Nothing’s Random about spellbinding solo drama
The little things in life suddenly loom large and take on tremendous value following the unprovoked street murder of a family member in Random, an hour- long solo play by the British playwright debbie tucker green, who likes to spell her name in lowercase letters. Interpreting several characters speaking in a variety of distinctive accents, Montreal actress Lucinda Davis made Random a gripping theatrical experience on Saturday in a joint production by Black Theatre Workshop and Imago Theatre at the MAI.
Random, first presented at London’s Royal Court Jerwood Theatre in 2008, was inspired by a series of local murders of black youths. The victim in Random is also black, suggesting a racial motive for his slaying. The arbitrary choice of victim made it, in the storied phrase of journalism, a random act of violence. For a family, though, it was their young man who was slain and there was nothing random about that.
Seated on a simple chair in the middle of a dark stage, Davis opened the drama in the alternating voices of the family’s father and mother, sister and brother, as each in their own way began a typical morning. The morning had a familiar banality. Mother and daughter debated over which clothes to wear to school. Sister and drowsy brother made sibling banter in his room smelling of an athlete’s sweat. Father griped about this and that.
Davis adeptly matched accent to character, switching rapidly from the mother’s Jamaican lilt to the schooled London speech of the daughter and the brother’s macho drawl. Davis’s minimalist gestures — a cocked eye, an extended hand, an elbow set aggressively on a knee — added to the characterization with the precision of a caricaturist capturing a likeness with a few strokes. Only as actions developed and the number of characters mounted — apparently a dozen appeared in all — was it disconcerting sometimes to make out who was who.
Leading up to news of the murder — the sister learns of it while at school — Davis from time to time called out the hour like a condemned person watching the approaching moment of execution. Behind her on the floor, rows of little digital clocks told the time in glowing red numbers, marking passage to the inevitable.
At each time check, a faint blip sounded in the subtly perceptible soundtrack that Peter Cerone — a longtime collaborator of international theatre director Robert Wilson — composed to create a veiled feeling of menace. The grim sound worked in counterpoint to the vivacity of the family ’s daily affairs.
After the news broke, the music stopped, the clocks dimmed, the lights went up and Davis stood. A demarcation line had been drawn forever marking before and after.
Murder brought white police officers to the family door, forcing the father to put aside his creed of “Never let white people or police inside our house.” His dislike of whites and police mounted at the sight of the officers’ dark boots on his wife’s best rug and the sound of the officers speaking with what the daughter considered “trained politeness.”
The difficult aftermath of a sudden death was most touchingly portrayed in closing passages describing the victim’s room, where brother and sister had spoken that morning. The room had not changed, only her perception of it. But dead or not, the sweat of a young man, she concluded ruefully, “still stinks.”
Davis’s virtuoso performance was surely in part due to the deft touch of veteran Montreal director Micheline Chevrier, Imago Theatre’s artistic director. Chevrier has ensured that Davis’s readings — in line with green’s text — kept a certain reserve even in the harsher passages. Davis was expressive but never overheated or sentimental, transmitting the characters’ emotions through implication rather than through overt signs.
In its turns of phrase and choice of images, green’s writing had a poetic texture. The richness of her words often reflected the vocabulary of Caribbean Englishspeakers who have a knack of turning even simple thoughts into poetry.
The tandem of Davis, a winner of the Montreal English Theatre Award, and green, who won Britain’s BAFTA award for Random and other awards, is a powerful one. More of Davis in other plays by green would seem in order.