Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury (review)

Fairview had yet to start, but as I walked down the aisle, Roc Lee’s sound design—nostalgic sitcom tunes—sashayed through the air, setting the tone. As I settled in, listening to the theme of Good Times, I observed how set designer Misha Kachman devised the cross-section of a single-family home: living room and parts of a pastel-hued dining room/kitchen that suggested a distinctly African American middle-class suburbia. The cultural and class particularity represented by the space was strengthened by the oversized family portrait that gazed at the audience from the living room wall, a photo that conjured church directory or school yearbook formality. The photograph intrigued me. Something seemed amiss. My eyes were drawn to the contours that traced the bodies in the portrait. I assessed the image with suspicion. Something is going to happen with that picture . . . but what?

Prior to this time, I had managed—through chance and will—to avoid details about the Pulitzer-winning Fairview. While I was cognizant of its acclaim, I heeded warnings to sidestep the script and bypass field discussions until I had a chance to see it. Yet and still, two details proved impossible to evade: 1) Fairview wrestles with race, and 2) the play begets a buzzworthy surprise. Subsequently, I was keenly aware of my own positionality and evaluative impulses as an active spectator—an awareness that was augmented by the play’s design. Accordingly, I should forewarn readers that in service of sufficient critical engagement, this review divulges significant spoilers. For those who would like to experience the intentions of Fairview fully, I suggest returning to this review once they have seen or read the play.

Once Woolly Mammoth’s production of Fairview commenced, my attention toward the portrait was overtaken by the play’s first wave of archetypical characters: Beverly, the frenzied mother and B. Smith wannabe (Nikki Crawford); Dayton, her placating husband (Samuel Ray Gates); Keisha, their smart, athletically gifted high school senior (Chinna Palmer); and Jasmine, Beverly’s fierce and fabulous sister (Shannon Dorsey). Deftly directed and performed, the initial and purposefully one-dimensional countenance of these characters soon revealed this play’s layered textures.

Fairview began simply enough: Beverly frantically prepared her mother’s seventieth birthday bash. As her anxiety increased, the play revealed that appearances are paramount—the appearance of success, domestic bliss, and familial synchronicity overpowers inconvenient truths. DuBoisian double-consciousness quickly emerged and soon expanded to include Fanonian hailing and current critiques of surveillance. These tropes redoubled during act 2, when the first act’s sitcom-styled drama silently repeated itself. Instead of the onstage performers vocalizing their lines, the audience heard voice-over commentary from projected shadows that were (thanks to Colin K. Bills’s lighting design) framed within the façade’s upper windows.

Samuel Ray Gates (Dayton) and Nikki Crawford (Beverly) in Fairview. (Photo: Teresa Castracane.)

While the Black actors reenacted act 1, the voices —audible signs of white gazes—offered cavalier commentary on racial narratives, stereotypes, and experiential otherness. The theme of surveillance activated word and deed; white thoughts soon became white scripts that Black bodies were driven to enact. The puppeteering became so domineering, that act 3 gave white fantasies of Blackness shape and form—birthed into caricatures that invade the once-seemingly stable space. Behaviors on stage rallied into the ridiculous. The lines between real and mediated became incoherent chaos, perverting sitcom slapstick into destructive, prop-obliterating pandemonium—the madness of racism incarnate.

While Fairview articulates varying forms of racist hostilities within dominant, Eurocentric culture, this thematic reveal was accentuated variously in the Woolly Mammoth production. The irrationality of racism was portrayed by scenic segues that traversed from the all-too-familiar to the all-too-surreal. For instance, something did happen with that family photograph: it literally framed the explosive entrance of the “très sexy” grandma Bets (Laura C. Harris). With Bets and other purposefully exaggerated racial impersonations...