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Girl trouble
Breath, Boom is a tough night out
BY CAROLYN CLAY

Breath, Boom
By Kia Corthron. Directed by Michael John Garcés. Set by Adam Stockhausen. Costumes by Karen Perry. Lighting by Kirk Bookman. Sound and original music by Martin Desjardins. Fight direction by Rick Sordelet. With Kellee Stewart, Zabryna Guevara, Carla J. Hargrove, Dwandra Nickole, Edwin Lee Gibson, Jacqui Parker, Tawanna Benbow, Katrina Toshiko, Chinasa Ogbuagu, and Ramona Alexander. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre through April 6.


The language a child hears is the one it will likely speak; in Breath, Boom that language is violence. And like the life of the play’s central character, a Bronx girl-gang leader named Prix, the Huntington production of the play is an affront, if not an assault. It’s a toned-down, simulated, but muscular manifestation of what Prix has grown up experiencing, from the towering, graffiti-scrawled gray concrete to the siren- and techno-blanketed ceaseless noise of the street. Playwright Kia Corthron calls her play the " Disney version " of what she learned from research and teaching tough customers at Riker’s Island. But it’s as in your face as she thinks it can be without sending us all packing for the theatrical equivalent of the suburbs.

Breath, Boom does however strive to transcend agenda-driven docudrama (though it packs statistics the way its characters pack heat). The play, which follows Prix from age 16 to 30 as she circulates from the hardscrabble projects and streets to prison and back, aims at a poetry to balance its polemic. Prix, a tough, wounded presence at the center of urban and domestic chaos, has a strange obsession. She’s in love with fireworks, which she calls " the most precisely controlled chaos you ever saw. " The metaphor may be hit a little hard, but the character’s dream of masterminding the booming explosions of color that mesmerize her every Fourth of July provides an apt parallel to her attempt to cull both order and ecstasy from the sororal mayhem.

Although it swaggers off the Bronx streets with a razor under its tongue (an accouterment shared by many of the characters), Breath, Boom was commissioned by London’s Royal Court Theatre, where it premiered in 2000. The play was produced the next year at New York’s Playwrights Horizons, and Michael John Garcés, who directs the unblinking Huntington production, recently staged it at Yale. Like Corthron’s other works, it’s been legitimately criticized for jumbling issues and dramatic structure; it can be cliché’d and confusing almost at once. Another problem, at least in the Huntington production, is that Prix is so sullen that’s she’s more eye than center of the storm.

But Corthron makes rhythmic use of street patois, and there’s an effective disconnect between the play’s oft-irrepressible characters and its chilling images, which include a prison-dormitory game in which girls loll on bunks sharing fantasies of suicide and plans for their elaborate funerals. In one scene, Prix’s cousin Angel enthusiastically displays a scrapbook filled not with milestones in the lives of friends and family but with souvenirs of their early, violent deaths.

But the lives of gang compatriots Angel, Malika, and Comet (an 18-year-old mother we first meet when her " sisters " beat her nearly to death for planning to leave the organization) have not turned them into the combination of rage and steel that is Prix. They lack the " leadership quality " that Comet likens to ice — though Prix’s calm comes in the wake of brutal family fireworks that include sexual abuse by a menacing stepfather. After mom finally shoots the guy and goes to jail for it, he sticks around as a jaunty, ne’er-do-well ghost, taunting Prix as she goes about the methodical criminal business of her life, which is little different in jail from out.

Breath, Boom is part journalism, part cautionary tale, with a stark yet sentimental ending (in which Prix, burped out of jail and into the numbing world of minimum-wage work, seems finally to forgive her dying mother). But the Huntington offers a muscular production in which the sound design, a constant underlay of clanging and traffic and music, captures the play’s intended abrasion. And the brutality, devoid of stage blood, is quick, businesslike, and believable.

As Prix, Kellee Stewart is perhaps too seething and stony; even the rapture evoked by pyrotechnics seems hard, if precisely articulated. Among the supporting performers, local favorite Jacqui Parker commingles defeat with warmth and pride as Prix’s determined mother. And there are energetic turns by Zabryna Guevara as the upbeat Angel, Carla J. Hargrove as a cocky romantic whose idea of a successful evening includes sex and cookie-dough ice cream, and Tawanna Benbow as Prix’s African-American Betty Boop of a reformatory roommate. Breath, Boom may not do for you what fireworks do for Prix, but it makes its points and lands its punches.

Issue Date: March 20 - 27, 2003
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