — the chance to show more nuance in the scene transitions and the fluidity of the family scenes. As it is, brownsville song is a jumble, its better moments buried by its worse ones, any subtleties rent asunder by its incompleteness.
brownsville song (b‑side for tray) plays through April 19 at the Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargent Dr. (203) 787‑4282.
