Ordena, who stars as Alma in Yellowman: The writing is supposed to be lyrical but feels banal.
Yellowman
- Written by Dael Orlandersmith
- Directed by Weyni Mengesha
- Starring Ordena and Dean Marshall
- At Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs in Toronto
It's always comforting to be reminded that American literary-prize juries have as little clue about what works onstage as the ones in Canada do.
Dael Orlandersmith's Yellowman was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002, despite being desperately untheatrical. It'd work better as a short story, a radio drama, a film - pretty much anything other than a live play.
Currently being co-produced by Nightwood and Obsidian in Toronto, Yellowman is about "shadism" among African-Americans in a South Carolina community - and rarely have I encountered a problem play so single-minded about its theme. Barely a sentence goes by that doesn't refer to dark, light, yellow, red, or blue-black skin. The characters view absolutely everything through a social hierarchy based on different shades of black.
Alma (Ordena), whose skin is dark, and Eugene (Dean Marshall), whose skin is light, look back on their youthful romance in two separate, but equal, intertwined monologues. We encounter them as elementary-school students, as young teenagers, and again as older ones.
There's very little in the way of plot here beyond their bland courtship, but plenty of exposition about Eugene's dark-skinned father, who resents his son's light skin; his light-skinned mother, who was cast out of her family for marrying a dark-skinned man; and Alma's self-hating jet-black mother.
Yellowman keeps looking like it's heading into Romeo and Juliet territory, but "shadism" never really seriously inhibits Alma and Eugene's romance. Eventually Alma takes off for New York, but even that doesn't scuttle their relationship. It takes the last-minute intervention of an inheritance and few bottles of bourbon for some drama to break out.
Orlandersmith's tell-don't-show style is depressingly prevalent in theatre these days. Monologues I can deal with, but to have two actors onstage talking past each other all night is such a waste. It's like going to see two singers and never hearing them duet.
As for Alma and Eugene's individual voices, Orlandersmith keeps intruding with psychosexual observations that you can't imagine the characters actually making themselves. Alma gives a speech about how "men like [her]father" had sex with "women like [her]mother": "They rode, they entered, they shot their seed then left them." Eugene, meanwhile, during a drunken brawl with his father, keeps giving us the exact GPS location of their penises.
The writing is supposed to be lyrical, but feels banal and repetitive. I lost track of the number of times Eugene said: "I pour myself a drink." Remember when sentences like that were called stage directions, and actors used to act them out?
Weyni Mengesha directs with economy and precision on a deconstructed Southern porch designed by Tamara Marie Kucheran. Ordena and Marshall are engaging as Alma and Eugene, though neither really delivers the Southern flavour that might make the play a bit more palatable. Like That Face , the other play Nightwood is currently producing, there's no dialect coach listed in the program. Instead, the actors wing it - and so, Alma's mother becomes less Gullah Geechee and more Caribbean-Canadian as the evening progresses. All the more to make you yearn for Trey Anthony's Da Kink in My Hair , which dealt with the issue of shadism in Canada's black communities and knocked it off in a single 10-minute monologue.
Yellowman runs until Nov. 14.
J. Kelly Nestruck