‘Brownsville Song’ wails with reproach
For much of “Brownsville Song (B-side for Tray),” you might catch yourself wondering to what extent Tray (Davied Morales), the young shooting victim at its center, is a good kid.
Sure, between his training sessions in the boxing gym, he toils away at a scholarship essay, works diligently at a part-time job and wields charm so powerful it can disarm his congenitally belligerent grandmother Lena (Cathleen Riddley) or coax his little sister Devine (Mimia Ousilas) out of her shell. But Kimber Lee’s play also hints that Tray has a shady side hustle, one that might partly explain why this young black man was killed. What’s the deal with all the mysterious phone calls and the slinking in to their Brooklyn apartment late at night? Is he hanging out with nogoodniks again, like Junior (William
Hartfield)?
Shotgun Players’ ghost story of a play, which opened Thursday, June 22, raises those questions only to skewer them, to show how tempting it is to blame the victim and absolve the rest of us. If Tray didn’t want to die, that flimsy thinking goes, he should have behaved more perfectly.
Under the direction of Margo Hall, “Brownsville Song” reveals that thinking for what it is: our national shame.
Tray is already perfect — and not just because his generous, forgiving spirit inspires the same in the harsher Lena, not just because his no-quit attitude sparks in Merrell (Erin Mei-Ling Stuart), a troubled figure from the family’s past, a new urge to better herself. He’s perfect even when he talks back to Lena, even when he’s egregiously late picking up Devine. He’s perfect, worthy simply by being. So, the play proclaims, is a seemingly menacing character like Junior.
That doesn’t mean the play is perfect. Its mechanisms to get Tray and Merrell in the same room again after many years, and then to allow them to interrogate each other, are painfully contrived and flimsily executed — as if a playwright’s exercise to help better understand the characters had somehow made it into the show’s finished product. One of the scenes, set in a Starbucks where Tray works, spends so much time on a bit part’s latte order that you think the multibillion-dollar company must have paid for an ad spot.
Nor does the show fully escape sentimentality. Stirred by Tray, other characters overcome their failings a little too easily. The conclusion of “Brownsville Song” gets close to hagiography.
Still, scenes between Tray and Lena fare well. They love through fighting — not the cutesy fighting of a Lifetime movie, but the debating and occasional roughhousing of a lifelong, perfectly matched spar. Even though Tray’s the pugilist, Riddley often makes her character the more physically fearsome, the alpha of the block. She’s at her best when another character speaks without her warrant. She might swallow her rage, but that doesn’t mean it goes away. It makes her only stronger.
She needs that strength. Hall makes the world of “Brownsville Song” a frightening one. A dark palette, a haze effect and a xylophone that sounds like dripping water make the characters as isolated from the supposed protections of the law and societal institutions as they would be at the bottom of a cave. Car headlights constantly roll by, and each time they do, you fear they’ll land on a character and somehow expose him or her, maybe run that person over.
Where the headlights are really shining, of course, is on you, on all of us and on our failure to tell a different story about Tray and his fellow victims.