Playwright: Shepsu Aakhu
At: MPAACT at Victory Gardens
Phone: (773) 871-3000; $17.50 & $20
Runs through: May 18
The strength of a play often is in the telling rather than the tale, and that's the case with Kiwi Black by established playwright Shepsu Aakhu. Although set within Chicago's African-American community, the story of an adolescent son coming of age in the shadow of a tough-love father is colorblind. A son's aspirations vs. the world's possibilities, a father's desire to instruct and assist vs. his ability to do either, these are universal to all races and cultures.
Kiwi Black focuses on a Black urban commonplace, the single-parent household. The departure from stereotype is that the parent is a widower father. This is part of Aakhu's telling that makes the play stand out. The other key element of style is punchy dialogue. Sometimes poetic, sometimes of the streets and sometimes satirical, it's always rhythmic, pithy and a model of economy. Indeed, sometimes it's too economical, as I discuss below.
Director Mignon McPherson Nance amplifies the text through visual and musical dynamics. She uses the supporting ensemble to portray a varied Black community, chiefly seen on a subway platform (one of the play's principal settings), with the creative and often-amusing assistance of costumer Kanika Sago. Nance also punctuates the rhythmic text with recorded and live blues riffs that highlight the musical nature of Aakhu's words.
The principal players are J. David Shanks as father Joe Gratton, a shoeshine and hustle man who lives 'one paycheck from homeless,' and Kevin Douglas as 14-year-old Lennox Grafton. Although too old to pass for 14, Douglas is a gifted actor with a particularly expressive face and magnetic presence. You want to keep your eyes on him, both literally and in the watch-his-career sense. Shanks is less successful as Joe because he's too nice, projecting careworn concern instead of the streetwise survivor who throws his son out of the house at the climax of the conflict.
Indeed, this is the play's weak point. Lennox is a good kid, questioning but well-behaved, his sights set on college. Aakhu asks us to believe that Lennox would drop out of school, take to the streets and become a three-card monty hustler all in two weeks, and that Joe would allow it to happen. I don't believe the former as written, nor the latter as played. I don't dispute the storytelling purposes of either action, but they aren't sufficiently developed and, therefore, seem forced. It's also odd that in a poor household, the neatly dressed Lennox doesn't have a part-time job. This is where Aakhu's economy subverts verisimilitude.
But if one takes Kiwi Black as a poetic—rather than literal—framing of universal human concerns, it becomes easy to declare this a successful and stylish work.
----------------------------------------