Playwright: Thomas Bradshaw. At: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn. Phone: 312-443-3800; $10-$42. Runs through: March 6
Our play's premise locates us in 1983, when David Jennings, a very gay music major, learns that his upstate New York school may have spawned its first outbreak of AIDS. His boyfriend, Jonathan (David and Jonathan, get it?), wants to alert their campus LGBT organization, but David refuses to cancel their plans to spend the Christmas holidays together with his parents in Maryland. The Jennings household, however, includes a pair of African-American servants employed under antiquated conditions that nobody seems to consider eccentric but damnyankee Jonathan. Only after a series of unfunny sitcom mishaps does David reject his family's ways (much as he lost his accent upon migrating north), demanding that Mary, the illiterate housekeeper, be taught to read.
Time passes, Mary and Mrs. Jennings bond over widowhood and education, both dancing at the boys' Massachusetts wedding in 2005. But all does not end happily: in an epilogue, we learn that two years later, Jonathan died of you-know-what disease, and Mary, now an ordained minister, proclaims this scourge to be divine punishment for the sin of homosexuality.
It's a thoroughly artificial construct, of course—the racist language is pasted into the text as awkwardly as if lifted from a tourist phrase-book, and a cook unable to read could scarcely be expected to do the grocery shopping (plantations don't raise their own food any more, you know). If playwright Thomas Bradshaw and director May Adrales had presented this material as the cartoon farce it wants to be instead of relying on its audience's willingness to be bullied, its slap-in-the-face criticism—Bradshaw claims Mac Wellman as his mentor—would still have raised the desired questions: Does inhumanity beget inhumanity? Is the American South inherently evil? Was/Is ignorance bliss? Should we be surprised when those we thought to help turn on us?
If Bradshaw's goal is to stir controversy, debate and perhaps a fist-fight or two in the lobby, his adolescent diatribe may be counted a success. But in his zeal to jerk us around far harder than necessary, he leaves us no recovery time during which to contemplate what lessons may be found in unpleasant opinions articulated by actors grimly reciting ugly words as if through surgical masks. Yes, social issues reduced to Zap Comics-simplicity are provocative—but so is a pie in the eye.
