Family dysfunction in black and white
Themes and conceits swirl in “Barbecue,” now in its Bay Area premiere at San Francisco Playhouse. Playwright Robert O’Hara delves into the intractability of addiction, how we talk about it, how some exploit it for profit, how others might intervene only to mask their own problems, how one’s family can enable it with their stubbornly low expectations, their unbending concept of who the addict is, the schadenfreude they derive from the addict’s escapades, the comfort they get knowing at least they’re not that bad.
O’Hara, who doesn’t just broach taboos but revels in them, is also interested in how all those questions become infinitely more complex when race is the chief variable. The play, seen Wednesday, Oct. 4, begins with a white family’s attempt to lure its prodigal sister to a drug intervention by disguising it as a boozy barbecue in her favorite park. In Bill English’s spot-on set design, there’s not much to recommend the park as anyone’s favorite; it’s all chain-link fences and weeds poking out of rocks. The family’s painstakingly reserved picnic table is right outside the park restroom, whose every sign and light fixture has left a long tail of rust.
There’s James T (Clive Worsley), who wears tube socks with sandals (Brooke Jennings did the costumes) and is well into his can of Miller Lite though it’s just after “the ass crack of dawn.” He’s joined by Lillie Anne (Anne Darragh), who came up with the loony barbecue ruse, and then by Marie (Teri Whipple) — who greets by way of a “Where the cups at?” — and Adlean ( Jennie Brick), who leaves her grandkids in the car by themselves and can snap out of her painkiller induced stupor to bark at them like a drill sergeant. Brick’s bone-deep ownership of Adlean’s trashiness and vacuousness is one of the show’s foremost delights. She blows up balloons for the barbecue with the same languor with which she drags on a cigarette, floating the pathetic, softball-size results to the ground as if she might already be dead and wouldn’t mind or notice if she were.
This clan isn’t onstage for long, though. Soon, after a blackout, a black family is at the same scene, wearing the same costumes, using the same names, continuing from where the white family left off. (Now it’s Adrian Roberts, Halili Knox, Kehinde Koyejo and Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe as James T, Lillie Anne, Marie and Adlean, respectively.) They switch back and forth for the rest of the first act, as their respective Barbaras (Susi Damilano and Margo Hall, who also directs) eventually arrive.
This device gives you a rare opportunity to investigate in yourself how you might see the same situation differently when it’s populated by members of a different race. Why does society condition us to have one set of associations with white drug addicts, and another with black ones?
Worthy as that inquiry is, it doesn’t have the impact it might ,because Lillie Anne’s gimmick never feels credible. Why is it necessary to go to this much trouble to trick Barbara to show up if she already sees all her siblings all the time? Why does Lillie Anne think Barbara, the type of person who puts razor blades in her teeth, will have a change of heart, or that her deadbeat siblings will rise to the occasion to help, let alone exert any of the energy that they devote exclusively to reaching for pills, joints or bottles?
That implausibility also tempers some of O’Hara’s humor. Jokes, too, have to come from a relatable premise, and the performers can’t fully invest in the stakes, nor can they go fully Jerry Springer when their lines call for it — or if they do, it’s empty flailing.
The play’s second act explodes the conceit of its first, and it would spoil the show to say how, except that O’Hara keeps expanding the lens of his investigation into how we tell stories differently about blacks and whites. But here, too, implausibility dogs him. Characters change the rules of their situation so often that you don’t see them; all you see is the playwright’s hand.