76 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021
THETHEATRE
CHARACTER LIMITS
The search for justification in plays by Lynn Nottage and Alice Childress.
BY VINSONCUNNINGHAM
ILLUSTRATION BY KRISTIAN HAMMERSTAD
E
verybody’s entitled to a little pri-
vacy. Character development in
drama is similar to a growing friend-
ship—a process of gradual divulgence.
The puzzle of someone’s bearing and
outward presentation gives way to the
collection of secrets and fears and fam-
ily history that make up—and, over
time, help to explain—that person. Still,
the most interesting people, onstage
and in our lives, hold on to a whiff of
mystery. There’s something alien and
ineffable about them that can’t be re-
duced to mere facts, or be rationalized
by psychology. Call it soul.
Lynn Nottage’s new play, “Clyde’s,”
directed by Kate Whoriskey (at the
Helen Hayes), about the staff of a run-
down sandwich joint at a truck stop,
takes a stark either-or stance regarding
the lives of its characters. They spill their
guts without much prompting, and, in
the spilling, court intimacy—or, in the
frustrating case of the title character,
give nothing at all. Both approaches
render surfaces rather than spirit.
Clyde (Uzo Aduba) is the badass,
shit-talking, intermittently horny, some-
times violent proprietor of the roadside
shop. She wears formfitting clothes that
highlight her curves and pedestal her
décolletage. Sex has something to do
with her power—the passes she makes
at her employees register as vague
threats. She always wants the sand-
wiches to come out faster, and she has
no patience for the culinary ambition
that’s growing in the kitchen under her
nose. She wants the basics, nothing more.
Sometimes she shows up with odd gifts
that might or might not be ill-gotten,
the kind of stuff that euphemistically
“falls off the back of a truck”—some
olive oil from Central Europe, an inex-
plicable mess of wilted chard, a plastic
bag full of sea bass in greenish liquid.
“The fish smells rank,” somebody
says, to which Clyde replies, “You know
my policy. If it ain’t brown or gray, it
can be fried.” Fire up the skillet. A free
beer for anybody who gets sick. That’s
the kind of place this is.
Clyde is an ex-convict, and so are
the people who work for her, a fact that
she hangs over their heads like rain in
a cloud at every opportunity—nobody
else is going to hire them, so they’d
better submit to her whims, however
brutal. Tish (Kara Young, who spins
great performances out of straw in every
show I see her in) is a single mom sad-
dled by a trifling, untrustworthy co-
parent. Rafael (Reza Salazar) fum-
blingly pines for her. Jason (Edmund
Donovan) is the new guy, initially quiet
and sullen, marked up with white-su-
premacist tattoos. They’re all under the
thrall of the sagelike Montrellous (Ron
Cephas Jones), a kind of sandwich guru,
who wants to jazz up the place with
new recipes and more tender attention
to ingredients. He leads the group in
sessions of visualization and conjec-
ture—what kind of sandwich can your
mind conjure up?
Often, the sessions lead to bouts of
confession—all the employees give up
the goods on why they did time, even,
eventually, Jason. This is supposed to
deepen the bonds among them, and,
perhaps, to offer a well of complexity
not often granted to working-class peo-
ple chewed up by the system and given
a harsh set of choices: eat shit, starve,
or go back in. But the life stories come
between slapstick riffs on sandwich-
making and kitchen etiquette—a bunch
of well-performed gags—and as a re-
sult the play has trouble finding its
tone. It’s hard to figure out how seri-
ously to take the putatively tough mo-
ments in “Clyde’s,” or what to do with
In “Clyde’s,” Uzo Aduba plays the formerly incarcerated owner of a sandwich shop. the biographies we’re offered. (Clyde’s
