"Downtown Race Riot" at The New Group

So excited to be back in New York City to see a few shows. The trip is a quick one this time, so only three plays over the weekend.

We started off with Downtown Race Riot, by Seth Zvi Rosenfeld last night. It was not an auspicious start to the weekend.

The Play

Set in Greenwich Village in 1976, the play depicts a struggling family: Mary, a flower-child junkie, and her two children, Jimmy the high-school dropout with some rather questionable views on other people, and Joyce, a nominal lesbian who flirts incessantly with her brother's best friend. Said best friend, Marcel, is a black Haitian immigrant who seems to have a fair amount going on, although his life's goal seems to be graffiti artist.

The thing is, there is about to be a race riot in nearby Washington Square Park aimed at driving out the blacks and Puerto Ricans. Jimmy wants to participate, but his mother doesn't approve. Marcel wants to participate, too, which is more complicated, being as everyone views him as black, though he insists he is part of the neighborhood.

So there is some conflict set up. Personal and group loyalty come into conflict, of course. Marcel's story turns out to be perhaps the most interesting, his family not only having been chased out of Haiti, but also out of Harlem, since they weren't African American, so didn't fit in with the American blacks. So he's eager to join a riot to drive out blacks, essentially as retribution. But he can't see that he will be just as much a target.

There are other complications involving gangs/mobs and a coked-up lawyer Mary has hired to try to scam some money out of the city. So there seems to be a lot going on. Except there isn't. Jimmy keeps trying to make people hamburgers, but they get ruined. The dialog is heavy on exposition and short on any actual interest. It's just not a terribly interesting play. For one thing, it's all building up to the climax of the riot, but the play ends just as it's about to happen, so we never see that or its after effects.

The Production

The set was actually quite cool. It's a fixed set for three rooms in the apartment, all quite authentically decked out in mid-70s style. There was obviously a lot of detail work put into that. Similarly, the soundtrack feels authentic, and the lighting is used effectively to move the focus from one room to another (though there is sometimes interesting stuff going on in the rooms away from the focus). So that part is fine.

Then there is the acting. The big name in the cast is Chloe Sevigny, a movie and TV star who plays Mary. She's OK, but really not carrying the show. The biggest share of the lines go to Jimmy (David Levi), who has a rather limited range of sulks, punctuated by violent outbursts. More interesting is Marcel (Moise Morancy), who at least shows some range as he interacts with different characters. Joyce (Sadie Scott) made no sense to me. I mean, the character as written doesn't make sense, but as performed there is just no connection or appeal. Her big confrontation with Mary is delivered with kind of a flat, wooden affect that drains any emotion right out of the scene.

Of the other characters, Jay 114 (Daniel Sovich) provides kind of a menacing presence without a lot of lines. And Josh Pais as Bob Gilman, the lawyer, provides some humor to a pretty dismal scenario, but he only comes in late in the play and doesn't really resolve anything. But it's fun to watch a self-justifying coke-head from the 70s with a contemporary perspective.

I will add that this is the first time I'd been in this theater, the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre. We sat in the mezzanine, which gave us a really nice overview of the apartment spread across the stage. I thought the acoustics were good, as were the sight lines.

None of the characters really creates much interest, except maybe Marcel. Instead of going offstage, characters often just go into other rooms, where you might or might not see them doing things in dimmed light, such as Mary shooting up while nominally watching her soap operas. Joyce wanders off to her room, partly disrobes, and then just lies on the bed. At least, that's all I noticed, as I was focused elsewhere. During another scene, Jimmy just sits at the table and mopes over one of his hamburgers, not eating or anything else I could discern. It's quite distracting to feel the need to look all around the stage to make sure you're not missing something. Perhaps this is some avant garde technique, but for me it just seemed like lazy direction.

Bottom Line

There just isn't much appeal in this play.I suspect that with stronger acting or some more clever direction, it could be better, but the script still doesn't provide much of interest. At best there is some mildly interesting character sketching, but none of the characters are actually very deep or compelling, and certainly not enough to atone for the lack of plot advancement.

Ultimately, the play just seems to give up. It leads us up to a big decision (will Jimmy and Marcel actually go to the riot?), but doesn't show us any of the repercussions of that. If the outcome is as cut-and-dried as the lead-up makes us believe, then are there actually any meaningful repercussions to the decision?

And the sad thing is, I find that I left not really caring. None of the characters seemed important enough to me, either as individuals or as symbols of some larger social faction, for me to derive any meaningful lesson about either the historical period or the current one. If there was some deeper meaning intended, it didn't make it across.

I had hoped for more, both in content and execution. I'd give this one a pass.