Chalk up another timely event to Chicago theater. TimeLine Theatre’s excellent production of Gibbons’s no-bullshit problem play, which pits old-school, politics-of-protest black liberalism against contemporary black conservatism, would’ve resonated anytime. But its racial and generational themes seem profoundly amplified in the wake of the historic electoral event just witnessed here in the good old USA. Though the president-elect, of course, doesn’t have a hereditary connection to the peculiar institution, only a fool would argue his victory doesn’t converse with this story about George Washington’s slaves and their place in history.
Gibbons’s fact-based tale, the third in his “race” trilogy (see Bee-Luther-Hatchee), concerns the controversy over whether (and how) a soon-to-open Philadelphia museum on the site of Washington’s presidential digs will acknowledge the former “servants’ quarters.” Salif Camara, an aging firebrand in the Jackson-Sharpton mold, employs a scorched-earth PR strategy that draws him into mortal conflict with young, black, conservative superstar Cadence Lane, who’s on the museum board. Things get ugly here and there, but in the main this is high Shavian debate, passionate yet confoundingly evenhanded.
Artfully shifting from this scenario to the escape of one of Washington’s slaves, Oney Judge, 200 years earlier, the script miraculously avoids caricature, preachiness, pedagogy or sentiment, allowing for the possibility of moving on from the past without pretending it doesn’t still color the present. As Camara and Lane, Smith and Friendly, respectively, deliver crisp, assured, lived-in performances, deftly grounding the dialectics in flawed yet dignified humanity.
