ARTS REVIEW: 'NEIGHBORS' AT THE MATRIX THEATER

New, Original & Hilariously Entertaining, Yet Disturbing In Its Subject

By: Clare Elfman

September 15, 2010

(July 27, 2010 in Los Angeles, California) A classics professor, his wife and daughter, settle into a good neighborhood of a university town.   He is black, his wife is white. He's established and respected in a fine house among good neighbors of scholars and academics. Finally this is post-racial America. He has arrived.

And then a new family moves in next door.  In this country which has whip-lashed, in the past fifty years, from the murder of Emmett Till in a still segregated south, to the election of a black president, our professor finds that everything he sought to escape, everything that might tarnish the role he's now acquired, is just outside his door. The Crows have arrived!

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a very talented and promising young playwright, drops us into a world of fantasy/reality that sends us roller-coastering into wild humor and shocking satire.  Shocking because his new neighbors are, by the professor's own description, "nigg....s." He is confronted with the N word.  Cleverly, the Crows are presented to us as a minstrel musical act, black-face on black, white or red painted exaggerated lips, an incredibly over-the-top pigtailed Topsy, and a Mammy right off the old Aunt Jemima Pancake box -- enormous breasts to which she sometimes attaches two white baby dolls to suckle (a la Gone With the Wind era with its happy singing slaves and the mammy's total concern for her white "children").

The outrageous costuming pushes racial stereotyping to the limits. Huge big-breasted Mammy slaps Jim when he tries to get "uppity" and wants to go to school instead of taking his father's place in the show. Sambo wears false genitalia -- one penis so long that he chops off part of it and stuffs it into a watermelon. Topsy -- and her huge, wild pigtails -- opens with a crazy dance.

But suave Zip in his black-face and painted lips is attracted to the  professor's white wife, and their relationship introduces another theme: white women attracted to black men and black men to white women.  So many racially related themes are thrown into the second act, it's hard to know if they were the author's intention or just an act yet to be refined and polished. Zip and the professor struggle as the marriage unravels.

The end of the second act shifts to a silent confrontation between the Crows and audience. So what are they asking us about our own preconceptions?  Is this sudden audience discomfort the author's intention? The author has opened a perplexing dialogue. If the Crows are simply embarrassing stereotypes, why is the teen daughter so attracted to their energy and talent? Why does Zip become a real threat to the professor? Why suddenly does the marriage between a black man and a white wife, in this "post-racial era," again become a racial question?

But two facts are obvious. This is an early work of a major playwright. And the cast uniformly excellent. Topsy is done and overdone by a talented Daniele Watts who delights with a little pageant in which she rejects her Topsy-curls for the wild hair of a '20s jazz singer and moves through history to show connection and progression of this raw music into modern jazz.  Derek Webster as the professor delivers a stunning classroom lecture on a Greek drama which parallels the tragedy of a king who must kill his daughter to satisfy the gods and save his soldiers -- his ordinary rough-in-the-field guys and the implications of that sacrifice. Baadja-Lyne is Mammy; Keith Arthur Bolden is Sambo, the street kid and hip-hopper; an excellent Leith Burke plays Zip, who bridges the world and seduces the professor's wife. (Why, the implications are not clear, but the point of the play is to make you wonder and question and get a bit upset at the conclusion.)  Julia Campbell is an excellent white wife. Rachael Thomas is the daughter who is attracted to the wild and free-wheeling life of the Crows. James Edward Shippy is the son who wants to cross over to the other world, yanked back by his family who expect him to carry out generations of Jim Crow traditions.

Warning: if you are squeamish, there is one bit of action (and nothing to do with black-white America. I think the author was having a bit of scatological fun) that is so hilariously shocking that I said, out loud: "How the h*ll did they get away with that?"

Neighbors is new, it's original, it's hilariously entertaining yet disturbing in its subject -- a new era of "post-racial" black America. And bravo to Joseph Stern of the Matrix for having the guts to bring this startling and provoking and, at the conclusion, disturbing play to the L.A. theater scene.

Matrix Theater

7657 Melrose Avenue

Los Angeles, California

(323) 852-0008