Sandwich shop turned purgatory for ex-cons
Evil just getting started as menu offers workers path to salvation
In a roadside sandwich shop, good and evil are duking it out, but not the trite or abstract sorts.
At Clyde’s, good is so extreme that kitchen counter becomes church altar; sandwich roll, cradled communion host. The line cook behind it all, Montrellous (Harold Surratt), is turn-theother-cheek, parable-spouting prophet, and in Amith Chandrashaker’s lighting design, he looks like the subject of a devotional painting where one ghostly beam of light from the heavens strives to banish sin and temptation.
In Lynn Nottage’s appealing comedy of the same name, which opened Jan. 25 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, evil might inhabit the human form of proprietor Clyde (April Nixon), but it defies psychology.
In her particular brand of schadenfreude, taunting her workers — who, like her, are all formerly incarcerated — with their failures, unworthiness and powerlessness isn’t enough.
Clyde pops up from behind the order window or slinks in to sniff out then pounce on their weaknesses as might a trickster figure who’s everywhere and nowhere at once.
She keeps at it even when it’s against her self-interest, preferring to ridicule her team for suggesting creative menu ideas even when they could make her money. She punctuates each cruelty with a cackle. She flips her fabulous flame orange or ice blue wigs (by Megan Ellis) or fluffs her breasts the way a villain twirls his mustache.
Most inhuman of all, as a restaurant boss, no one has ever seen her eat one bite.
Such heightening lends a welcome air of mystery and magic to a play that otherwise lives in the kitchen-sink realities of food prep, which Wilson Chin’s exquisite set design captures with discernment and empathy: the linoleum tile pattern that looks like a skin disease, the lonesome window nearly opaque with the grease of countless spoons.
In “Clyde’s,” evil has every reason to win. Rafael (Wesley Guimarães), Letitia (Cyndii Johnson) and Jason (Louis Reyes McWilliams) know no one else will hire them because of their records.
If they forget, Clyde delights in reminding them, as a cherry on top of their latest humiliation. Her sandwich shop is a kind of purgatory, the prison after they get out of prison.
And yet within this hellscape, where nihilism or worse would be the obvious path, Montrellous still attracts disciples. For him, crafting the perfect sandwich is art, religion and, somehow, a way out. That others start
dreaming of and demoing their perfect sandwiches is the play’s great optimistic dare.
Elsewhere, as Nottage fills in everyone’s backstories, preachiness creeps in. “Clyde’s” wants its audiences to understand that each character went to prison because of social failures, but Nottage’s loving, sunny banter makes that case better than her how-I-got-here monologues.
Direction, by Taylor Reynolds, seems shaky about why some exchanges need to be in the play, and some performances are words searching for an intention, like a tumbleweed in an open vista. But Johnson as Letitia, who’s looking for love in all the wrong places because she doesn’t think she deserves any better, demonstrates that floorto-ceiling, core-to-fingertips inhabiting that is actor transformed by character. She says “red” in “red onion” as if it’s a revelation. She holds a leaf of lettuce as if she’s looking in a mirror, trying to make an invisible reflection match her dreams.
A fastidiously appointed kitchen means there’s plenty of opportunity for silly stage business with food, and here, “Clyde’s” delivers. Every line is both funnier and weightier if you say it while brandishing a butcher knife. Surratt’s Montrellous wields a sauce squeeze bottle with the aplomb of a baton twirler. McWilliams as newbie Jason uses his for a pissing contest, and he stuffs sandwiches as if they had eyes he could gouge out.
Speaking of eyes, Nixon as Clyde has green ones that look like they could glow in the dark, and she knows just how to flash them to make you wonder where she comes from, if her character can be real, if she’s an allegory. They get the play’s last moment, signaling that however you thought the story ended, evil has only just begun its siege.