Usher Nonsense # 29 – Drowning Crow
DROWNING CROW By Regina Taylor, Directed by Marion McClinton
With Stephanie Berry, Paul Butler, Aunjanue Ellis, Peter Francis James,
Anthony Mackie, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Ebony Jo-Ann, Peter Macon,
Curtis McClarin, Roger Robinson, Tracie Thoms, Baron Vaughn and Alfre
Woodard
Manhattan Theatre Club at the Biltmore - through April 4
I love actors more and more. They get up there and slug it out every night, no matter
how ill served they are by the material or the production staff. In this production, try
as they might, they couldn't connect with the audience. Ultimately, Drowning Crow
is inflicted on these actors, not interpreted by them.
I really wanted to like this play. Drowning Crow sets Anton Chekhov's The Seagull in
the Gullah Islands off the coast of contemporary South Carolina. An ambitious
undertaking - so all the more exciting. The first tip off that this play might not be
what I had hoped was that a synopsis was being stuffed into each Playbill because, I
was told, "People were having a hard time understanding what was going on." And a
synopsis is supposed to fix that? The second clue came when I asked one of the full
time ushers how he liked the production he said, "It's getting better. They've already
cut 30 minutes." That was two weeks into previews. One more week to go.
The play turned out to be a jumble of styles and moods, none of which seemed to
connect. It is as if all the actors were in their own world living parallel lives. The
characters are supposed to do this in Chekhov, not the actors. A fine line, but an
important one. Here, Taylor combines the formal language of Chekhov with hip hop,
rap, contemporary slang, spirituals, and old standard tunes. The result is like
experiencing bad reception on a radio. The entire ensemble has great lapses of
momentum when it appears they are trying to remember what it is they are doing.
This may actually be the case because of all the cuts to which they are adjusting.
Alfre Woodard is uncomfortable in the extreme, and I thought she just might leap off
the stage and run out of the theatre. Aunjanue Ellis as the Nina character prances
around like a small high-strung pedigree dog, and Anthony Mackie has only one long
drawn out petulant mood. The rest of the cast has moments of clarity that are not
sustained. And then there's the crow, shot because Constantin thought it was
drowning, not swimming, in the lake. Ever see a crow in a lake?
There were a lot of empty seats after intermission, and at the end of the evening, I
heard a man say, "Well, it wasn't as bad as the last play they did here." To say that
Drowning Crow is better than Violet Hour is like saying consumption is better than
TB.
The good news is that after seeing this production I am now reading The Seagull.
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