Cab Testifies From The Stage, A Cage

For 50:13, the Yale Cabaret​’s first play after winter break, the space was transformed into a fascimile of a prison cell in a tall cage — complete with cot, basin, and toilet — surrounded by chairs and tables. In the play, Jiréh Breon Holder, a second-year playwright in the Yale School of Drama, dramatizes life ​“inside” for Dae Brown, an inmate who has only three days left to serve.

Directed by second-year acting student Jonathan Majors and featuring Leland Fowler, a first-year actor making his Cab debut, 50:13 is a one-man tour de force as Brown speaks to the teenager (never seen) serving an adult sentence in the next cell. Brown often addresses the boy as ​“nephew” and takes an avuncular interest in the young man’s future in prison.

The stories Brown tells about his background create opportunities for Fowler to step out of Brown’s stolid persona and into other characters, adding both comic and dramatic interest. There is, for instance, the story Brown’s mostly absentee father tells about catching his own father, a parson, in flagrante delicto with a male parishioner, told with a gleeful sense of sexual farce and hypocrisy. It also ties into one of the themes that Brown tries to take up with his younger prison-mate: the question of manhood as it relates to the homosexual interest of a particularly domineering fellow prisoner. Holder’s approach lets Brown handle the issue with delicacy and a sense of respect for whatever the boy’s own inclinations might be, while also consoling him with a code that grants certain acts acceptable for survival regardless.

The theme of survival runs through Brown’s account of himself, too, particularly when he finally tells the story of his grandfather witnessing his own father’s lynching in the front yard after he called out whites for harassing his children. This story of the past could seem less threatening to teenagers now, except for Majors’s staging of the scene with strobe lights and Fowler’s enactment, in gripping mime, of a knock-down, drag-out fight with an angry mob — a fight he loses. Brown’s stand-up great-grandfather, however, seems to be the basis for Brown’s sense of himself and his own serious purpose in life.

Holder’s monologue entertains more than it preaches, but he wants the audience to register Brown’s simple, plainspoken heroism, and his valid grasp of realities. The everyday drama of African-American history — the storefront churches of community and the breakup of families in the post-civil rights era welfare state — figures in Brown’s background, giving him a rap that can speak to the next generation. Fowler is particularly sympathetic in displaying Brown’s wondering paternal pride as he pores over a letter about his infant son making moves to walk. If any of us were placed in a cage and forced to testify as to who we are, would we do so well?

As a recognition of common cause with the huge number of black men incarcerated in the United States — the play’s title refers to the African-American percentage of the prison population versus the general population — Holder’s play focuses on how the story of any one man can implicate the story of his entire race, but can also be a symbol for how to keep one’s dignity intact in adversity. Charged by Fowler’s gripping, mercurial performance, 50:13 delivers a thoughtful and theatrical presentation of what it takes to survive in a white man’s world.

Yale Cabaret’s next production, Quartet, plays this weekend, Jan. 22 – 24.