Playwright: Kia Corthron
At: Pegasus Players, 1145 W. Wilson
Phone: (773) 878-9761
Runs through: April 13
Breath, Boom purports to be about the life of a girl gang leader in the Bronx, chronicling her life from age 16 to 30. We watch Prix (Rain Wilson), our braided, angry, poetic gang leader with a fascination for fireworks, as she grows into a young woman, scarred by sexual abuse, incarceration, crime, and mistreatment at the hands of those whom she calls friends and family. Prix doesn't have much luck on the mean streets of New York, and the dark cloud under which she lives is only briefly illuminated by the fireworks shot above the East River, and her dabbling in creative expression (in addition to a failed attempt at staging her own display, Prix also sketches fireworks, and fashions them out of pipe cleaners). The hard luck and lack of love eventually rob Prix of even the outlet of creativity and shrivels inside.
At the beginning of this review, I said that this play, by young playwright Kia Corthron, purports to be about Prix. What the play is really about is the playwright's fascination with her characters and how the despair and horror of their lower-class lives affects them. And that's not enough. What Corthron has done here is create a parade of characters about whom we can never sympathize. Worse, we can never root for their growth, or hope that they might discover an opportunity for escape from their lives. Corthron gives us a central character who speaks in a kind of hip-hop poetry and who is, for the most part, angry at the world. The imagery of her language (using mostly the contrived metaphor of fireworks, which, I suppose, is meant to represent Prix's desire to escape, to find the perfection and beauty she sees in these fleeting pyrotechnic displays) is at odds with the rest of the cast, who speak more in the naturalistic tones of the street. The disparity jars. I suppose Corthron thinks Prix's language makes her profound. It doesn't; she just doesn't sound real.
Prix never really connects with the other characters, including her mother and several vivid, but ultimately empty, vessels she meets when she's confined first to a girls' reformatory and later, a prison. And this lack of connection makes for a static, flat landscape that becomes boring after a while. In addition to needing at least one sympathetic character, we also need some sort of story to hook into. Corthron doesn't bother to provide us with a plot.
Eavesdropping on the disenfranchised and powerless, especially those whose main voice is violence could be powerful, but Breath, Boom fails because that's all it does: eavesdrops. What am I supposed to feel? I couldn't discern what the playwright's intention was. It didn't help, either, that veteran Pegasus Playwright director Ilesa Lisa Duncan directs the production with one-note monotony and keeps the volume loud, with little modulation. After a while, you just wish most of the characters would simply shut up.
