THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2019 79
held together only by the alchemical
relationships among the actors on
stage. Sometimes just a look or a smirk
between women keeps the thing feel
ing real.
And so casting is perhaps the big
gest challenge, and it is met emphat
ically by Gardiner. Moore is as funny
here as she was as Black Cindy on the
TV show “Orange Is the New Black,”
but infinitely warmer, cannier, and more
empathetic. Her great power as Lady
in Yellow comes from her sense of
winking camaraderie with the audi
ence, which grows throughout the show,
drawing the viewers out of spectato
rial passivity and “casting” them as a
crowd of participants. She delivers an
aria of humor and false bravado as she
regales the audience—which she has
already befriended—with the story of
her highschoolgraduation night. The
speech ends in sublime vulnerability:
he started looking at me real strange
like i waz a woman or somethin/
started talkin real soft
in the backseat of that ol buick
WOW
by daybreak
i just cdnt stop grinnin.Moore’s delivery of Shange’s poetic
transliteration of black English—its
elisions and rhythms—makes this flow
ering of first love also a kind of standup
routine.
What Moore accomplishes with
words Allen does with song. At sev
eral points during the show, Allen leads
the ensemble in its sung numbers,
swerving away from simple melody
and into swooping, soaring gospel or
foreboding blues. Allen’s voice is pow
erful, but even more impressive is how
she connects that instrument to emo
tional truth, seeming to pull the sad or
lovely or touchingly naïve stories spo
ken by her castmates onto a higher and
more terrifying plane. The guys next
to me kept moaning, rightfully, at al
most every sound she made.
Okpokwasili speaks with a pene
trating, oddly precise timbre that makes
the workings of her mind almost vis
ible. She sneaks trace amounts of ter
ror into her otherwise bombastic, hi
larious appeal to a former lover: “I want
my stuff back,” she says, and the mind
somersaults at the thought of all that
must have been taken.T
he monologue will always be with
us, and Shange’s “choreopoem,” as
she called it, avoiding the designation
“play,” might give us a hint about how
to keep it vital. Camille A. Brown’s cho
reography draws as much attention to
bodies as it does to voices—dance num
bers are not sideshows but, rather, at
tempts at articulation. There’s a humil
ity through gesture, an acknowledgment
that literature eventually runs up against
the limits of language. And speech—
even the clear kind that knows exactly
what it means—isn’t achieved on its
own; each monologue is as much an
exhibition of listening as it is of talking.
After one of her most affecting pas
sages, Allen walked calmly back to her
place in a circle, preparing to hear out
Lawson, who gives the final and most
harrowing disclosure of the piece, a
tale of soured love, horror, and immit
igable loss. As Lawson—monstrously
honest, as expressive in the hands and
eyes as she is in the voice—spoke, Allen
took a sip of water while she lookedTHE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2019 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
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on. That little rupture in the presen
tation—Allen was a character and a
performer and an onlooker all at once—
drew me even closer to the action on
stage, implicating me somehow. I might
as well have been up there, too. I was
hearing and seeing just like Allen was.
Lots of miniconversations about
etiquette (phones off or on, or locked
away in some ugly pouch?) have slipped
into recent discussions about the the
atre—understandably, in this extended
moment of uncertainty about the sur
vival of the form. They seem to be
byproducts of a potentially fatal mis
apprehension of what the art actually
is, and what it might be used for in
the future. There is no shortage of out
lets for stories artfully told, or for art
ists of bravery and intelligence to get
their visions across. We, of course, want
these things from the theatre, but we
need much more, too.
Shange’s descendants (including
the great Suzan LoriParks, who writes
play scripts just as crudely funny and
idiomatically accurate as Shange’s, and
Daniel Alexander Jones, whose multi
vocal, deeply generous shows make a
fractured absurdity of the proscenium)
are moving forward to fulfill her prom
ise of an expression that is rigorous
and formally fit but also deeply in
vested in the communalism that nei
ther TV nor film will ever be able to
provide as naturally as the theatre.
These inheritors make it possible to
imagine a theatre of radical—even cha
otic—kinship, in which there is no au
dience and the artist is only an insti
gator, and where everybody gets to
holler and it’s obvious when to fall
into a hush.