"Barbecue" at San Francisco Playhouse

SF Playhouse photo by Jessica Palopoli

This is a difficult play. I wish I had seen it a little earlier in its run, because there was a casting change for the last couple of weeks of the show, and it probably made a significant difference in the overall quality. But you go with what you got.

The play in question is Robert O'Hara's Barbecue, which takes place in a public park somewhere in Middle America around the present time. It's very clever in the way it does some things, but there are definitely some holes.

The Play

The play opens as a group of siblings begins to gather for a barbecue in the park, ostensibly as a celebration, but actually as a pretense to stage an intervention.  One of the siblings, Lillie Anne, has summoned the others (James T, Adlean, and Marie) to try to convince their sister Barbara to go into rehab. All of the siblings have issues, and many probably deserve to enter rehab themselves, but the opening scene establishes some of the background and relationships that have brought them to this stage.

As the first scene ends, the lights drop, and when they return we see exactly the same scenario, but all the actors have been replaced by doppelgangers. The obvious difference being that the first set of actors were all white, and the second all black.* The action continues as before, and we perhaps rethink some of our evaluations based on this change. Scenes alternate the two casts for the rest of the first act as we proceed into the actual intervention.

And then just as we get to the key moment at the end of the intervention (with the black family onstage), someone yells "Cut!" and everyone drops out of character, crew come onstage, and we realize that what we are seeing isn't what we thought we were seeing. We get to ponder that through intermission.

After intermission things change a bit, and we primarily see the two "Barbara" actresses interacting, starting with the white Barbara alone in the park, then joined by the black one. It becomes clear that the white Barbara is the "real" one, and the other is a famous actress who is evaluating whether to play Barbara in a film adaptation of Barbara's memoir, written in rehab.

[Spoilers here...look away if you must!] In the course of their discussion/negotiation, it becomes clear that Barbara's memoir is largely fictionalized, and was in fact inspired by reading a memoir while she was in rehab that inspired her recovery, but was also revealed to be fabricated. So we have layers on layers of fabrication and imitation and appropriation and ambition. Ultimately, everybody is trying to make a buck off of telling a story that might not be theirs, might not be true, and really, what does that matter?

I'd put this play in the trendy current genre of "gotcha" plays, where we are presented with a scenario that is ultimately revealed to be something entirely different, both within the play and to us. We've seen several plays like this over the last year or two, including Christopher Chen's Caught, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' An Octoroon. When done right, it can be brilliant, and really make the audience evaluate their thinking and prejudices. But timing and chemistry onstage are in many ways as important as the writing, as the audience really has to buy into the set-up in order for the "gotcha" to work.

The Production

Which brings us to the production. This casting is particularly tricky, as the play needs two complete, coherent families. For the most part, this works pretty well here. The characters of Adlean (Jennie Brick and Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe) and James T (Clive Worsley and Adrian Roberts) slip back and forth pretty seamlessly. The Maries (Teri Whipple and Kehinde Koyejo) seem to have somewhat different approaches to their character. Lillie Anne (Anne Darragh and Halili Knox) is more of a problem; though both are good performances, they don't feel like the same character at all, really.

And then there is Barbara (Sally Dana and Margo Hall). The white Barbara was originally Susi Damilano, an SF Playhouse founder, producing director, and frequent performer. Damilano is a dynamic and accomplished actress who probably matched up well with the veteran Hall. Not taking anything away from Dana, but she doesn't have either the big stage presence of Damilano or the chemistry with Hall that comes from developing the roles over the course of the run. I found a lot of the post-intermission scenes just lacking in coherence and fire that seemed to be called for. It just felt off. So that's why I say I wish I'd seen the play a bit earlier, with the original casting. It's a tough call for an actor to come into the cast for the last two weeks of a run and try to maintain the quality of the production. It's not bad, but it doesn't feel like it's all it should be.

Other than that, I thought the production was quite good. Bill English's set design works well, evoking a public park that has probably seen some better days. And Hall directs as well as performing, which works pretty well because most of her scenes either don't have a lot of lines, or they have lines, but not many other characters.

Bottom Line

There is a lot going on in this play, but because each of the actors only plays about half of it, it's kind of hard to really get into any of them. And as noted above, when we do finally get two characters developing and working with each other the particular casting of this last couple of weeks has taken some of the air out of the balloon.

Still, there is plenty to think about in the play, even if the very nature of it makes it difficult to really settle in and evaluate it. We get to look at how we feel about characters of different races with exactly the same issues, for example. And we get some class consciousness as the big movie star confronts the rehabbed addict on her home turf, as well as the pretenses of the star who thinks she can just dictate who she is and what her background is; never mind what "facts" you might have read about her. Those are all pretty interesting, but all get a bit muddled. The concluding scene just adds a few more with some digs at Hollywood and the film-going public and their attitudes about race.

Ultimately I have a little trouble trying to decide which of these are actually important to the playwright and which are just incidental details that go into telling the story. And that's probably my biggest issue with these "gotcha" plays: by their nature, they are complex, and they also consciously undercut their own characters, plots, and messages. It's great to have plays that leave us asking questions, but it's also helpful to make sure we know which questions the playwright actually thinks are important.

Barbecue runs through this weekend (closes Saturday the 11th). It's worth seeing.

*I'm sure I could come up with better descriptions of the cast change than "white" and "black," but that is the essence of what we're looking at. We have the same family with essentially the same dynamics, just a different race. I will use the "black" and "white" shorthand because it's late and I'm tired.