It’s probably best not to
scrutinize While I Yet Live too carefully on a structural level: As a memory play, its
chosen narrator is the one character with the least to gain by looking back,
and it dramatizes things outside the rememberer’s POV; as a play that mixes
realism with magic realism, it fudges the rules of the latter—are the
spirits of the departed manifestations of conscience or real; and if only the
former, as seems to be implied, how do they know things the living cannot?
The
reasons why it’s best not to examine this too closely—particularly in a
review—are two. The first: Spoiler city; to particularize the
discrepancies is to give away too much. Which leads me to the second reason:
The only reason to care about the first is because the audience loves the play
so damn much that the structural fine points—though perhaps not
negligible in a literary context—seem like academic carping against the
evidence of a positive, cathartic, visceral response. Billy Porter’s play is one of those rare examples in which the
aggregate effect essentially neutralizes structural anomalies.
This
may well have to do with While I Yet Live being
both
Porter’s first play and at least semi-autobiographical (Mr. Porter is
the Tony Winning actor who created the role of, and still currently
plays, the drag queen Lola in Kinky Boots), thus almost
assuredly having the early rush of white-heat inspiration behind it. It’s a
play about an extended African-American family in Pittsburgh, first seen in an
unspecified year a decade or two ago. Tonya (Sheria Irving)
introduces us to growing up in an era before spankings were considered bad
parenting; when she was 12 and her older brother Calvin (Larry Powell) is still tiptoeing around the fact that he’s gay,
when in the house. But this is the day when he crosses that line, and basic
tenets of Christianity and faith, long held by his mother Maxine (S.
Epatha Merkerson) are challenged. But
there are already cracks in her resolve, from her own physical condition, a
progressive palsy, and caring for her terminally ill best friend Eva (Sharon
Washington) whose cancer hasn’t at all
been helped by prayer. And once emboldened by confronting his
mother—angrily, but with respect—it doesn’t take much pushing from
his abusive stepfather, who is Tonya’s blood father, Vernon (Kevyn
Morrow) for Calvin to move forward into a
full-throttle rebellion expressed with less restraint. Figuring into this
dynamic are also Calvins’s grandmother Gertrude (Lillias White) and aunt Delores (Elain Graham).
As
melodramatic as all this sounds in thumbnail, it actually plays out in moments
of riveting authenticity; and a great deal of the play is also spectacularly
funny, particularly as the audience, particularly the African American
audience, mark places of total identification with their own dynamics regarding
family, home, church, love and faith.
It’s
beautifully acted under the direction of Sheryl Kaller, to the point where, except for the Act Two
passages that veer into magic realism—passages that made me very aware of
the writing—there were long, long stretches where I simply forgot I was
watching a play, and really bought into the “reality” of watching a family
dynamic both imploding and reassembling into a new configuration.
And
since Mr. Porter and cohorts can pull that off…maybe
the
rest, the stuff that "doesn't matter" tio the lay audience, is even
addressable. That’s the great thing about theatre, and in
particular a play that seems like it might stick around for a while.
Like
families, they can develop and grow and keep moving forward…
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