Fairview @ Bishop Arts Theatre Center
Photos by TayStan Photography
—Review by Jan Farrington
I don’t think I will hear the term “white gaze” again in the same way. Ever.
The riveting, entertaining, and painfully true production of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview now running at Bishop Arts Theatre Center (a production of Bishop Arts Theatre in association with Undermain Theatre) is still rolling, sharp-edged, through my mind on this morning after. I expect it to be there for a very long time, an exceptional addition to the many conversations and encounters we have, all of us, on the subject of race in this country.
Let me not mislead you. This isn’t a lecture, it’s a living, breathing piece of theater, immensely engaging and sit-com comical at the start. Drury won the Pulitzer Prize for her play, and as the realism of the first scene slowly transforms (to a sense of disturbance and confusion, then a feeling of shame at what we’re hearing, and then to an Absurdist scene of characters onstage who should…not…be…there for “Mama’s” party), we understand fully why her play had to be honored.
It isn’t that African American playwright Drury is revealing information we don’t (most or all of us) know; it’s that her “delivery system,” for lack of a better term, is extraordinary and powerful, a gut punch to heart and head alike. And it leads to a request that we (I mean the “identifying” white members of the audience) aren’t quite sure what to do about. “The growth is in sitting through the discomfort,” one audience member was quoted as saying after an earlier performance—and I hope that sounds to you, as it does to me, like the best kind of theater.
I can’t tell much more without taking away from the experience. Director Jiles King II has pulled together a terrific and all-in cast who shift from “regular” onstage performance to other very challenging theatrical styles as the play moves along. Junene K. and Harold Winston are very natural as married couple Bev and Dayton: she’s perpetually on stress overload (“Everything’s gonna be fine. It has to be….”), and he tries to calm her. Kayann Richards is Bev’s sister Jasmine, preening and gossipy, but a good listening ear for her niece Keisha, the tense college-bound daughter of the house. And actors Christina Cranshaw, Nadia DeWolf, Jon Garrard and Clint Gilbert embody some people we are less and less glad to know. These are all performances I will remember.
At some point we suddenly recognize Keisha as the center, the compass point on which Fairview turns. Sydney Hewitt gives a compelling performance, particularly in the second half of the 90-minute play, as she recoils from the surreal situation around the family dinner table. At first, Keisha is our companion in confusion—but then she is a young Black voice pushing us to climb out of our white bunker, our comfort zone, and to try seeing this world from a literally different viewpoint. “You have told me every story I have ever heard,” she says, eyes scanning us closely. “I just want to know what this place would feel like…without you.”
The posh at-home set for Bev and Dayton’s house was designed by Kensey Coleman, the walls hung with artworks (Ken’ja Brown designed props) that had me nodding my head: yes, those feel right. Bernetta Sowels’ costumes for the family are spot-on (love Keisha’s pulled-together private-school plaids, and Jasmine’s slinky red pantsuit), and she has fun with the wildly divergent “looks” of the uninvited guests. The silhouette work was done very well (lighting designer Velyncia Caldwell), but a bit more sound clarity (as we’re not seeing the actors) would be welcome, though perhaps not technically possible.
Bishop Arts’ and Undermain’s artistic directors, Teresa Coleman Wash and Bruce DuBose, deserve applause for combining their various strengths and long experience to bring us the regional premiere of this extraordinary play. I urge you to go, to listen, to think.
WHEN: Through November 6
WHERE: Bishop Arts Theatre Center, Dallas
WEB: bishopartstheatre.org
