Playwright: Lonnie Carter
At: Victory Gardens Theater,
2257 N. Lincoln Ave.
Phone: ( 773 ) 871-3000; $20-$28
Runs through: Nov. 13
If Lonnie Carter had proposed a pop-music biodrama of, say, W.E.B. DuBois or James Weldon Johnson—poets held in reverence by modern scholars of African-American literature—the protest would probably soon have led him to abandon his project. But since Phillis Wheatley was a slave-girl of 18th-century Boston who wrote in impeccable neoclassical mode with a singular absence of anger over her social status, she is a candidate for a Sweet Mama makeover at the hands of an author looking to strut his own street cred.
Certainly Wheatley deserves recognition as the first published American woman poet of color—a title achieved in no small part through the assistance of her guardians, John and Susannah Wheatley, and later the patronage of England's Countess of Huntington. But Carter's revisionist pageant reflects 21st-century values over period accuracy, depicting its personnel as grotesque caricatures—the countess, for example, is a cocaine-sniffing, champagne-swilling Sportin' House hostess, and Benjamin Franklin, a foozly old lecher who attempts to grope his innocent guest during a twister-like romp on a map of Europe. By contrast, our heroine's future husband, here given a comically ornate name, is permitted to woo her in a welter of double-entendres that would get him hissed off the stage at the Green Mill in a matter of minutes.
This is not to say that Carter doesn't deliver the goods in terms of gettin' down and paaarTAYing. His etymologically-capricious rhymes are mostly clever, even if the rap-style meter sometimes pushes them toward Dr. Suess, and his quantum-chronological references—'She was famous, Amos, and she wanted to bake YOUR cookies!'—drew chuckles from the opening-night audience. Daniel Bryant, Ann Joseph, and Aaron Todd Douglas charge through a whirlwind of costumes, wigs and personalities with protean agility, as does Mikhail Fiksel's incidental-music collage ranging from Bach to Billie Holiday.
But however well-executed its faux-primitif aesthetic, Carter's play achieves dignity only in the moments that Yetide Badaki's Phillis Wheatley recites the words of her persona with a winning poise and an interpretive intelligence that raises the question of why anyone thought her story needed to be Oprah-ized in the first place.
