Whose "Histree"?: Saint Mines

There were so many signs, images, and even jokes running throughout this devastating, near-perfect production of one of Suzan-Lori Parks's earliest plays that it lingered in my mind long after I saw the performance. The play itself covers familiar ground for Parks (the cyclical nature of history, language, racial representation), but unlike her more recent narrative-driven plays (such as Father Comes Home from the Warsand The Red Letter Plays, which are also being revived by the Signature Theatre next season), Death of the Last Black Manis more like a jazz ensemble riffing upon a multitude of misconceived cultural signifiers about black people throughout history.

Instead of passing motifs among various musical instruments, the play generates and repeats stereotypes that themselves function as motifs, passing them among the characters through Parks's repetitions of words and phrases. For example, when the phrases "Saint mines" and "Whose fault is it?" are first uttered separately, they carry their own particular meaning. The meanings accumulate each time they are repeated or passed on to another character. When the phrases are finally put together and reversed, making the answer to "Whose fault is it?" a defiant, "Saint mines," they become truly complicated. This is but one example of how Parks's play dramatizes the process of the dissemination and obliteration of blackness through history.

Blain-Cruz's production perfectly realized the play's swirling imagery. Even before the play began, audiences were greeted by designer Ricardo Hernandez's set of white horizontal wooden slats running the width of the stage with a slim patch of dirt at the apron. The design suggested the ramshackle home and yard of August Wilson's Fencesor a nineteenth-century minstrel stage floor that warped its way up the back wall, almost threatening to consume the Griffin Theatre.

Black Man with Watermelon (Daniel J. Watts) appeared alone on stage, sitting silently still in the small yard encumbered by a giant, beautiful watermelon in his hands. Upstage of him was a thick tree branch, sturdy enough for lynching a man, that cut a stark diagonal line across the stage. It was accompanied by an old television set that seemed to have grown from the same roots as the tree. These three images provided a glimpse of just some of the ways the last black man in the whole entire world "dieded": systematic poverty, white terrorism, and media constructions of "blackness." By the production's end, all these linguistic and visual images would come together, not in harmony, but rather in an eruption of dissonance and dissidence.

What is most jarring in Parks's play, and highlighted in this production, is the juxtaposition of real-life issues with a lack of actual human characters. Even their names reveal that they are not meant to represent "real people," but rather the ubiquitous stereotypical representations of black people throughout history. Characters include the aforementioned Black Man with Watermelon (Watts) and Black Woman with Fried Drumstick (Roslyn Ruff). Together these characters echo struggling black couples, such as Troy and Rose of Fencesor the unnamed couple in Irving Berlin's 1933 song "Supper Time." Prunes and Prisms (Mirirai Sithole) is named for the linguistic phrase whose repetition promised to "cure your big lips." Sithole's performance of the phrase began as a childish jump rope song before eventually becoming a ritual of defiance. In opposition to Prunes and Prisms's youthful optimism, And Bigger and Bigger and Bigger (Reynaldo Piniella) conjured the "angry young black man," like Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright's Native Son. In Montana Blanco's black hoodie costume, Piniella's And Bigger also recalled Trayvon Martin and other black men recently killed by police and marked in the media as "thugs."

The production resisted the trap of contributing to the grotesque canon of American racial stereotypes through the stellar cast, whose flesh-and-bone humanity...