Dominique Morisseau came to playwriting through acting. In college, inspired by Ntozake Shange and frustrated by the lack of roles for Black women in the theater department at the University of Michigan, she wrote her first play, Blackness Blues: Time to Change the Tune (A Sister’s Story). Now, more than 20 years, a MacArthur grant, and a current residency at Signature Theatre later, Morisseau’s perspective as a performer is still audible in her work. Her characters often get their own impassioned monologues, and her scenes are driving and vernacular, powered by clear conflict, enthusiastic shit-shooting, and canny sizing-up. In a way — and this is neither compliment nor slight — they feel a bit old-fashioned: There’s nothing postmodern about their front-footed, just-short-of-declamatory brand of realism. These are the kind of chewy, relatable yet high-stakes dialogues that will populate scene-study syllabi for decades to come. They’re built for capital-A Acting.
Whether or not they always come together into fully compelling pieces of theater is another question. Currently, Signature is reviving one of Morisseau’s early plays, Sunset Baby, which made its premiere at the LAByrinth Theater Company in 2013. A three-hander that takes place in a present-day East New York housing-project apartment, the show is thematically weighty yet formally thin. Its story deals with competing poles of activism and cynicism — the grave risks of both softness and hardness in the lives of a former leader in the Black Power movement, his estranged daughter, and her boyfriend — but the combination of Morisseau’s straightforward text and Steve H. Broadnax III’s even-keeled direction renders up a production that’s less theatrical than it is rhetorical. It’s long on argument but short on a more expansive, less literal expression of drama.
It may be that the show is starting at a disadvantage: Its protagonist, Nina (Moses Ingram, wearing the emotional equivalent of body armor) was named by her activist parents for Nina Simone, and co-sound designers Curtis Craig and J. Keys (Morisseau’s husband) have reached deep into the singer’s catalog to score the production. Although that may seem like the obvious move, it sets too high a bar. Simone’s songs are so rich, so devastating, so unmistakable, that they demand a dramatic context that rises to meet them in all their raw complexity, and Sunset Baby doesn’t quite get there. Compounding this issue is the fact that Simone, along with being “full of brilliance and torment … beauty and power,” as Nina’s father Kenyatta (Russell Hornsby) says, had a wickedly sharp sense of humor, a quality neither Kenyatta nor Nina possesses. Both are guarded, solemn, and intense, molded by different kinds of suffering. Nina, says the character description in Morisseau’s script, “has a lifetime of walls up and will fight you before letting them down.” While that’s emotionally credible, the play made up of these fights, one after another, serious-faced and world-weary, starts to feel stodgy, its potential for oomph and poignancy sputtering like a flame with too little oxygen.
At the center of most of Sunset Baby’s altercations is a collection of letters. Nina’s mother, a renowned Black Power activist named Ashanti X, wrote them to Nina’s father while he was in prison — “for … what was it again?” Nina taunts Kenyatta when, recently released after many years, he shows up at her door hoping to read what his lover wrote. “Oh right … robbing an armored truck. Nice … In the name of some bullshit cause … To steal capitalist dollars in the name of third-world democracy.” Kenyatta cringes at his daughter’s impenetrable cynicism. Weary and overwhelmed with guilt, he’s hardly the firebrand he used to be, but at his core he still believes in the cause — and he wants his daughter to believe, too. But he’s spent almost all of Nina’s conscious life in prison — “You’re a stranger,” she tells him coldly — and it doesn’t help his case with her when he says things like, “You were going to be our revolution.” Between scenes, Kenyatta delivers somber, fairly stilted monologues into a video camera, and at one point he talks about his plan, back before Nina was born, to “plant my seed into a warrior woman who was as powerful as the sun. Build the revolution in the offspring.” Yeesh. The cringe goes both ways.
Kenyatta wants the letters (“I just need to read them,” he claims). Nina — who puts on a wig, thigh-high boots, and a face of stone every night to deal drugs with her boyfriend, Damon (a sharp J. Alphonse Nicholson) — wants out of the game. Damon wants that too, but he also wants control, and he’d happily sell the letters to bankroll his and Nina’s escape. “They’re worth a fortune!” Nina snarls at her father. “Oh … you didn’t know these letters were the hot shit? … You didn’t come here cuz you … wanna put your hands on them tens of thousands that my mama’s worth now that she’s dead?” Nina’s cynicism, and the rest of her armor, have been forged by a childhood struggling with her brilliant mother’s descent into addiction, which has at last ended in death. As far as she can see, the revolution failed. It didn’t save Ashanti X, and it hasn’t helped her, or Damon, or anyone on the streets of East New York. “Fuck your progress!” she tells Kenyatta. “This is your progress … me. Here! I’m your fuckin’ progress … What the fuck did you achieve?”
Nina is a tough part: She’s so entirely hardened that it can be tricky for an actor not to fall into monotony. Her development is largely subcutaneous — what we actually witness are her decisions. Broadnax’s production is lucky to have Ingram, whose spine never bends but who’s able to expose the deep yearning beneath Nina’s plates and spikes. “I want a home,” she admits to Damon, her voice breaking for the first time as Ingram puts her head back and shuts her eyes against tears. “I want kids of my own … I wanna sit … and watch the sun rise and set. I never even saw a fuckin’ sunset!” Nina’s lament gives rise to the play’s title, though the notion that the character has really never seen a sunset feels forced and sentimental. It’s pretty easy to walk outside at 7 p.m., even in a place that’s not exactly Bali. I couldn’t help thinking of Werner Herzog’s claim that he doesn’t know the color of his own eyes. I love you, Werner, but come on.
The more resonant aspect of Morisseau’s title is its reference to the waning days of the Black Power movement. As a sunset baby, Nina is a child of the revolution but not of its bright dawn. Instead, she — and, Morisseau implies, a whole generation — is struggling through the long, bitter evening that necessarily follows a vivid zenith in the ongoing fight for freedom and progress. Among this troubled cohort, and hovering as a ghost in the periphery of the play, is perhaps the most famous sunset baby of all: Tupac Shakur. Tupac’s mother, Afeni Shakur, was a prominent Black Panther activist. Morisseau borrows their last name for Kenyatta, and echoes of both Afeni, who was born Alice Faye Williams, and Malcolm X resound in the chosen name of Nina’s mother. Although Nina Simone’s music suffuses the play, Tupac is there in the shadows. Like Nina’s, his is a vexed legacy: Did he uphold his mother’s movement in his music, or did he betray it? What’s the relationship between the fight for Black liberation, as embodied by activists like Ashanti X and Kenyatta, and the “thug life” represented by Tupac and lived out daily by Damon and Nina?
These are meaty, complex questions and intriguing to ponder — Morisseau’s plays often sit atop fascinating historical strata, even if their dramatic construction tends to stick to the middle of the road. Sunset Baby doesn’t burst off the stage, but it keeps us intellectually engaged. What it offers for contemplation is the unglorious face of revolution, what Kenyatta calls “the man in the mirror.” That face is tired and worn, full of mistakes and unintended consequences, but Morisseau suggests that it is not the face of failure. It needs rest and grace; it needs to soften. The sun will rise again, and the revolution — unglamorous, daily, personal, imperfect — will continue.
Sunset Baby is at Signature Theatre through March 10.
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