31st Play - Stick Fly by Lydia R. Diamond

I was in a Zoom meeting (I was VERY excited!) with this amazing playwright and realized that I hadn’t read this play of hers. As a human being she was passionate and inspiring, so I thought I’d make it my final play of July. :)

Summary: "The affluent, African-American LeVay family is gathering at their Martha’s Vineyard home for the weekend, and brothers Kent and Flip have each brought their respective ladies home to meet the parents for the first time. Kent’s fiancée, Taylor, an academic whose absent father was a prominent author, struggles to fit into the LeVay’s upper-crust lifestyle. Kimber, on the other hand, is a self-described WASP who works with inner-city school children, fits in more easily with the family. Joining these two couples are the demanding LeVay patriarch, Joe, and Cheryl, the daughter of the family’s longtime housekeeper. As the two newcomers butt heads over issues of race and privilege, long-standing family tensions bubble under the surface and reach a boiling point when secrets are revealed." (Concord Theatricals)

Loved: I have always thought of the Martha's Vineyard world as being such a WASP-y white world, and I thought it was really great to see a Black family living and thriving in this world for a change. I have since found out that there is a quite a history of wealthy Black families in Martha’s Vineyard. So, that was a cool discovery, even if I was clueless. :P Still, it’s great to see a play about a rich Black family. Rich (not all of them) and wonderfully flawed (pretty much all of them). The play certainly is about race in moments, but in a way that doesn't focus on all of the traumas that Black people have gone through; it focuses on the fact that this family still has problems even though they have money, like all humans. I really enjoyed the playwright’s poking at class issues that came up between the family and Cheryl, who is serving as the maid during the play, since her mother, the family’s usual maid, is not there that weekend. We see some of the family treat her more like an object than a person, and then we see Taylor, the fiancee of one of the sons, working way too hard to be more inclusive to her to try to combat the class issues. As a white person, it's valuable to see that sometimes overly aggressive inclusive behavior is just as annoying as the opposite; it’s even more annoying to Cheryl. A good lesson - I think intentional, as Lydia R. Diamond is a SMART playwright. I also really loved that the one white character, Kimber, who we kind of want to cast as the antagonist just because she is white, actually fits into the family better than Taylor, who is Black. Again, smart playwriting. I also appreciated how the lessons of privilege are turned a bit upside down, but still shown as problematic.

What I didn’t Love: I don't have a lot of specific criticism for this play, but I think I was less compelled by it than some plays I have read. As we get towards the end of the play, there are some revelations that make things perk up, but it just didn't strongly pull me in othewise. I really actively did not like the characters of Joe and Kimber, and maybe that was the intention of the playwright. However, it made them a little less interesting to me - I’d like to at least be conflicted a little bit in my dislike. I also was really rooting for the character of Cheryl, but mostly because as the daughter of the maid, she feels like the underdog. That being said, I didn't get enough specifics that made her, as a person, endearing to me. I'd have loved to see her as fully fascinating and flawed. As a matter of fact, now that I poke around in my feelings for this piece, I didn't really LIKE any of them. I almost like Taylor, but she's ultimately more annoying than interesting to me. I think the writer set the characters up that way intentionally, but that's what keeps the play from being as compelling to me as I wanted it to be.

Overall: This play reminded me of the rich family reunion plays August, Osage County and then Brandon Jacob-Jenkins' brilliant twist on that story, Appropriate. I LOVED how this play turned things upside down to have the rich, privileged family be Black in this play. We see that money solves a lot of problems, but not all of them, and that class and privilege still cause complications. That being said, it's a well-made, funny play with wonderful writing which allows us to recognize that even with the privilege of wealth this family has, they still don't have the privilege of whiteness. The characters are all both interesting and flawed, but I struggled to like them overall, and thus was not as fully drawn into their stories. I think this issue would likely be solved with good acting and directing, but perhaps some unlikeableness in all the characters was what was intended. I'm not sure, but I look forward to seeing this one in person one day.

Here’s a link to Google Sheets with more info about the play: Play a Day Sheet

Read a great interview with Lydia R. Diamond: https://broadwaydirect.com/stick-fly-playwright-lydia-r-diamond-on-getting-produced-on-broadway/