Bold ‘Fairview’ dares to push all the buttons
Jackie Sibblies Drury’s drama raises tough questions at Berkeley Rep
Life isn’t fair and neither is art in Jackie Sibblies Drury’s astounding “Fairview” at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
Always a provocateur playwright with a scalpel-sharp sense of the Brechtian (“We are Proud to Present a Presentation …”), Drury here wields the knife of her wit on the audience as well as the characters.
Giving away the dazzlingly metatheatrical plot would be highly unfair indeed, but it’s a mindblowing evening of lacerating self-exposure in its regional premiere, incisively directed by Sarah Benson. A world premiere collaboration by Berkeley Rep and New York’s Soho Rep, the brilliantly audacious “Fairview,” which was developed at Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor project, plays dirty from start to finish, at first lulling us with tired racial tropes straight out of cloying ’90s sitcoms and then spitting in the face of our cozy complacency.
One of the most electric nights of theater in recent memory, “Fairview” charges the imagination and the subconscious like a lightning rod. It also stings a little when it thrills you.
This highly charged experimental drama, which pushes every button you’ve got, feels alternately exhilarating and unsettling as a woman of color. I can’t imagine how jarring and
confrontational this experience must be if you don’t relate to being marginalized. You can see why some audiences members get frustrated with the play. It isn’t so much trying to entertain us as to shock us awake. The power of the piece comes from its smarts and its fearlessness in taking on society’s dominant gaze.
First you are cordially invited to grandma’s birthday at the Frasier house, complete with beige decor, dry rosé and bourgeois patter.
The frazzled host, Beverly (Natalie Venetia Belcon) is spinning like a top, trying to make her dinner party Instagram-worthy, from flowers to candles. Her husband, Dayton (Charles Browning), may have forgotten the root vegetables, the dessert spoons and the obligatory Humboldt Fog cheese platter. Her precocious daughter Keisha (Monique Robinson) wants to take a gap year before college and her snarky sister Jasmine (Chantal Jean-Pierre) has arrived bearing only booze and a bad attitude. Her tart analysis of the classic family drama narrative, along the lines of “Somebody dead, and the house ain’t paid for,” is a showstopper.
Still it’s hard to shake the feeling that something is going dangerously wrong, and that unease goes beyond the characters. Keisha senses something is awry, as do we.
Drury, at first slyly and later more urgently, examines viewing as an act of colonialism. Just who is the audience and what gives us the right to sit in judgment? The way the stage is framed by a box, or perhaps a cage (set by Mimi Lien) is another hint. When the characters address the audience, they use the fourth wall as a kind of mirror that reflects a depth of meanings.
As the music sides from Sly and the Family Stone to the Beastie Boys, Drury deconstructs the power dynamics on and off the stage. Raja Feather Kelly’s choreography slides from cakewalks to chaos before you know it, sucking us into a theatrical apocalypse where all bets are off.
Be prepared to take a good hard look in the mirror. Like other radical theater auteurs, Drury smashes convention with a hammer. But unlike say, Taylor Mac, she doesn’t implode paradigms right in your face. She seduces you into a state of absurdity, lit with Genet-like mind games, before she demolishes the family’s palace of beige and the fourth wall along with it.
By the end of the night, with a cacophony of drag and hip-hop aesthetics ringing in our ears, we are finally ready to look Keisha in the eye and admit that it’s the world that’s gone crazy, not her.