Elmina's Kitchen, and: Permanent Collection (review)

Two recent plays that deal with the contemporary black experience served as cornerstones of Center Stage's 2004–2005 season. One came with a glossary, the other with a description of recent events upon which the play was based. The American premiere of Elmina's Kitchen distanced its audience while Permanent Collection, first produced in 2003, approached its audience with topical and geographical immediacy. In spite of these differences and the ways in which the productions emphasized them, both performances conjured a world that made distance relevant while complicating the familiar. Each presented problems of race, equity, and our perceived understanding of the world. Neither offered an easy solution.

Elmina's Kitchen finds a group of West Indian émigrés in a take-out restaurant in the London borough of Hackney, site of the famed "murder mile" and its ubiquitous gun violence. While the violent setting may be reminiscent of parts of Baltimore or any American city, the terms which must be explained to an American audience range from epithets born in the West African slave trade ("Blood Clatt" for the cloth used to wipe the bloodied backs of whipped slaves), to terms specific to Hackney ("Yardie," the Jamaican street thugs responsible for much of the local violence). Add to that dialects which range from Cockney to West Indian—often in the same sentence—and an audience is duly challenged by the text. This is fitting, as Elmina's Kitchen is chiefly a play about displacement and attempts at assimilation.

The restaurant's very title, referencing both family and slave history, alludes to these themes of displacement. Named for Deli's late mother, who opened and ran the restaurant for some twenty years, "Elmina" also refers to the name of an old slave fortress on the west coast of Africa. The chief action driving the play fittingly complements these tensions. Deli, who now owns the restaurant, is caught between his father's carefree (even careless) approach to life and his son Ashley's lust for the BMW that the street life promises. Deli tries whatever he can to save Ashley from the street, balancing the conflicting realities of his origins and his current situation. That he is unable to speaks to the severity and permanence of his displacement, if not that of an entire marginalized group. Ashley gets his car, but it costs him his life.

On the surface, Permanent Collection seems much more accessible to a contemporary Baltimore audience. Based on recent events in Philadelphia, the play opens with Sterling, an African American, directly addressing the audience. Sterling describes being pulled over while driving his Jaguar through a wealthy suburb for, as he puts it, DWB (Driving While Black). We soon discover that Sterling is the newly appointed director of the Morris (read the real-life Barnes) Foundation. The action of the play centers around his attempts to make changes to the foundation's public galleries, a move in direct opposition to founder Morris's will—the very will that left the foundation to a black college whose board appointed Sterling its director. Sterling clashes with the Foundation's Education Director, Paul, a long-time employee and a white man.

The play's themes seem familiar, but are presented in ways that provoke re-examination. The two central characters each seem right—and wrong—at moments. Paul's descriptions of the unique genius in the collection's arrangement inspire awe and even reverence. But Sterling merely wants to add eight pieces of African...