‘The Magnolia Ballet' is the race relations play you need to see right now

San Francisco Chronicle​

14 hours ago

They're some of the oldest questions in the American dramatic canon: whether two lovers can be together, whether a father and son can connect — whether a weed-ridden, magnolia-dappled plot of land is freedom or encumbrance.
But in Terry Guest's 'The Magnolia Ballet,' another query grounds all the others: what a 17-year-old boy will do with his secret spiritual inheritance from his ancestors.
Shotgun Players' show, which opened Saturday, July 19, at the Ashby Stage, is simultaneously micro- and macrocosmic. Poetic and fluid as your pawpaw's yarns spun down by the river, it's also as inexorable as a current after a rain. A Black boy named Z (Jaiden Griffin) and a white boy named Danny (Nicholas René Rodriguez) must face their fathers and decide whether to write new chapters in their families' histories. Can they be honest about who they are and whom they love in a Civil War-haunted Georgia, or must they uphold the hate and fear of a long line of male forebears?
And in just one of many insights, all the power lies with one of them to make the call. It has to be that way in a place where a tattered Confederate flag clings to branches alongside the witchy Spanish moss, courtesy of Imani Wilson's set design. Here, gray rebel uniforms lay folded in attic trunks — dress-up costumes that poison their wearers.
But in another genius move, centuries of power don't get the last word.
Hovering above all the action, often in a window that seems to materialize out of light alone, is a specter (Devin A. Cunningham), who sings spirituals solo or leads the others in dance and nerve-tingling harmonies, ennobling Z's every move.
In one brain-exploding scene, this ancestor is forced to have an exchange with Vivien Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara (also Griffin), complete with a ruffly white dress with red trim. Scarlett asks him for help writing a love poem to Ashley Wilkes, then barks at him like a junkyard dog with a rusty chain around its neck. In the next moment, when Z and Danny research a Civil War school project, the 'Gone With the Wind' clip of Leigh beating Butterfly McQueen plays. Ribbons and lace can't veil whiteness' savagery.
As Guest's collagelike script does the vital, healing work of historical reframing, it rejects caricature. Everyone, even the show's worst, trembles with humanity. Watch Drew Watkins in the dual roles of Z's and Danny's dads. 'See the fire behind my eyes, the fire that says that I deserve to have anything that I want?' he says as the latter, a white cop. There's a sinister smile behind the line, but Watkins also reveals it as a desperate mantra, repeated as a security blanket.
Director AeJay Antonis Marquis makes exchanges fizz with danger. Every time the lovers near each other, a thousand questions — informed equally by sociology and personality — seem to radiate from their pores. Roughhousing might turn into making out or just linger unconsummated, panting. The winning impulse only opens new lines of inquiry.
Marquis' balletic staging matches the nigh-impossible balance Guest's script strikes. A wordless barbershop sequence looks like a pas de deux, while a burst of Britney Spears choreo plays like a dance-floor love letter. Neither saccharine nor cynical, 'The Magnolia Ballet' tackles hate without an ounce of hatefulness. It shoulders every burden with which the South saddles its men — Black and white, gay and straight — and invites us to free our attics of those heavy, dusty trunks. Or better yet, maybe even raze the whole thing. At the very least, it asks us to be brave enough to look at what's inside.