THE NEWYORKER, MARCH 16, 2020 93
dressed up as her characters from flicks
like “Black Swan” and “Garden State”
and “The Professional.” At Keyonna’s
lowest moments, here comes Portman:
perfectly timed, beguilingly free, ready
to create a distraction that feels like
Keyonna’s desperate grasp at survival.
The Portman interludes, and the
accompanying visual and aural trap-
pings—a hilarious invocation of the
“Garden State” soundtrack; the instantly
recognizable costumes, especially the
death-black, ominously avian tutu from
“Black Swan”—are, initially, funny and
humanizing, and point to how popu-
lar art and its personae simultaneously
distract us and serve as background to
our pain. The result, in “Portmans,” is
a kind of social surrealism, in which
feeling draws as much on the imagi-
nation as it does on rough, objective,
material fact.
In a better calibrated script, one that
took as much care with each of its char-
acters as Johnson does with Keyonna,
the flights into comic, gonzo Portman-
ism would help assuage the creeping
sense we get that the details of the fam-
ily’s life fit neatly into a clichéd black
melodrama. We’ve seen something like
this before: Daddy dead; Momma’s
brains and morals fried by alcohol;
brother eventually incarcerated (by
whose fault we soon find out); poor
baby sitting at home all alone, too
stressed for schoolwork.
This chafes, not because such things
never happen in real life but because
their depiction in stories like this always
sticks to appearances, to the troubles
obvious in the skin, but never makes
it further, never glances the heart. As
it stands, we get the wonderfully com-
plex Keyonna—bolstered by a rich,
deep, moving performance by Young—
who walks through a world of tropes
like a Technicolor figure in a black-
and-white talkie.
M
uch of the play’s charm, despite
its narrative fuzziness, lies in the
way Johnson portrays the creative pre-
cision and generous adornments of
black speech. She rushes pleasingly to-
ward the specific: D.C. slang, instantly
familiar if you’ve ever lived there or vis-
ited for long, is lathered on. The vol-
leys of loving encouragement, sly rib-
bing, and, often, recriminating eruption
between Keyonna and Samuel are some
of the best moments of the play.
That kind of articulation, rooted in
place and politics and fired by a real
but endangered affection, might also
have been used to address the theme
that Portman’s odd, hovering presence
tries to point to; namely, that, at the
bottom of the American class and ra-
cial structure, a straight white woman
having fun, free to change costumes
whenever the going gets rough, might
appear to be as much a cruel appari-
tion as a friendly partner. When “Na-
talie” kisses Keyonna, during the low-
est of her many brutal lows, it serves
only to further devastate her. Freedom
hurts most when you can taste but never
fully partake in it.
This is tough territory, how race
mingles with desire and leaves behind
a sour alloy. It’s reminiscent of Pecola
Breedlove’s doomed yearnings in Toni
Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” which
leans into the story’s flights of fancy
and brings them under the lights, rather
than relegating them to a sideshow. I
wanted more of Keyonna’s imaginings:
everybody’s heard about troubles like
hers, but nobody’s seen what ravages
they might wreak in a mind so sensitive
and determined and tortured by dis-
tant hope. Young’s lovely performance
is at its best not when she’s blissed out
by escapism, or broken down by her
mother’s antics, but when she’s tiptoe-
ing unsteadily on the line between these
modes. That’s humanity: a dream walk-
ing through a swamp; local syntax danc-
ing among the casual cruelties of offi-
cial speech; thoughts of Heaven stuck
in the mud.
The real Natalie Portman showed
up at the Oscars earlier this year wear-
ing, over her dress, a black cape whose
piping was decorated with the names
of all the female directors whom the
Academy had failed to acknowledge
with nominations: Greta Gerwig, Lo-
rene Scafaria, Marielle Heller, Mati
Diop, on and on. You might imagine
a young girl like Keyonna, obsessed
with film and dazzled by the red car-
pet and its camera flashes, seeing Port-
man onscreen and murmuring, “Good
point,” then, looking around at the
chaos of her own life, adding, “But if
you only knew how much worse things
could be.”
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