When someone scrawls the word on Eisa’s locker at school, she is so offended she takes revenge. After all, as the biracial daughter of her New England town’s only gay dads, Eisa is anything but mainstream. She sees herself as the next Lauryn Hill. One of her dads — the white one, Samuel — calls her, with some awe, a “woke genius.”
Despite their demographics, the adults are surely the basic ones in the family. A hot night for Samuel involves lasagna followed by “Annie Hall” on TV. He does not know that “black dad,” Aaron, is beginning to feel, with Eisa’s upcoming departure for college, that years of parenting and enforced domesticity have doused whatever wildness he once had within him.
If this sounds like the setup for a smart, stinging contemporary comedy, of the imminent-empty-nest subgenus, it very much is. But the setup quickly goes astray, or is deliberately derailed, in this Manhattan Theater Club production directed by Saheem Ali. Startling plot developments halfway through the play’s swift 100 minutes jumble the tone and strain credibility until we no longer know what genre — or even what world — we’re in. Nor can we discern in the aftermath what point the playwright is making.
That’s a shame because Augustin is drawn to complex conflicts. Refreshingly, gay parenting isn’t one of them; Aaron (Teagle F. Bougere) and Samuel (Patrick Breen) might as well be straight, so little does their homosexuality seem to matter to Eisa (Kara Young) or to their neighbors. (It barely matters to them, which proves to be a problem.)
And race, too, seems like something Augustin intends to treat lightly. As the play begins, Aaron, expertly twisting Eisa’s hair for bed, comments disparagingly on the movie they’ve just seen: Whereas white people on screen get to be sad and “silently live their lives,” he explains, black people “can only teach lessons on race and class.”
But that amusing swipe is misleading, because the story Augustin proceeds to tell does engage race at every turn. Eisa feels, or thinks she feels, alienated in the “godforsaken white oppressive culture” of her community. When a white teacher won’t give her credit for a “vision board” project she didn’t turn in, Eisa blames racism. That Charpie (Crystal Finn) once lost on “Jeopardy!” by failing to remember the name Zora Neale Hurston is all the proof Eisa needs.
If this is satirical, what happens next cannot be; Eisa’s revenge on those who fail to appreciate her nascent greatness is baroque and unfunny. Even her proto-romantic dealings with a boy named Atlas — a classmate who sells pot at the local Chuck E. Cheese — are turned into racial transactions. When Atlas (Adam Langdon) asks Eisa what her favorite music is, she says it’s not her job to educate a white person about black culture. But she’ll do it in exchange for a discount on weed.
Even as the story goes haywire, there are powerful moments and hard insights within it. In one subplot, Augustin, whose earlier play “Little Children Dream of God” was likewise studded with loveliness, has Aaron try to reconnect with his first boyfriend. The scenes between Bougere and Javier Muñoz as Raul, the “nomad” ex, may seem unlikely in their setup but are full of utterly believable regret as each must recognize the limitations life has put on him.
Ali gives such moments the time and quiet they need; one of the play’s sweetest passages even takes place in silence. When Eisa strikes her deal with Atlas, allowing him to listen to Lauryn Hill through one of her earbuds while she listens through the other, we hear nothing but instead see the bliss passing over and through them.
That instances of profound connection are the strength of “The New Englanders” is something of a conundrum; the play originated in the Miami-raised Augustin’s own feelings of alienation as a college student in Boston. It’s a tipoff to that sense of alienation that he has Aaron describe “Our Town,” the Thornton Wilder classic that takes place in New Hampshire, as a “not that great” play that makes “white suburban people nostalgic.”
And yet “Our Town” is the template for whatever is best about “The New Englanders” — including the opportunity for some rich performances by young actors. (Young, so moving last year in “The Revolving Cycles Truly and Steadily Roll’d,” and Langdon, a late addition to the “New Englanders” cast, are especially fine.) What they help rescue from the confusion here is an insight Wilder would surely have appreciated: that our lives seem special only from within, and only for a time. It doesn’t get more basic than that, in the good sense.
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Production Notes:
‘The New Englanders’
Through Oct. 20 at Manhattan Theater Club Stage II, Manhattan; 212-581-1212, nycitycenter.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes
By Jeff Augustin; directed by Saheem Ali; sets by Arnulfo Maldonado; costumes by Dede Ayite; lighting by Alan C. Edwards; sound by Palmer Hefferan; music by Michael Thurber; production stage manager, Katie Ailinger; general manager, Florie Seery. Presented by Manhattan Theater Club, Lynne Meadow, artistic director, Barry Grove, executive producer.
Cast: Teagle F. Bougere (Aaron), Patrick Breen (Samuel), Crystal Finn (Laura Charpie), Adam Langdon (Atlas), Javier Muñoz (Raul) and Kara Young (Eisa).
This article originally appeared in
.