2024 - 2nd Play - Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury
Lyndsay Allyn Cox, Dom Carter, Yewande Odetoyinbo, and Victoria Omoregie in SpeakEasy Stage Company's production of "Fairview" By Courtesy of Nile Scott Studios
This one has been sitting out for me to read for a while now - I was very excited to read this 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner!
Summary: “At the Frasier household, preparations for Grandma’s birthday party are underway. Beverly is holding on to her sanity by a thread to make sure this party is perfect, but her sister can’t be bothered to help, her husband doesn’t seem to listen, her brother is MIA, her daughter is a teenager, and maybe nothing is what it seems in the first place…! FAIRVIEW is a searing examination of families, drama, family dramas, and the insidiousness of white supremacy.” From Dramatists Play Service.
Laura’s thoughts in brief: Wow. This is a powerful meta-theatrical examination of the intrusion of white supremacy and surveillance into theatre and more evidently, into Black life. I LOVE meta-theatricality in a play, but not everyone does. I will say that I think it’s used really well in this one. The first act feels like a stereotypical Black sitcom, and it’s funny and entertaining, if not revelatory. Then the second act replays the first act exactly, but with voiceover from clearly white voices, particularly answering the posed question, “what race would you be if you could choose?” Oh boy. It starts to get cringe-y here, especially as the voices are speaking without censoring themselves (or knowing that they should?), and even the one woman that questions the correctness of the stereotypes they bring up has her own very problematic moment(s). There’s a crazy plot twist that I don’t want to spoil, but the third act takes CRINGE to a whole new level. I can’t imaging being in the audience for this play - WOW, WOW, WOW. Powerful and surprising! I will say that just reading the play was a bit confusing, because I wasn’t certain if the voices were onstage or off. My first thought was that the voices were offstage, based on the stage direction “We hear the following conversation,” which was definitely how the first production was done. Interestingly, it appears that some productions have included the white voices with the characters visible onstage, based on the reviews I read. I really appreciate that the playwright wasn’t terribly specific with her stage directions which gives artistic license to directors. Additionally, in my copy of the play, it didn’t designate the ethnicities of the cast. The Black family seemed obvious, but when the voiceovers started in the second act, I wasn’t sure what those cast members looked like (especially since I was reading not listening). As the act progressed, it started to be clearer that those voices were white, sigh. Overall, though, this an incredibly interesting and challenging play! The Pulitzer win makes absolute sense to me from my reading. However, THIS PLAY NEEDS TO BE SEEN. I want to see it so badly, and would highly support it being produced. It’s not my show to direct, or do Intimacy for, and probably I’m not quite right as an actor either. But it made me LAUGH and made me THINK, which are some of the ways I want plays to affect me. SOMEONE IN CHICAGO PLEASE DO IT!!!!
READ MORE! Here’s what others had to say about other productions:
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/theater/reviews/la-et-cm-fairview-20181015-story.html
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/2/28/fairview-review/
https://preview.houstonchronicle.com/theater/pulitzer-winning-fairview-asks-tough-questions-18124657