Grandma’s birthday dinner shifts to much deeper story
It’s Grandma’s birthday, and her daughter Beverly wants everything about the celebratory family dinner to be just right. At the outset of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s comic drama “Fairview,” which began previews Thursday, Oct. 4, and opens Thursday, Oct. 11, at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, a viewer might take all the fuss about the cake and table settings and the proper cooking of the root vegetables as material the late Neil Simon might have mined for domestic comedy. Instead of a Jewish family in Brooklyn, this one is African American, living somewhere unspecified in apparent middle-class comfort.
To put it mildly, all does not go as planned — and not just because Beverly’s husband, Dayton, bungles a side dish. In one theatrical convulsion after another, the rising playwright Drury leaves the conventions of polite living room drama in the dust and launches a probing inquisition into race, identi-
ty, family and the singular potential of theater to address those issues in the most immediate and implicating ways.
When “Fairview” premiered at New York’s Soho Rep this year, the New York Times called it a “dazzling and ruthless new play.” According to the New Yorker, Drury had created something “outstanding, frustrating, hilarious, and sui generis.” The play is a co-commission by Soho Rep and Berkeley Rep, the latter of which developed the piece in the company’s Ground Floor program for new work.
On the page, “Fairview” comes off as at both subtly sly and audacious. Prickly family interplay and lightly prodding references to the theater’s fourth wall give way to startling shifts of perspective, dance (choreography by Raja Feather Kelly) and some potently unsettling big speeches. A stage direction offers a clue to the play’s carefully devised architecture: After a first act that “appears to be a family drama,” Drury notes, “Act Two watches Act One” as it “pushes further into Act One and tries to drive it forward to make Act Three.”
If all this sounds a little disorienting, both Drury and director Sarah Benson, who is reprising her Soho Rep staging with partially altered casting here, aren’t aiming to confuse or confound. Rather, they hope to induce audiences to interrogate their own preformed assumptions. The seemingly conventional first act both affirms and undermines some of those expectations.
“If you think about it,” said Benson, in a three-way telephone interview with the playwright, “there are things about naturalism that are incredibly strange. We were interested in puncturing that form as a way of pressing forward what Jackie’s writing about.” Benson spoke from the offices of Soho Rep, where she serves as artistic director.
“The play asks questions about what it means to watch and be watched,” said Drury, who was crossing the Bronx and speaking by cell phone from the car. A lot of that watching in the theater, she added, is done by white liberals who make up the dominant portion of most regional theater audiences. What they’re watching, in this case, is a black family turning its collective theatrical attention on that combustible fact. There are portions of dialogue that will make listeners of any race squirm.
Drury, whose previous plays include the zombiethemed “Social Creatures” and a verbosely titled work about an early 20th century African genocide (“We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia...”), has heard names like Brecht and Albee invoked as touchstones for her work. After a thoughtful pause, her remark on the matter was drily and somewhat evasively amused.
“I get mistaken for Edward Albee all the time in my real life,” said Drury, who is black. She went on to cite her playwright contemporaries Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Young Jean Lee and Annie Baker as like-minded innovators of theatrical form and content.
Both Drury, who grew up in New Jersey, and Benson, a native of the United Kingdom, tried acting early on and realized their futures in the theater lay elsewhere. First as a Yale undergraduate and then at Brown, where she received her master of fine arts degree, Drury began to write in earnest. “I was terrible at performing,” said Benson, who received a degree in English at London’s King College and earned her MFA at Brooklyn College. “I was just this person who was still in the building,” she added lightly, as if she had become a director by default.
Drury, whose cellular link faded a few times, heard that line clearly and laughed. Even at a distance, the connection between the two was apparent. Drury called her collaborator “crazily fearless and committed” to “Fairview” in its earliest, exploratory stages. “Not a lot of writers of color and female writers get that level of trust before it’s proven something exists on the page.”
“Jackie invites destabilization of yourself,” said Benson. “That can be an amazingly productive place to be.” About “Fairview,” which seems poised to become a breakout moment in Drury’s career, the director said, “the American theater privileges the writer. Jackie has seized that opportunity and run with it.”