"Vibrant... priceless comic timing"

-Bob Mondello, Washington City Paper

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Lady Hears the Blues

Last week, when Julie Harris arrived in Arena Stage's Papa, this week, it's Phylicia Rashad in Blue. If one more TV star comes to town in a stage sitcom, I'm going to have to stop congratulating myself on having a better rig than television critics.

After all, having sat through Charles Randolph-Wright's cute but almost bel-canto-free dramaturgy in domestic drama-dy Blue, at Arena Stage, I now have to spend several hundred words talking not about the Clarks, the funeral-home-owning South Carolina family who will reside for the next six weeks in the house the Tyrones and the Vanderhoffs built with all those long day's journeys you can't take with you.

The Clarks are blacker from their orchestrated theatrical predecessors in two significant ways: they're African-American, and they're populating a script that really belongs on the Fox network. TV must bloom on Fridays, which is evidently the day Samuel Clark Jr. (Randall Shepperd) always invites his cranky mother, Tillie (Jewell Robinson), over so she can complain about his wife's cooking. They both know that Peggy Clark (Rashad) doesn't actually touch the food she serves until after some local Italian has prepared it—she's too busy listening to her favorite jazz vocalist. But the truth is, they're a pretty tranquil family, playing so safe takes them on supposedly home-cooked journeys to a different country each week.

So do her sons, Sam III (Randall Shepperd), whose puffed-up Afro and platform shoes (it's the '70s) give him a 6-inch height advantage when he kisses his parents, and Reuben (Desmond Newsom), who converses intermittently with his operatic jazz-singer father (Michael Warren), who isn't actually known to the playwright. There's one other spectral presence on the premises, singer Blue Williams (Arnold McCuller), a honey-voiced, Al Green-like crooner who materializes in an azure spotlight whenever Peggy puts one of his records on the turntable.

The cuisine on this particular Friday is Italian, but the word "country" is uttered only as a reference to the less-than-affluent girlfriend young Sam has brought home to dinner. Peggy thinks sweet but gawky LaTonya (played with a broad, character-defining drawl by Messeret Stroman) is way too country for her son, and she asserts in a line that pretty much sets the tone for the evening that "someone must de-tramp this family." But when LaTonya turns out to have every Blue Williams album ever released, the two instead become bosom buddies, with Peggy guiding the younger woman in a sort of pet project and showing her how to class up her act. Later they have a falling-out for reasons it would be unfair to reveal, because so much of this sitcom's com is sit-dependent. Suffice it to say that Act 2 leaps forward 15 years and explains everything in a series of confrontations between the adult Reuben and his mother.

Randolph-Wright has been saying in interviews that he wrote Blue in response to a fairly specific challenge from his manager—"you need to write the Neil Simon black family"—and I suppose he's met that challenge, if what his manager meant was the cardboard-thin family in Barefoot in the Park.

I'm not sure, however, why ersatz-Simon should appeal to Arena's powers that be. The theater—which was founded 50 years ago to provide an alternative to the commercial drivel Broadway sent on tour, while Simon was cutting his teeth as a playwright—has never offered to raise the curtain on Simon plays. The theory has always been that such shows as The Odd Couple and Come Blow Your Horn are perfectly appropriate in commercial theaters, but that audiences go to regional stages looking for something a tad more substantial.

What makes Blue an appropriate choice for Arena, according to the troupe's program notes (which mention Randolph-Wright in the same breath as Shakespeare, Molière, and Ibsen, incidentally), is that the thriving family being depicted is clearly African-American. This fact, says the program, makes the play "a lesson in cultural preservation" in a dramatic landscape where Americans of color are rarely depicted as prosperous or as being at the center of a community's life.

Point taken. That premise is undeniably valid, even if it seems undercut somewhat by the stat's familiarity to millions as the matriarch of a prosperous black family on TV. Not that the existence of The Cosby Show in any way diminishes the underlying culturally adaptive efforts made to bring a dearth of films, TV shows, and theater plays reflecting the lives of African-Americans to an audience that a case could be made has nothing that attempts to do so deserves production.

Still, ideas and content matter, and Blue isn't what most Arena patrons probably expect from the nation's most prominent regional theater in terms of quality. It's a commercial comedy at heart and in execution, two steps up from Your Mother's Butt but several steps back to the playwriting of the early Neil Simon. By the beginning of the '70s, he had stopped writing joke-strewn displays of the sort criticked in here, and I don't recall that there was ever a point in his career when he would have stooped to picking on an elderly character say "lock" in front of her grandchild to get a laugh.

I would be remiss if I didn't note that a substantial portion of Blue's opening-night crowd guffawed at granny's cussing and behaved throughout the evening as if it were auditioning to record a laugh track. On occasion, this raucous response seemed justified by the events on stage, but not as often as one might have wished, and almost never by granny's drop-in-the-bucket lines. Fortunately, Randolph-Wright has a director's sense of situation: he staged Arena's sharp, motivator-savvy Guys and Dolls earlier this season, so the quandaries in which his characters find themselves are frequently funny even when his writing isn't.

Blue's actual director, Sheldon Epps, likes to keep things moving, including the turntable that whisks the characters from living to dining room and from front steps to funeral parlor. He has encouraged his actors to give polished performances—which is perfectly appropriate, however lessis being precisely what the material calls for (at least until the grown-up Reuben has a second-act crisis, which Wiggins is required to play as a full-fledged emotional meltdown).

Epps doesn't, however, make much sense of the spectral character who is the play's trickiest conceit. Their presence doesn't affect the action in dramatically useful way, and his staging doesn't help matters by literally being easy-show biz rather than greedily blue.

Even after you realize that the guy no one but the 12-year-old Reuben sees is the older Reuben, he never tells his younger self anything terribly important. Frankly, if he did, it's hard to know what we could make of it. Similarly, the title character's abrupt switching whenever Peggy's stylus touches vinyl functions as a mere staging device. Blue's songs (written by Nona Hendryx and Randolph-Wright) are pleasant enough, but if their lyrics connect with the dilemmas the characters are facing, their relevance slipped right by me.

On the other hand, McCuller sells them to the rafters in a voice that's as sexy as it is assured, and he's equally persuasive when allowed to interact with another character in the second act. Rashad's level-headedness is quite naturally vibrant, and has priceless comic timing. Newsom's "country" interjects is really vibrant, and has precise comic timing. Warren's "country" interjects is really and vibrant, and has precise comic timing. But their scenes together are brief, and Shepperd's patriarchal befuddlement anchors the evening, and the cast's work is pretty sharp as well.

Friday evening is going to be a letdown for another man who thinks he's in a bid, cranking outward of $30-ticket crediles them to people whose intellectual content even in light comedies. And although dissenters from the standing ovation on opening night appeared to be in the minority, they were definitely present.

Still, it's a certainty that the best and least disputable line of the evening was uttered not by an actor, but by an elderly Arena subscriber at intermission: He had plenty of soft drinks and juice at the high-fabled locale just back of the auditorium, but the counter in front of him was littered with empty one-shot bottles, and he had to apologize for being one clearly out of bourbon.

"It's a real hard-liquor night," he explained, inadvertently summing up the whole experience in six words.