COMPLEX AND POWERFUL, RELENTLESS LIVES UP TO ITS TITLE
After Timeline Theatre Company’s near sold-out run during the winter, The Goodman Theatre is restaging playwright Tyla Abercrumbie‘s ferocious, fierce, determined and monolithic three-hour play, Relentless. Prolific director Ron OJ Parson helms this bold new work focused on confronting the societal pandemic of racism plaguing this country for generations. Purposely uncomfortable for a largely Caucasian audience, Abercrumbie’s work holds a magnifying glass up to the turmoil in the country matched by the turmoil faced by two sisters. The women are sharply divided over what to do with their recently deceased mother’s journals. Her life is chronicled in a trunk full of hand-written diaries filled with stories the siblings never knew. Is it an invasion of her privacy to read these diaries now that she has passed? Are the books required readings to understand who their mother was after her passing? What if the daughters don’t particularly like what their mother has to say? What would be revealed and what could the fallout from these revelations be? Are diaries, the written collection of private thoughts, for public consumption after the author has passed on? The sisters share opposite views on the book’s content.
Ayanna Bria Bakari and Jaye Ladymore
We meet the sisters during the Black Victorian age of the Harlem Renaissance in a 1919 Philadelphia opulent living room (Jack Magaw’s homey set design impresses). The extravert, Annelle (Ayanna Bria Bakari) is a boisterous socialite — loud, self-centered, aloof and oh so very “married to a doctor”. The flightier of the two sisters, Annelle wants to sell her Mother’s house quickly and return to her posh and comfortable life back in Boston. The introverted sister Janet (Jaye Ladymore) is a graceful, studious, cerebral nurse who cautiously and curiously pours over every page of her mother’s diaries, hungry for the stories her mother never shared when alive.
Ayanna Bria Bakari and Jaye Ladymore
Selected diary entries are told in staged flashbacks. Their mother, named both Zhuukee and Annabelle Lee (Demetra Dee), begins as the headstrong property of a slave owner’s daughter, Mary Anna Elizabeth (Rebecca Hurd) a spoiled, selfish, southern belle who would later become instrumental in Zhuukee’s life. Used as a prop during her sexual awakening and teenaged rebellion against her strict southern parents, their powerplay was never on equal footing. Not even when Annabelle Lee was freed from her life of slavery. From petulant to abolitionist, Mary Anna Elizabeth was nowhere near as “woke” as she pretended to be. Even when giving Zhuukee gifts, the gesture was met with resentment from Mary Anna Elizabeth when Zhuukee didn’t respond to the memento exactly as she had wished.
Jaye Ladymore, Travis Delgado, Ayanna Bria Bakari and Xavier Edward King
As for the men in their lives, Annelle is married to outspoken physician, Marcus (Travis Delgado) who was also attempting to play matchmaker with his winemaking friend, Franklin (Xavier Edward King) with the outspoken sister, Janet. Ladymore and King have tremendous onstage chemistry, chattering over one another with rapid-fire dialog, much like a Katherine Hepburn & Spenser Tracy movie or a Noël Coward play.
Xavier Edward King and Jaye Ladymore
This quartet of affluent, educated and opinionated Black Americans pushed to their limits is the real foundation of Abercrumbie’s tale. While unveiling facts both complex and intricate, the bonds of sisterhood are stretched to the limits, but not permanently tattered, forever changing truths each held about the other. Pushed their own personal agendas, each tries to define their own interpretations of inclusion, equality and respect. The play’s backdrop — the 1919 Red Summer was about to explode — further complicated racial divides that now, almost 100 years later, is still burning red hot. The play’s final moment, which I will not spoil, is an unnerving reminder that for every step forward, there are two steps back.
Ayanna Bria Bakari and Demetra Dee
On a second viewing in just a few months, this complex and powerful, if overly long drama (particularly in the second act), Relentless remains an ambitious debut, even if it takes too long to get there. Christine Pascual’s solid costuming and Megan E. Pirtle’s wig design added magnificently to a compelling night out at the theater. Relentless once again proved itself unrelenting and required springtime viewing.
Demetra Dee and Rebecca Hurd
photos by Liz Lauren
Rebecca Hurd and Demetra Dee
Relentless
Goodman Theatre, 170 North Dearborn
ends on May 8, 2022
for tickets, call 312.443.3800 or visit Goodman Theatre
for more shows, visit Theatre in Chicago