Rarely performed Lorraine Hansberry play attests once again to the playwright's genius

San Francisco Chronicle​

3 days ago

In a fictional African country, a prodigal son returns home from his white wife in Europe, hoping to say goodbye to his dying father. Instead, Tshembe finds himself in the crossfire of a colonial 'emergency,' what whites call their own violence. His wayward brothers are no help, and an obnoxious American journalist spouts a lot of easy-for-him-to-say ideas about how Tshembe ought to live his life.
Such is the heavy, heady milieu of Lorraine Hansberry's 'Les Blancs,' which was incomplete when she died in 1965 at age 34 and premiered five years later with edits by her widower Robert Nemiroff.
To enter the world of the play is to be smacked upside the head with its young writer's insight and imagination. She didn't just dream up characters but their whole society and history — how religion interacts with healthcare and different political factions; how centuries of white predation and plunder might push different personalities toward different choices.
Oakland Theater Project's production, which I saw Sunday, July 20, adds still another layer to this thick context. Under the direction of James Mercer II, all the characters — Black, white and mixed race; male and female — are played by Black women.
As Tshembe (Jeunée Simon) squares off with parachute journalist Charlie (Champagne Hughes); brother Abioseh (Brittany Sims), who's converted to the white man's religion; and colonizing soldier Major Rice (Monique Crawford), a series of thoughts might strike you.
Second, how much Oakland Theater Project's cast kills it.
In the role of put-upon Doctor DeKoven, Aidaa Peerzada makes every utterance a toxic brew of rage and regret. Her circumstances have eaten her to the bone, and all she has left is hunched shoulders and gritted teeth.
As the notepad-toting Charlie, Hughes burlesques bumptious white masculinity — furrowed brow, thrust lower jaw, 'of course I get to be here' eyes — in a way that makes you want to tell every white man the world over that this is what he looks like, at least psychologically.
Simon, in a part originated by James Earl Jones, makes clear that her character has the stuff of kings from her first entrance, when Tshembe's hoping to catch his father's last words but learns he's just missed them. Simon's face falls, then turns to ice. Something smolders inside, then gets pushed back down. She carries on, but everything around her feels heavier. Such a man could shoulder a whole nation's woes.
For all these virtues, 'Les Blancs' is an easier play to admire than love. Multiple important characters — referred to often, shaping the events onstage — never appear. Scene one snatches us in medias res; history's been churning along just fine without us, and it'll keep going after the play's over, Hansberry implies. It's intricate and clever, but you feel like you're always playing catch-up.
The speeches are beautiful, perceptive, as biting today as they were in 1970: 'I do not 'hate' all white men — but I desperately wish that I did. It would make everything infinitely easier!' Tshembe says. 'I have arrested gangrene, removed tumors, pulled forth babies — and, in so doing, if you will please try to understand, I have helped provide the rationale for genocide,' Dr. DeKoven laments.
But as Act Two sprawls outward, 'Les Blancs' starts to feel like a civilization undoing in real time instead of a discrete, honed dramatic incident. It's epic, but in a way that doesn't energize so much as exhaust.