nothin Collective Consciousness Lets Rasheeda Speak | New Haven Independent

Collective Consciousness Lets Rasheeda Speak

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Brown and Kulp .

We’re maybe a third of the way into Rasheeda Speaking, and Ileen is treating Jaclyn badly. She’s sniping and casually cruel, and going a little nuts, and for much of the time so far, it has worked on Jaclyn, who at first doesn’t understand what exactly is going on.

Then there is a moment where she gets it. She sees the forces aligned against her. They threaten her livelihood. They threaten her dignity. And in retaliation, in a moment when Ileen isn’t looking, Jaclyn seizes the chance to open the drawers of Ileen’s desk and rearrange everything in them, so Ileen, who prizes order, can’t find anything.

Rasheeda Speaking — playing at Collective Consciousness Theatre from Jan. 17 to Feb. 3 — is an office farce that isn’t afraid to play with fire. At the play’s outset, Dr. David Williams (Ethan Warner-Crane) and his faithful receptionist Ileen Van Meter (Susan Kulp) plot to part fellow receptionist Jaclyn Spaulding (Gracy Brown) from her employment. They want her gone. But they don’t want to be branded — perhaps the better word would be revealed” — as racists in the process. So they conspire to make Jaclyn’s life in the office miserable enough that she wants to leave. They begin to play mind games. Ileen in particular begins to micromanage Jaclyn’s every move, criticizing her every action and slowly stripping her passive-aggressively of her responsibilities until there’s not much job left for Jaclyn to do. It looks like Dr. Williams and Ileen might succeed in getting Jaclyn to leave.

Warner-Crane and Kulp.

Until Jaclyn figures out what Dr. Williams and Ileen are up to, and starts to fight back.

Under the direction of Elizabeth Nearing, Warner-Crane and Kulp are convincing co-conspirators, with Warner-Crane a good cold-shouldered coward and Kulp shooting Ileen through and through with a particular, recognizable kind of anxiety, the kind born of knowing that what you’re doing is wrong but wanting to do it anyway. Brown, meanwhile, undergoes a steady and remarkable transformation, from matter-of-fact to incredulous to clever to, at last, somehow both triumphant and fragile at the same time.

How much you laugh during Rasheeda Speaking may depend on how much you connect with it as a farce — New York Times reviewer of a production starring Tonya Pinkins and Dianne Wiest did not — or how much truth you believe it reveals in its humor. As a guy who loves a good farce, I found a lot to like in Rasheeda Speaking. It is fun, and it is quite effective, and it is the sort of play that just might make people feel a little uncomfortable. Some audience members might want to dismiss a play like this, saying that it’s too broad, that things like this don’t happen in real life. But friend, they happen.

Toward the end of Rasheeda Speaking, moreover, playwright Joel Drake Johnson gives Spaulding a speech about her daily bus commute that gets at the way we continue to discover, with every civil rights victory or social move forward, that the forces of prejudice are as deeply rooted as ever. Take away a white person’s ability to casually use the n‑word in public, and some white people will simply find a substitute that carries the same toxic weight. The play’s ending is tougher than anyone might want. But maybe it’s the best we can hope for.

Rasheeda Speaking runs at Collective Consciousness Theatre, 319 Peck St., from Jan. 17 to Feb. 3. Visit the theatre’s website for tickets and more information.

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