| . | 08/19/2008
Noon Day Sun
By: Deirdre Donovan
Gin Hammond
Cassandra Medley meets the race issue head on in her provocative play, Noon Day Sun, which was first staged in Montclair, New Jersey, winning the 2001 Audelco Fest Award for Best Play. In its Off Broadway premiere at The Beckett Theater, the drama investigates the racial tensions that can build when a Black American “passes” for a Caucasian in our society. Under the auspices of Diverse City Theater Company, the new production of Medley’s work arrives with good timing, and some fine performances in principal roles.
Based on a true incident, Noon Day Sun tells the story of a light-skinned Southern woman named Zena in her late 20s, who boards a train in 1947 from a non-descript southern station, in flight from an abusive marriage. The conductor, mistaking her for a white woman in a colored-car, invites her to move to a car for the white clientele. Sensing fate in the conductor‘s misconception of her race, she transfers to the white passenger car, and arrives in Fort Wayne, Indiana, as an ostensibly white woman.
The subsequent scenes leap ahead a decade to 1957, showing us Zena, reinvented as the stylish Wendy, married to a young Irish-American named Brian, an up-and-comer in sales. Brian and Wendy are portrayed as the toast of the town, just crowned “Autorama Couple of the Year” in Detroit, equally admired for their intelligence and verve. Wendy is pregnant with their first child, and life couldn’t be more promising or exciting for the couple. Still, the story has some ironic twists, and before the final scenes, we’ll see how all roads eventually lead back to where they began. Zena will be forced to confront her past, including the fact that years ago she lost her infant twin daughters to a flu, and that she’s still legally married to their Negro father, Reuben.
The tale fluidly shifts in time and place from the 40s to the 50s, stretching from the Deep South to the far northern reach of Detroit, Michigan. While some scenes are conventionally structured with straightforward action and dialogue, there are many innovative scenes where the characters’ conversations and stage business crisscross each other. This double-exposure staging technique is almost cinematic in effect, and truly enables us to grasp the double-standard that existed for Blacks and Whites in the 40s and 50s. This play has all the racial ache that festered during the Eisenhower Era, and exposes the deep-rooted prejudice in the North and South. The novel twist, however, is that Noon Day Sun explores “shadism” in Blacks, and vividly demonstrates how race generates in the bone‘s marrow, and not in the skin‘s pigmentation.
What saves the show from being a dry docu-drama is that Reuben has a powerful presence in the story, making a glorious mess of Zena’s tidy life of “living white.” Having reformed himself from being a fall-down drunk and shiftless worker in the South, he’s moved to Detroit, and is preparing to make a life-long commitment to the dark-skinned Pearl (played by the amazing Melanie Nicholls-King), a devoutly religious woman with a strong mind and good heart. While Reuben has evidently found an ideal match in Pearl, he’s still haunted by his past life with Zena, and feels compelled to resolve their shattered relationship.
In a series of coincidences, Reuben meets with Zena to discuss their troubled past and present lives. Their surreptitious meetings in hotel ballrooms, basements, and custodial closets give them an opportunity to raise probing questions about their racial identity, and how “living white” can be a form of betrayal. The most powerful scene by far, however, is the flashback that enacts the tragic death of their infant twin girls. The scene movingly illuminates how Blacks had little, or no, access in the South to emergency medical treatment or facilities in life-and-death situations.
Although the author sometimes forces the conceits and coincidences in the play to make her dramatic points, her contrived interludes still manage to gain potency in the context of the complete work. Reuben and Zena’s meetings, in particular, seem to border on the surreal at times, but their relationship also adds the necessary emotional texture to the larger story.
There are some fine performances in the show. Reprising her role as Zena is Gin Hammond (Helen Hayes Award for The Syringa Tree). Not only does she demonstrate that she’s utterly at ease in the part, but she feelingly conveys the honey-pie slush and fierce angst of her character as she evolves into a conscious social person. Hammond creates an indelible image of a fair-skinned black woman who’s “living white,” and reaching for what she’s never had as a poor Negro. Another first-rate performance is turned in by Melanie Nicholls-King, playing a self-effacing Negro and Reuben’s dark-skinned lover. Pearl’s final speech in Act 2 about race is profound, and utterly moving. The talented Ron Cephas Jones (Obie Award Winner), in his bifurcated role as Zena’s first husband and Pearl’s lover, is well-cast in his part. He conveys the sincere quality of a man being handed a second-chance at life, and a first chance at freedom.
Noon Day Sun is a play, essentially, about “passing” and “living white,” and the inevitable problems it begets in society. Directed by Victor Lirio, the play couldn’t be better timed in light of the whirlwind of racial discussions surrounding the Obama presidential campaign... It’s surely not too late for us to take a fresh look at race, our own belief systems, and perhaps our hidden prejudice.
The Beckett Theater at Theatre Row, 410 West 42nd Street, New York City.
Tickets: Ticket Central at 212-279-4200 or http://www.ticketcentral.com
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