Love is on the rocks this spring. Although completely dissimilar in tone, the Theater Offensive’s Hamartia Blues and Ryan Landry’s Camille shine searchlights on obstructions that thwart relationships. But in both pieces the offputting glare gets toned down to a romantic softness for moments when emotional turbulence subsides and obstacles are overcome.
Hamartia Blues (at the Boston Center for the Arts through May 18), a new play by local poet/playwright Letta Neely, opens with a trio of black men chumming it up ghetto-style in a Midwestern state penitentiary. One is scrawling a tattoo on another, and they’re all gabbing about tough times in the pen and on the streets. So what’s love have to do with it? One of them, Afir (Darius Omar Williams), has a sister, JaySan (Sonya Raye), a lesbian who has just shacked up with her lover, Neferdia (Merle Perkins), in Boston. With his incessant, intrusive collect calls to JaySan, he is the thorn in the women’s relationship, at least as far as Neferdia is concerned. JaySan, however, harbors sufficient familial obligation — and curiosity — to field her brother’s calls, which over the course of the play build up to a confession that unleashes the secret of the siblings’ past misunderstanding.
Regardless of how cute and cuddly the lovers’ pillow talk may get, the road to romantic bliss is peppered with detour signs for a lesbian black couple in urban America. We meet the women as JaySan tends to Neferdia’s wound from a launched bottle, a wake–up call to the homophobia rampant in their neighborhood, even in the African-American community. Neferdia won’t report the incident because she doesn’t want to turn over black offenders to a white man’s system.
Sound loaded? There is little in the play that isn’t stacked with provocation and implication. The script is a none-too-subtle commentary on the vicious cycle of social ills to which urban minorities fall victim. Through flashbacks, for instance, we learn that the father of JaySan and Afir is an alcoholic who can’t accept his daughter’s sexual orientation. Afir, meanwhile, is haunted by images of his own sons. And Neely doesn’t miss any opportunity to toss in mention of civil-rights rallies, government conspiracies to denigrate black communities, or the multitude of difficulties that make it hard for a black man to break free from the revolving door to prison.
What saves the play from sliding off into sociopolitical sermonizing is the writing. Neely’s poetic dexterity melodically complements her shrewd ear for colloquial street conversation. Characters bounce dialogue off each other with a rhythmic clip that pulsates with hip-hop cadences.
At the BCA, director Brenda Cotto Escalera elicits nuanced performances from a uniformly forceful cast. When not casting steely gazes, Williams has a manner of scrunching up his face that reveals more of Afir’s fury-packed tension than his words do. Perkins embodies sultry playfulness with her velvety voice and a lithe grace, but she also rages with indignation, especially when her own demons surface. With defensiveness and suspicion sharpened by years of oppressive poverty, Raye poignantly conveys JaySan’s conflicting urges to support her brother and dismiss her past.
One shudders to imagine the blaxploitation Ryan Landry might spin on Hamartia to throw it off color and off kilter. The local legend of lurid lampooning struts his stuff once again in Camille (at the Theater Machine through May 25), a campier version of Charles Ludlam’s already outrageously campy take on Alexandre Dumas’s La dame aux camélias. You might know the 19th-century tale of the consumptive courtesan from any number of stage and screen leading ladies, from Sarah Bernhardt and Greta Garbo to, most recently, Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge.
But Landry, hilariously sabotaging the high class with high crass, takes the story’s " gay Paris " to its most literal frontier. His hilariously affected Marguerite is extravagant and insincere, so perhaps her tendency to say one thing and mean another makes drag a suitable mode. Thanks to an amusingly eccentric and unfettered cast playing her catty social circle, it works like gangbusters.
To say that most of the jokes are tongue-in-cheek would be misleading, since other body parts far better represent the humor here. But it’s not all bawdy gags and cheap pranks (though rubber chickens and whips do make appearances). Serious conflicts for 19th-century societal gals get aired as the debt-addled courtesan’s interest in securing a lover to support her spending habits hampers her pursuit of true passion. Marguerite’s earnest, baby-faced suitor, Armand (Tom Lowe), has thin pockets compared to the wealthy but world-weary Baron de Varville (David Hanbury). Still, the lovers do manage fleeting moments of bliss in the countryside before Armand’s father steps in to preserve his family’s reputation and demand that Marguerite call it off. Alas, there’s no next spring for love to bloom for this dying dame.
